In October 1944, four months after American forces captured Saipan, German Ambassador Heinrich Georg Stahmer sent a cable from Tokyo to Berlin that marked a quiet turning point. For more than a year, his reports had painted Japan’s war situation in deliberately optimistic colors. This time, according to surviving records, he acknowledged that the Pacific situation had deteriorated beyond the point where conventional Japanese strategy could recover it. The cable, dated October 5, 1944, is preserved in a collection of 73 rolls of microfilm at the U.
S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The rolls contain captured records of former German and Japanese embassies and consulates from 1890 to 1945, including cables sent from the German embassy in Tokyo in the months after Saipan fell. Stahmer had arrived in Tokyo from Nanjing on January 28, 1943, carrying instructions from Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
He was taking over a post that had been badly compromised by the arrest and execution of Soviet spy Richard Sorge the year before. Sorge had been a German journalist who infiltrated the embassy, had an affair with the wife of the previous ambassador, General Eugen Ott, and passed Tokyo’s strategic secrets to Moscow for nearly a decade. Japanese authorities arrested Sorge and 34 of his contacts in October 1941. Sorge was executed at Sugamo Prison on November 7, 1944, three months before Stahmer filed the cable that began to acknowledge Japan’s true situation.
When Stahmer took the post, the U. S. Office of the Historian later recorded that the entire complexion of the German Embassy changed. Outgoing reports were, in the historian’s words, “purposely tinged in an optimistic hue, and an atmosphere of distrust permeated the Embassy.
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Stahmer had built his career on the Tripartite Pact. He helped negotiate the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 and the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The pact was signed in Berlin on September 27 by Adolf Hitler, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, and Japanese Ambassador Saburo Kurusu. Stahmer later went to Nanjing to manage relations with the Japanese-installed Chinese government under Wang Jingwei.
He arrived in Tokyo with a personal investment in the alliance that made honest assessment of Japanese weakness difficult. The cables on the captured reels cover the period from the loss of Saipan in July 1944 through the end of the year. The October 5 cable is cited by postwar historians as a turning point in Stahmer’s reporting. It was referenced in a telegram between the Gestapo liaison at the Tokyo Embassy, Josef Meisinger, and Stahmer.
Meisinger was the same SS officer who would be hanged in 1947 as the butcher of Warsaw. The exact verbatim text of the October cable survives in the National Archives microfilm but has not been widely quoted in secondary literature. What is clear is that after this cable, Stahmer’s reports became increasingly willing to acknowledge what the previous 14 months of optimistic reporting had not. Running parallel to Stahmer’s diplomatic dispatches were the reports of Vice Admiral Paul Wenneker, the German naval attaché.
Wenneker was a Kiel native who had been a prisoner of war in the First World War after his ship, the SMS Mainz, was sunk at the Battle of Heligoland Bight. He had commanded the pocket battleship Deutschland and returned to Tokyo in 1940 as a senior German naval officer in Asia. Wenneker spoke fluent Japanese. He had been on friendly terms with Richard Sorge, which should have ended his career and did not, partly because he was useful and partly because by 1943 everyone in the embassy had known someone who turned out to be working for Moscow.
His reports to the German Naval War Staff went by Naval Enigma and tended to be blunter than Stahmer’s diplomatic cables. Since 1942, Wenneker had been telling Berlin that the Imperial Japanese Navy was not going to fight the war the way the German Navy wanted. He urged the Japanese to use their submarines against American merchant shipping the way German U-boats operated in the Atlantic. The Japanese refused, saying submarines were warship weapons to be used against warships.
Wenneker observed that the Imperial Japanese Navy seemed to believe it was still fighting the Battle of Tsushima almost 40 years later. The Japanese kept their ship designs from him when they could. When he toured the battleship Yamato in 1943, his hosts told him the ship displaced 45,000 tons and carried nine 40-centimeter guns. The Yamato actually displaced 72,808 tons and carried nine 46-centimeter guns, the largest naval guns ever put to sea.
On Wenneker’s initiative, Hitler agreed to send two German U-boats to Japan so the Japanese could study the technology. The first, U-511, arrived in the summer of 1943. The Japanese examined the boat and used it as a training ship, deciding the German design was too complicated to build in their own shipyards. The second, U-224, went to a Japanese crew trained for months in Germany and was lost at sea in the spring of 1944 on its way back to Japan.
Communication between Tokyo and Berlin throughout 1944 was slow and strange. Diplomatic cables went by radio in the German diplomatic Enigma cipher, which British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had cracked by November 1944. That meant the Allies were reading Stahmer’s cables at roughly the same time Ribbentrop’s office was. Longer diplomatic pouches went by submarine on missions called Yanagi, which ran the gauntlet of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans between occupied France and East Asian ports still open to Japanese shipping.
Many of these submarines went down with their entire cargo. The dispatches that did arrive in Berlin were months out of date. The October 5, 1944 cable did not use the word surrender. It did not suggest Japan was about to seek a separate peace.
There is no surviving marginalia from Berlin on the cable, no record of Ribbentrop’s response. The next cables in the file returned to the diplomatic register Stahmer had been using before, describing the situation once again as serious but contained. In the first week of May 1945, with the German surrender approaching, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo summoned Stahmer and handed him an official protest. The protest accused the German government of betraying its Japanese ally.
The accusation was technically correct, as Germany had been negotiating with the Allies through Sweden and the Vatican for some weeks. Stahmer received the protest in silence, as protocol required. After the German surrender on May 8, Japan broke off diplomatic relations on May 15. Stahmer and the remaining German diplomatic staff went into internment at the Fujiya Hotel in Hakone, a hot spring resort town in the mountains about 60 miles west of Tokyo.
They remained under Japanese guard until the Japanese surrender in mid-August. American occupation authorities arrested Stahmer on September 10, 1945, and held him in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. He returned to Germany in September 1947, and the denazification process released him in September 1948. In 1952, he published a short book through a publisher in Bielefeld titled “Japans Niederlage, Asiens Sieg” — Japan’s Defeat, Asia’s Victory.
The book was not a memoir but a regional geopolitical argument for a postwar Asia free of European and American influence. The Marianas appear once on page 42 as a strategic stepping stone. The cables Stahmer sent from Tokyo in the summer of 1944 do not appear in the book at all. After the book, he went into business with Japanese companies, traveled back to Japan for commercial purposes in 1952, and lived quietly in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, until his death in 1978.
Wenneker went through American interrogation by Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who had served on Admiral Nimitz’s staff during the war and had been an assistant naval attaché in Tokyo before the war. The interrogation sits in U. S.
naval records cataloged as Interrogation Nav 70. Wenneker spoke about the Japanese submarine campaign, about the Japanese navy’s refusal to take his advice, and about his own opinion that the Japanese had misused the submarine fleet from the start. He returned to Germany and lived until 1979, the last decade of his life in a suburb of Hamburg. The cables are still in the National Archives at College Park.
Anyone can read them with a research card. The microfilm is scratchy in places, the typed summaries sometimes unclear. They sit on the same reels as consular records from Tsingtau and Batavia, records of German diplomats who served in places that no longer exist as German diplomatic posts.
They are what one German in Tokyo was willing to tell another German in Berlin in the months when both of them knew, in different ways, that the country they were reporting on was finished.