The Wehrmacht was the one important bastion of German conservatives, and German conservatives were ultra-conservative owing to German history. The Wehrmacht, like other conservatives, were not too unhappy with Hitler's expansion into Eastern Europe. Hitler gave them one victory after another. But when he began to give them a defeat after another, they began to change their minds. They tried to kill him in July 1944, because he seemed to bring Germany to ruins and aslo because in defeat, like what happened at the end of the First World War, they feared they would lose their social status and everything that went with it. Anyway, the Wehrmacht's haughty unrepentance was camouflaged without its important role in Hitler's war, its attitude toward Nazis, atrocities it did in Eastern Europe, and comfort women they had being questioned. We are made to believe as if they always treated Hitler as a corporal. Hollywood movies spread the myth.

There is a gap, unbridgeable, between what Germans think they are and what they really are. This unbridgeable gab is bridged by German romanticism and German metaphysics. German metaphysics is a form of German romanticism.
Bertrand Russell, an English mathematician and philosopher, was having tea with a colleague of his and a German professor that had come to study at Cambridge University. The German said, "You don't have a word like our Gelehrte in your language." Russell's friend was a stammerer. He said stammering, "We call him a p, p, p, prig."
Another contribution to what turned German unrepentance to enough remorse was President Weizsacker's (Weizsaecker's) famous address of May 8, 1985. He said, "Those who close their eyes to the past are blind to the present." The address was priggish; it layed all blames on Hitler Com., Ltd.

Hegel was a typical German philosopher. He laid down, like every German, uncontidionally the high-flown ethical principle that every man should be loyal to himself/herself and to nothing else; that no man should be bound by any authority or authorities but by his/her own independent morals as a free man/woman. To be continued.

Onya Michi!

:)

Pete
http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/7-problems-with-japanese-option.html

Hegel, like 99% Germans, ended up in smoothing over the unbearably contradictionary pressure between idealistic, high-flown principle and German/Prussian reality, always by justifying the German/Prussian State. It is the case of "They lived happily ever after." Martin Luther (1483-1546) set it up first in theory; religious piety was linked to political absolutism.

It is not suprising, therefore, to find that the extreme nationalist movements of the twentieth century, unable to throw up from their own ranks a philosopher equal to the task, should consciously or unconsciously turn to Hegel in their search for a theory to justify their actions. Most of the theories which have been evolved by the would-be philosophers of Fascism and National-Socialism are variations, more or less garbled by the introduction of syndicalist, racial, activist, and various other twentieth-century modifications, on Hegel's basic theme (The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nationalism, Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1963, p51.)

In passing, Japan of the 1930s was not a totalitarian, fascist country though it showed some resemblances like many Western coutries. You will not know that unless you have some knowledge of how the Japanese lived their daily lives in the 1930s and 1940s.
In Germany big businesses. land lords and social highbrows, for instance, were not too unhappy with what Hitler seemed to be setting out to do, but in Japan big bisinesses and big land owners did not like the right-wing movements. For instance, Japanese big businesses were doing trade with Ameriacan and European countries and they constituted a major window, like big land lords who lived in urbanized areas and middle-class people who were engaged in jobs that required intellectual skills, which looked out on Western culture.
The radical movements had their constituencies in agrarian areas,and "Peasants and residents of the thousands of villages and small towns, who still constitued the bulk of the population, looked at what was happening in the cities with wonderment and often with disapproval (E.O. Reischauer, Japan: The Story of a Nation, Charles E. Tuttle, 1970, p180.)" But the radical movements were not necessarily anti-American or Western.

Continued from above.
I do not know exactly when China began the game of "Do not visit Yasukuni Shrine," or "Japan has not apologized" game. When the CCP began its game around 1994, it thought it could make a lot out of Weizsacker's address and began to tout it and say, "The Germans are remorseful and made enough apologies while the Japanese are not at all repentant. The so-called class A war criminals were enshrined in October 1978 and three Japanese Prime Ministers had made over twenty visits without being denounced until China began to be critical of the visits.
The two governments have been exchanging signals of playing down the game for quite some time. The latest news report in Japan said that Abe is going to visit Beijing on September 3 though he will not attend the PLA's military parade. (Abe has met Xi Jinping three times as Prime Minister. I do not remember it was the first or the second time when they met, that the Chinese government asked the Japanese, at least according to a Japanese report, to make-believe that Abe had requested it.)

You can get to yaleglobal.yale.edu/Alistair Burnett/War Drums in Asia: Back to the European Future? at the following link.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/war-drums-asia-back-european-future.

Plantagenet,
I read your Submarines Matters. I found it too technical to understand and make a comment.

Hi Michi

Yes Submarine Matters is lovingly crafted for a technically minded audience of aesthetes, gentleman and submariners.

Pete
https://youtu.be/GgX1WBf2SjE

I said in one of my posts above that Abe is going to visit Beijing on September 3. According to a report he has finally decided not to, at least on September 3.