I don't think there is anything that could happen to make people remember the goddamn Nazis as victims. I do think that the atomic bombing of Germany would be seen and remembered somewhat differently than the OTL atomic bombings of Japan, thanks to subtle racism.
The interesting thing to me is that the racism works both ways. To some extent, Japan "gets away" with the atrocities of the Militarists when dealing with the US, where it is simply less remembered. But there is also less remembrance of the firebombing of Tokyo, compared to the firebombing of Dresden. Much of this, I think, is due to the myth of the "good German". The British "Mass Observation" group did polling during the war, and in 1943 it found that 60% of the public made a distinction between the German public and the Nazi government. Therefore, atomic bombing attacks that killed many German civilians would be seen as, at the very least, unfortunate.
There is no similar myth of the "good Japanese". They were seen as evil to a man, and there was no similar feeling of guilt for Japanese civilians killed. PLEASE NOTE that I am not trying to act as an apologist for the
Militarist regime. It was far more racist than the Anglo-American governments. But I do think that such racism would play a part in how an atomic bombing of Germany would be remembered. I expect that if German civilians had been killed, there would be far more books like "Hiroshima".
I never thought that the Japanese are considered less evil than Nazis because of the Atom bombs. It is because of the industrial genocide which the Nazis did, the Japanse had done some evil crimes but nothing comparable to the Holocaust i think, or know. So an Atombomb on Germany doesnt change that, or not?
This. No matter how bad Militarist Japan was--and I rank it as one of the most evil regimes ever foisted upon the world--the Nazis were worse. I think it's important to remember that.
The Japanese had lots of crimes and a death toll that exceeded the Holocaust in Asia depending on which count you believe. They just didn't have concentration camps and gas chambers or white victims,
Your opinion may vary, but to me the lack of genocide is an important distinction. I'll quote myself from a recent thread below, if you'll bear with me.
This comes up every once in a while, and I personally feel it is important--nay, vital--to argue against it. Please don't think I am an apologist for Militarist Japan. I fully recognize just how bad they are, I was taught about that history in both US and especially in Japanese high school.
Nevertheless, we need to remember that Militarist Japan wasn't as bad as the Nazis. No one was as bad as the Nazis.
Militarist Japan launched a war of greed and aggression that ended up tens of millions dead. They raped and pillaged their way across China population as a matter of policy, in order to induce terror. They enslaved Koreans, Chinese, and countless others to feed their war machine. They would happily starve the areas under their control in order to feed Japan. They engaged in the "Clean Fields" (often known by the Chinese name, Three Alls) policy in order to "pacify" large swaths of China that lead to endless destruction and deaths. They had systematized sexual slavery. They preformed human experimentation, and germ warfare and terror bombing on civilians. The massacred Chinese populations for almost any reason--including simply "toughening up" (read: brutalizing) their own soldiers. And they still aren't as bad as the Nazis.
Militarist Japan, bad as it was, was not genocidal. Even the most outrageous self-aggrandizing plans for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere didn't entail eliminating the Chinese or Korean or whichever people as a race. When the IJA captured Singapore, with its large ethnic Chinese population, it was well within their power to kill every last one of them. But they didn't. Instead, they forced the ethnic Chinese people there to to submit to interviews, to determine if any were "disloyal" or "subversive". They murdered thousands. They massacred some just to keep the rest in line. But they didn't kill everyone. Ethnic Chinese living in Manchuria, Beijing, Shanghai--in other words, in cities solidly under Japanese control--lived until the end of the war. Oh, the Militarist Japanese would take everything they had, and they would be just as happy if they did die. But they didn't go out of their way to do it.
Nazi Germany didn't kill Jews and Roma because they wanted to terrify enemy Jewish and Roma populations. They didn't starve their Russian captives because they couldn't feed them, or didn't care to. They did these things out of a deliberate policy of creating a Jew-free Europe, and an Eastern Europe with almost no Slavs left (and those that were reduced to serfs). A Militarist Japanese victory means an East Asia where the Chinese (just as one example) are no better than slaves. But a Nazi German victory means a Europe where there are no Jews left.
Militarist Japan was as bad as almost any regime in history. But they still cannot match the evil of the Holocaust, or GeneralPlan Ost. And that matters. If we forget it, and make the two equivalent, I fear we risk covering up, ignoring, or downplaying the special, extreme evil that the Nazis represented.
Again, Militarist Japan committed innumerable atrocities. They butchered millions. But they did not have an aim of genocide. The Nazis, and not the Militarists in Japan, were the ones that wanted to eliminate entire peoples from the face of the earth. I think that is a special kind of evil, and it behooves us to remember it. People in the West need to do more to remember the Asian victims of WWII, but I think arguing that
anyone was as bad as the Nazis is inherently dangerous. Genocide should remain a special evil, set aside.
I've heard that in Asia, that Japan gets a worse rap than Germany; because, while most perceive the Nazis as "those people in Europe who killed loads of other white people," Imperial Japan's war crimes occurred much closer to home. I imagine that's also why in Europe, the Nazis get a much bigger picture than Japan.
I think that's absolutely true. It's only natural for people to take events from their own past, from their own "neighborhood", more personally and more seriously.
Of course, subtle racism plays a part, too. As others have said in this thread, Chinese victims (as one example) as not as well remembered in the US as Russian ones.