Last War Criminal from South Korea that Served in the Imperial Japanese Military Passes Away

Via a reader tip comes this interesting read about Lee Hak-rae who was a convicted war criminal from World War II who served as a prison guard during the construction of the Thai-Burma railway line:

The last Korean to be convicted of war crimes after serving in the Japanese military during World War II has died without receiving the apology and compensation he insisted Tokyo owed him for his suffering. Lee Hak-rae, 96, died on Sunday.  (…….)

Interviewed in 1988, Lee said he had never abused prisoners in his charge and that he had been frightened of them because of their stature. 

That claim was undermined by the diaries of Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, the Australian army colonel who served in the Medical Corps and was captured at Java in 1942. In one passage, Dunlop wrote that he had become so incensed at the brutal treatment by “The Lizard” – the nickname the POWs gave to Lee – that he found a length of wood and hid alongside a jungle path he knew Lee would be taking. His intention was to kill Lee and conceal the body in the undergrowth, but he changed his mind after realising that he and other POWs would be held accountable for Lee’s death. (……)

“The Japanese guards were bad, but the Koreans and the Formosans were the worst,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “These were men who the Japanese looked down on as colonials, so they needed to show they were as good as the Japanese. And they had no one else to take it out on other than us POWs.”

South China Morning Post

You can read more at the link, but Lee after the war was originally sentenced to death for abusing prisoners and on appeal it was reduced to jail time. He ended up serving 11 years in prison and was released in 1956.