10 Years After

Fear Of Ghosts

. . . the Japanese soon began relocating the city's eight thousand "enemy nationals" to concentration camps, where they would remain for the duration of the war. The relocation of the Allied foreigners to the camps was part of a general tightening of the Japanese grip over the Western colony. In February, the Japanese ordered all Jewish refugees who had arrived in Shanghai after 1937 to move to a one-square-mile area of Hongkew by May 18. Most of the stateless Jews already lived in Hongkew, but those who lived in other parts of Shanghai had to leave their more comfortable houses and apartments for an already overcrowded district. Many of the refugees feared that the Japanese , because of their alliance with Germany, would take measures to exterminate them - as it was rumored was occurring in Europe. (Immigration of further Jewish refugees had been severely restricted once the Japanese controlled all of Shanghai.) Indeed, Henrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, had begun pressuring Japan to implement the Nazi "final solution" almost as soon as it invaded China. When Tokyo balked, Himmler sent on of his most ruthless officers, Josef Meisinger, a colonel dubbed the "Butcher of Warsaw" for having ordered the executions of 100,000 Jews in Warsaw in 1939, to Tokyo to further persue the question. At a meeting at the Japanese consulate in Shanghai in July 1942, Meisinger forcefully proposed the annihilation of all the Jews in Shanghai who had fled the Nazi "fatherland" by rounding them up when they gathered at the city's various synagogues on Rash Hasahanah, the Jewish New Year, and exterminated quickly thereafter. (The methods Meisinger proposed ranged from loading the victims onto boats without food or water to die at sea, to putting them to work at salt mines upriver, to placing them in a concentration camp on a nearby island where they would be used for medical experimentation.) But Himmler's emissary's efforts went for naught. The Japanese high command turned a deaf ear to his urgings.