by Matt Killeen
Faith. Not trust.
Sarah did not trust anyone, anymore. This had really always been the case, she had just forgotten it. It was a spell cast by Clementine’s proximity and agitation, by Sarah’s unexpected need to be liked. An illusion built of Lisbeth’s lies and Sarah’s need to be held. No longer.
Yet she had felt the rush of recognition and homesickness in Lady Sakura’s arms. She was an old friend, the echo of a better mother . . . but Atsuko Takeda was now a spy, a double agent, and therefore a liar. In reality she could be anybody. Sarah buried those feelings. Concealed her longing.
She was the little girl on the warehouse roof in Friedrichshafen once more. Alone, accompanied by voices that were probably her own.
The Captain was her colleague, her handler. Close but apart. She would deal with the rest as and when it came up. She was growing. Had grown. Soon she would need no handling.
Sarah stepped toward him and opened up her arms.
He opened his.
They shuffled into each other and closed them. They held on and, after a few seconds, tightened their grip.
“Your new coat makes an unnecessary amount of noise. And you smell of diesel oil.”
“And there was me thinking I was wearing too much Echt Kölnisch Wasser.” She sighed, letting go.
“Anyway . . . I’ve brought a different friend,” the Captain said, motioning to the Mercedes.
“Oh good, we need friends. I’d come to miss Sergeant Norris. Turns out he’s a wise man.”
Sarah smiled and looked at the car. At the small, fragile, pale little girl who stood next to it.
“Hello, Haller,” said the Mouse.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The creation of Devil Darling Spy was driven by my discovery of two horrific moments in history: the Nama and Herero genocides, and the war crimes of Japan’s Unit 731. These atrocities resonated with me, not only for what they represented at the time, but for how their echoes continue in the world today. The research that followed showed me some of humanity’s other dark corners, and they became part of the book.
I became aware of the extermination of the Nama and Herero peoples by German authorities when I read David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen’s The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism.
At the heart of the Namibian genocides was the belief that some humans are seen as less valuable, less human than others. What really chilled me to my core on reading The Kaiser’s Holocaust was the extent to which that belief was not limited to the atrocity’s instigator General von Trotha, the settlers, or even the Kaiser’s Germany. That thinking was the defining factor in the notion of colonization, of empire. Swanning into someone else’s world and stealing everything out of a sense of superiority and entitlement, at gunpoint—all the European powers had done this. It was what empire meant.
While von Trotha terrorized what is now Namibia in 1904, Belgians in the Congo were simultaneously unleashing a reign of terror that would cost some ten million lives, as revealed by campaigner E. D. Morel in his book Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years, 1890–1910. There was an international outcry that led to changes, but in practical terms, these only brought about a more sanitized method of forced labor and more subtle abuses.
Hitler and the National Socialists were likewise obsessed with colonies and territorial expansion—they called it Lebensraum, or “living space.” They chose to go east, into Poland and the Soviet Union, rather than into Africa or Asia where colonial territory would have to be taken from other major European powers.
While Samuel’s testimony in these pages is a true and accurate description of events, including the Shark Island camp and the collection of human skulls there, there is no evidence that the German settlers were behind the outbreak of rinderpest that so weakened the Herero.
But to a mind already reading about chemical and biological warfare, Shirō Ishii and Unit 731, it sounded like a textbook use of bioweapons. It would not have been the first time that a colonial power had done so, after all.
The real Shirō Ishii believed in biological and chemical weapons as a vehicle for his country’s imperial ambitions from the very start, and as a well-connected and persuasive personality, he almost single-handedly drove the entire program. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state Manchukuo, Ishii saw somewhere he could work in secrecy and a population that he could experiment on with impunity. So Unit 731 was created.
The image of the White Devil was born from the descriptions of his doctors arriving in stricken Chinese villages. Dressed in protective gear, they promised medical help and sophisticated treatment, but they were only there to experiment, study, and murder . . . much like the doctors on Namibia’s Shark Island were more skull exporters than healers.
With the exception of the clandestine visit to Berlin described in Devil Darling Spy, everything relating to Shirō Ishii and his Unit 731 in this book is based on fact. The human experimentation, infecting the city of Ningbo with the plague, and giving contaminated sweets to children—these are all true, and only a sample of his crimes.
Ishii’s eventual fate revealed much about the moral complexity—or moral vacuum—that surrounded the Second World War. He was captured by the US occupation authorities, but escaped prosecution for war crimes by offering up his research—data gained by experimenting on and vivisecting humans—in exchange for immunity. The US government considered his work “absolutely invaluable” as it prepared itself for a war with the USSR that seemed imminent. He almost certainly went to work at Fort Detrick, Maryland, home of the US biological weapons program, where testing of biological agents on human subjects continued until 1974.
Conceived and written as the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone was reaching its zenith, Devil Darling Spy absorbed that tragedy. The western lens of the media coverage and the way NGOs ignored local cultural sensibilities to the detriment of their medical efforts seemed clear echoes of colonial thinking. Meanwhile the real Millies waited for news outside the clinics and hospitals, as others withheld their sick in fear. I knew that the very first documented outbreak of EVD in 1976 was spread by missionaries reusing their needles. That overconfident disdain seemed very symbolic.
Dr. Chisomo Kalinga, an academic specializing in colonialism and illness narratives, who acted as a reader on Devil Darling Spy, has pointed out that the existence of a German medical mission in the AEF is unlikely, Albert Schweitzer’s rather paternalist mission in Gabon being the exception rather than the rule. She also reminds us that medical missions were usually designed to get Africans well enough for work, and that was the extent of the philanthropy.
Dr. Kalinga likewise maintains that the average rural Africans of the period would have been more superstitious than I had initially portrayed them and less likely to have trusted western medical staff. I have acted to redress this balance, and hope that the population of central Africa depicted in Devil Darling Spy does not seem anachronistically compliant.
As for the White Devil, like the stories around the Ngontang, it would have been more a recent folktale than true mythology, which in Bantu traditions tended toward animal spirits. Dr. Kalinga suggests that it would have become a story akin to an “urban legend” of today.
Some elements of the story are unambiguously true, such as the anti-fascists hidden by the Hotel Victoria in Rome, the state-induced famine in the Soviet Union in 1932, or the horrors of Backe’s Hunger Plan. Some are still a subject of debate to this day, such as the extent of the real Admiral Canaris’s aid to the Allied cause. Certainly the head of the Abwehr disapproved of Hitler and the actions of the Wehrmacht and SS in the east, but the idea that he was actively plotting against the Nazi machine from day one pushes the bounds of credibility. He remains an enigmatic figure.
However,
there is no evidence that the Japanese ambassador in Berlin was having an affair with his secretary. Although I am describing the real ambassador, Saburō Kurusu, that detail is a fictional convenience.
There were very few Black Germans when the Nazis took power, and despite their appalling treatment and their genocidal mass sterilization, their small numbers probably saved them from a formal extermination program. This may have been because the Nazis believed the sterilization had solved their “problem” or because they were preoccupied by what they called “the Jewish question.” The lives of those growing up Black in Nazi Germany were nonetheless horrendous, as Hans J. Massaquoi recounts in his unique memoir Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.
The so-called Rhineland Bastards were overwhelmingly the beloved children of consensual relationships, and the French soldiers, including the Black colonial troops, were tolerated, even liked by the Rhinelanders, for their respectful behavior—not that the converse would have justified the children’s later treatment in any case. But in a vivid demonstration of how even the most liberal voices of the era were mired in racist thinking, it was E. D. Morel, the whistle-blower on the atrocities of the Congo Free State, who was one of those responsible for creating the “Black Shame” narrative and the subsequent moral panic. Putting Black soldiers in positions of authority over white people appeared to be a world gone mad, and the intellectuals of the era were happy to embroider the truth to make their point.
Devil Darling Spy is littered with horrendous attitudes and the deeply racist words and labels spoken by the characters who hold them. Even sympathetic characters employ problematic terms, because they were widely used at the time. The term Gypsy, for example, to describe the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri peoples murdered by the Nazis in the Porajmos, is now considered pejorative. Notions of the exotic and exoticism are also problematic, as is the repeated geographical ignorance of the characters and their references to Africa as if it were Devon or New Jersey, rather than a massive, diverse continent of widely differing landscapes, peoples, and mind-sets. It is, hopefully, clear when characters are speaking, or Sarah’s own thought process is being revealed by the narration, and that the book is critical of them.
Rather naively, I thought that setting a book in central Africa during World War Two would be merely a case of research, similar to the work I did for Orphan Monster Spy on Germany, Austria, and the Holocaust. I was unprepared for the paucity of books, documentaries, and articles upon which to base my studies. This scarcity of sources and of accessible, mainstream work is representative of a very real Eurocentric bias that permeates western culture. Google Maps, for example, has no street view available in the vast majority of the African continent. There are settlements in the Sahara that can be seen in the satellite view but do not even warrant a name in Google Maps. It’s indicative that the Global North still views some parts of the world as inherently less important. Their thought process is still, to paraphrase the Captain in his moment of weakness, that “it’s just Africa.”
Colonialism has tainted everything that has followed it. It was in part the cause of both world wars. France’s failure to decolonize, with the US caving in to pressure from de Gaulle, caused decades of death and misery. The UK’s clumsy handling of Indian independence led to misery and bloodshed on an unimaginable scale. The last century of history is the story of broken promises by everyone, everywhere.
And colonialism is over in name only, with rampant corruption enabled by the West and the way that corporations continue to enact colonial-style practices in the Global South.
It is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint that I simply should not be writing about colonialism, setting books in Africa, or depicting Black or mixed-ethnicity characters. Kit de Waal wrote a brilliant piece on the challenges of writing the other and cultural appropriation and included the anonymous quote, “Do not dip your pen in somebody else’s blood.”
I have benefited from the privilege colonialism has brought, as have millions of others. My country’s wealth was almost exclusively built on stolen resources and the suffering of its subjects, including the murder, rape, and enslavement of a quarter of the world. Rather than dipping a pen in the blood of Africa, I feel like I’m trailing that blood, the blood of those who have paid colonialism’s heavy price, wherever I go. I feel those red footprints across everything I own, both earned and handed to me. I can no longer live with doing so and not trying to do anything about it.
I encourage everyone to seek out explorations of Africa and colonialism by writers of color, whose history or lived experience I cannot hope to replicate. Spanning the adult, YA, and children’s sections, and cutting across genres and time periods, a start can be made with the work of Nadifa Mohamed, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Desmond Ohaegbulam, Marguerite Abouet, Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah, Wayétu Moore, Naivo, Yaa Gyasi, Leila Aboulela, Ben Okri, Aminatta Forna, Ousmane Sembène, Abdulai Silá, Bessie Head, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Zetta Elliott, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nnedi Okorafor, Zetta Elliott, and Nisi Shawl.
The ubiquity of colonialism’s oppression and murder should not, in any way, detract from the crimes wrought by Nazi Germany or the specific horrors of their mechanized death camps. The late David Cesarani, talking to historian Laurence Rees, said of the Holocaust that “never before in history, I think, had a leader decided that within a conceivable time frame an ethnic group would be physically destroyed, and that equipment would be devised and created to achieve that. That was unprecedented.” That said, the complicity of one in the birth of the other should be recognized. Especially now.
When I started writing Orphan Monster Spy, creeping authoritarianism and the far right were making themselves felt. Free-market economics had just bankrupted the world. But rather than taking the economic model to task in any way, those invested in the model were allowed to turn and blame the poorest and most vulnerable for what happened. By the time I was writing Devil Darling Spy, anti-immigrant rhetoric and racist, homophobic, and misogynistic dog-whistling from the far right had become the mainstream discourse. The marginalized are beaten and abused on the streets. Politics entirely disconnected from reality holds court in both the UK and the United States. Meanwhile the super-rich get richer, people go hungry, and the planet gets hotter.
We need truth—real, verified, and evidence-based—as well as real understanding—of colonialism, of the Holocaust, of history. We need to read, as that means knowledge and empathy. Empathy and compassion are the enemy of “looking after our own,” because we are all “our own.”
If you assume or even hope that you would have been the kind of person to defy the Nazis, now is the time to find out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a few moments I thought that this would be nice and easy, having already thanked the people and organizations upon whose shoulders I had climbed to become a published author. Then I realized that I probably have to thank more people this time around than ever before—the people who helped Orphan Monster Spy after publication, as well as those who assisted and advised me on Devil Darling Spy. The resulting 2,500-word essay was, in practical terms, far too long for publication. So, to the booksellers, bloggers, media outlets, librarians, teachers, award organizers, reviewers, and blurbing authors who helped with my debut—thank you. If you’ve in any way supported my work and I haven’t expressed appreciation below, please know that it has meant the world to me.
Many thanks to Professor Timothy Parsons for his knowledge and insights on the Second World War in Africa and forced labor in French colonies, beginning with his published work and ending with his notes on the embryonic Devil Darling Spy, via English football and the reasons to prefer Blues to Villa.
Thank you to Kyle Hiller of Angelella Editorial for his invaluable authenticity read and generous aftersales care.
Especial gratitude goes to Dr. Chisomo Kalinga, doyenne of African illness narratives, who
battled a horrific cyclone that devastated three countries and still managed to deliver her notes on the entirety of Devil Darling Spy just a day behind schedule.
Thanks also to academic and author Mary Ononokpono for her wise advice, and Dr. Afaf Jabiri for helping me approach the Libyan community. Thanks also to Pascale Yammine and Dr. Hisham Faki for their help with the pilots’ Arabic.
I’m grateful to Dr. Emma-Kate Yates for providing the research on smallpox in Berlin between the wars and for general epidemiology backup; to Lesley Alborough for all things related to ocean swimming, submersion, and hypothermia; and of course, to Sarah’s namesake, my consultant on all matters Jewish, Deborah Goldstein.
Thank you to translator extraordinaire Kyoko Pallash for generously acting as my reader for all things culturally and linguistically Japanese, and for assisting in the hunt for the pre-1960s version of the “Takeda Lullaby” . . . which only went and got itself cut in the line edits. Sore ga jinseida.
Arigato gozaimashita to my old Japanese teacher Yasuko-san and her giant papier-mâché syringe, for being the voice and face of Lady Sakura. One day Mr. Giraffe will learn the counters for three-dimensional objects, but I fear the Japanese people should not hold their breath.
As ever, thank you to the Facebook hivemind for the on-tap, sum knowledge of humanity—to the countless Chanel No. 5 describers, child’s hand measurers, food scare rememberers, and grammar police. Special gratitude goes to Vanessa Plaister and Alison McKay for vintage hair advice, and, of course, Fiona Barker for telling me precisely how many times the word “realize” should appear in my book and for showing her working out.
Danke to the volunteers and admins at Subsim for getting me back in the control room of a Type VIIC submarine so I could run the attack on Virulent over and over until I could prove it was possible. As with all the sites I’ve visited that study Axis and Third Reich history, I see you keeping those real Nazis off your forums. Keep at it and don’t let up for even a moment.