Mnikwa Dlamini, for example, is the current chief of Hhelehhele, a rural area in the north of the country. He’s also an 88-year-old veteran of the war in Europe.

Swaziland is a small country in southern Africa. It gained its independence in 1968.

Before that it was ruled by the British, and before them the Boers. When war came to Europe, the British came knocking.

“All our life here in Swaziland was under British control,” remembers Chief Mnikwa. “It was mostly okay because the British and us had a good relationship. They at least treated us better than the Boers did.”

“We first heard in 1939 that the Germans were fighting with the British. They only said that they used to be friends with the Germans, and then after a while the Germans had started fighting them.”

As the war drew on, the then-King of Swaziland, Sobhuza, agreed to gather volunteers to fight as part of the Allied forces. In exchange, he extracted promises from the British of greater autonomy for his country in the future. But the young Mnikwa, not yet a chief, had his own reasons for signing up.

“The reason why I was eager to go to war was because there were rumors in my home that I might become the next chief,” he recalls.

“I said it’s better that I go to die. It was never in me. I said it’s better that I should go there because the way to heaven I would definitely find there.”

He didn’t want to be the chief because there would be ‘too much noise’.

So Mnikwa and a few thousand other young Swazis registered with the British authorities. They were given boots, khaki uniforms, the works.

In late 1941 Mnikwa was shipped off for training near the Suez Canal. He was soon fighting in the deserts of Libya, and then in Italy.

“[Benito] Mussolini, who was a politician, was friendly with Hitler. We then had to fight the Italians as well.”

“There were lots of bombs around. And they used to have bombs planted around in the ground, and you would touch some of them and they would go off, and people would die.”

Along the way, Mnikwa met soldiers from all parts of the world, including the United States. He remembers that they were “not people who liked to talk to other people very much. They would talk every now and then, but most of the time they kept to themselves.”

The war ended, and Mnikwa traveled back to southern Africa. He spent some time in Johannesburg, trying to avoid the inevitable. But eventually he returned to Hhelehhele to take up his responsibilities.

“I then realized that I can’t just do my own will. Clearly it was God’s wish that I should live.”

There are people who go to war out of a moral obligation, but perhaps not that many. Most sign up to pay their bills, or to pay for college. Others go because they’re told to.

Mnikwa Dlamini, the chief of Hhelehhele, a rural area in the north of Swaziland went because he didn’t want to be a chief.

Within seconds of stepping into the War Horse exhibit at London’s National Army museum, visitors are transported to the lush green fields of Devon.

The pastoral scene also features in the children’s novel and play that inspired the exhibit. “War Horse” was written by Michael Morpurgo and it opens as a horse appropriated from a Devon farm and shipped off to the front.

Morpurgo said it all began when he met a WWI veteran of a cavalry regiment in his local pub.

Morpurgo asked him what he did during the war.

“And then he said something wonderful. He said ‘I was there with ‘orses.’ And he said it like that “with ‘orses.’ And then he just started talking,” said Morpurgo.

The new exhibit traces the use of horses in war down the centuries through WWI. Curator Pip Dodd said they were critical and not just for charging into battle.

“The horse really was the motorized vehicle the helicopter and the transport ship and plane of its day. They were hugely important,” said Dodd.

There are also reminders of the grueling, often deadly conditions the animals endured even before they reached the battlefield.

One room recreates a ship’s hold, complete with creaking boards. Dodd said the demand for horses in WWI was enormous.

“In the first 12 days the British army bought up about 120 thousand British horses from farms and from bus companies but there weren’t enough or good enough to be army horses so they had to look further afield, “ he said.

They looked to the United States.

More than three hundred thousand horses and mules were sent over on transport ships, many dying en route. Those that made it were then shipped out again and into battle.

The video opening the exhibit recreates moments of horror and violence.

Morpurgo heard about it firsthand from the veteran he met., but what really touched him was the former soldier’s intense bond with the horse who carried him to the front lines when he was all of 17 years of age.

“He was terrified. They were all terrified, he said. All his pals were terrified but they couldn’t talk about it. They absolutely could not talk about it. And he must not talk about it, he knew that. So the only person he could talk to and he used the word person, the only person (he) could talk to was (his) horse. And (he) would go to the horse lines at night when (he) was feeding them, and (he) would stand by them and I’d stroke the neck and (he) would whisper into his ear and (he) would tell him stuff I could never even mention to my pals because we were all going through it anyway,” Morpurgo recounted.

The author’s book and play, like the exhibit focus on the warriors who never chose to go into battle and never knew what was was coming.

Of the 1.2 million horses used by the army, nearly half died. For Morpurgo, it is a vivid reminder of the cost of war.

“Roughly the same number of men and horses died in the First World War. So they did this thing together. It was extraordinary courage, loyalty, horror all together. But they didn’t do it apart they were supporting each other,” he said.

Curator Pip Dodd admitted to being moved by what he discovered during his research.

“Of course the vast majority of horses that served are now completely unknown and unknowable and anonymous and there were millions of them and so somehow we wanted to pay our respects really so we came up with the idea of this mirror box,” he said.

The box, surrounded by mirrors, is filled with dozens of cutout horses. The mirrors reflect off each other, multiplying the number into infinity.

Of all the horses used in war, only a handful returned to Britain. The rest were sold over seas as as riding horses, work horses or for their meat. Morpurgo finds that almost unforgivable.

For him, the horses of war are heroes just as much as the soldiers who relied on them.

Steven Spielberg plans to release a film version of War Horse in December.

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Thinking of the time when no witnesses will be left to remember and actually we’ll only have the archives and their images, I thought it’s important if not urgent to try to conceive the complexity of these images, the layers of reality that are concealed behind the simplistic way we are used to seeing this extremely important footage and I think that it also creates for us a perspective which we can use in our own contemporary viewing when being mediated by the media and news programs it’s always about our limitations as viewers and when we realize these limitations we know to seek for more than what we are actually seeing and I think this is maybe one of the most ethical tasks we have in front of us as viewers.

The emotional trigger maybe was the death of my grandmother one year before I started to make this film. Until then I was sure that at least during the decades the survivors were still a mass of people it was much more important to listen to them, or even to listen to their silence, because their silence was also a form of testimony, to understand something of what had happened. But now when they’re slowly dying, I think that the images are much more important to understand than anything else, because it is the chemistry of reality in a way. And to understand what it contains is to try and seek for truth. –Yael Hersonski

Jeb Sharp’s radio interview with Yael Hersonski, August 18, 2010

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: The Nazis documented, on film, life in the Warsaw Ghetto in occupied Poland.  Some scenes showed well-heeled Jews eating sumptuous dinners.  Others showed poor Jews starving to death.  For years, some historians used the film as something of a record of life in the ghetto.  Then, another reel was discovered.  It showed the filmmakers staging the scenes.  All of this prompted Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski to put together the Nazi footage in its entirety, and to solicit the input of ghetto survivors.  The result is called “A Film Unfinished.”  It opened today in New York.  Hersonski says the footage the Nazis shot in 1942 made a kind of morbid sense to her.

YAEL HERSONSKI: When I first watched the footage, I understood the basic attempt, which was to edit scenes in which we see Jews allegedly living a life of luxury, and to cut it with scenes that seemed to be more documentary scenes, from the streets, from the outside, where people were starving and dying.  When I was asking myself why they showed also the atrocities and not only the false fact that Jews were well off, I think that the only clue we have there is something that the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary four days before the filming began.  He wrote that now when they have decided to move the Jews to the east, it is urgent for them to make films, as many as possible, for the education of the future generations of the Third Reich.

SHARP: When you open up these reels and play them, what are you actually seeing?  Give us some example of the luxury, and also the destitution.

HERSONSKI: The film begins with a general shot from a high angle, of the ghetto.  And  I think that they were trying to create a snapshot of daily life.  But inside this snapshot, to create their own narrative about how the Jewish community was, without the context of the Nazi occupation.  And we see many scenes in which Jews are having dinner at a restaurant and eating food that you couldn’t get, even in Germany during that time.  People are wearing best suits and dresses.  And then it changes and shows the opposite scenes of people who are actually dying in front of the camera.  So they wanted to build a typical character of the Jew – whether a rich Jew who is manipulating, exploiting the weak; or the subhuman Jew who is always in rags, and create a reaction of disgust.  There is also a long sequence which merely shows a series of Jewish rituals.  But these rituals are, from the religious perspective, distorted as well.

SHARP: And one of those Jewish rituals is a funeral.  And as a survivor points out, who ends up seeing the footage, they get it wrong.

HERSONSKI: Right.  One big, rich funeral, in the Jewish community, had one coffin.  And they used it in order to build this ceremony which looks much more Christian than a Jewish one, because Jews are not buried in coffins.  And one of the survivors, when she sees that, she almost laugh, I think, because it was not done the way the film shows.

POLISH SPEAKING

SHARP: Now, you were quite focused on having these survivors, the last people who would have experienced the reality of the ghetto, participate in this filmmaking.  What motivated them, the ones who agreed and who felt they actually could handle it?

HERSONSKI: Well, I think that these people, they had basic curiosity to see this place of childhood again.  So for me, it was quite a surprise to realize that the experience of the survivors watching the film was not completely that of horror or fear.  There were also moments in which they smiled and laughed because they remembered how it was, the people that surrounded them, things that they liked to see and to remember again.  They added such important emotional layer to the images, and for me it was the most overwhelming stage of the filming.  They had a lot of information about the staging.  And one survivor was saying something, that even the most documentary, seemingly documentary scenes, when we see a street, the people who are passing by were specifically chosen to do so.

SHARP: So this was for propaganda purposes.  Did you come to understand what the Nazis intended to portray?

HERSONSKI: I think – and this is my own very personal speculation – I think they were trying to capture a kind of a last snapshot of a community – a community in which the upper classes are completely immoral and corrupted, exploit the lower classes, the weak, the poor.  And they are, in fact, the cause of atrocities we can see in this film that were caused, of course, by the Nazis.

SHARP: And just to be clear – I mean, propaganda intended to justify what the Nazis ultimately did?

HERSONSKI: I think so, yes.

SHARP: Just to underscore this, what did, indeed, happen to the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto?

HERSONSKI: Two months after the film crew had left the ghetto, nearly 70% of population, meaning 300,000 people, were sent to the gas chambers in Treblinka.  And in general, most of the ghetto was just annihilated.  In April ’43, there was the uprising, which brought the final end of the ghetto.

SHARP: Why did you make this film at this moment?  What was really driving you?

HERSONSKI: Well, thinking of the time when no witnesses will be left to remember, and actually we’ll have only the archives and their images.  During the decades, the survivors were still a mass of people.  It was much more important to listen to them.  But now when they are slowly dying, I think that the images are much more important to understand than anything else, because to understand what it contains is to try and seek full truth.

SHARP: Yael Hersonski – thank you very much.

HERSONSKI: Thank you for inviting me.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Libia Yamamoto attends religious service at a Japanese-American church in Richmond, Calif. Yamamoto was born at a hacienda in Peru. Her parents were immigrants from southern Japan. She and her family were deported to a detention camp in Texas during World War II.

Yamamoto: “Every morning we had what we called radio exercise. The Peruvian principal would lead us in Japanese, he would count in Japanese.

Yamamoto was born to Japanese parents who had immigrated to Peru. More than 20,000 people of Japanese ancestry lived in Peru before the outbreak of the Second World War. But the Japanese-Peruvian community changed dramatically after December 7th, 1941.

Three months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began sending Japanese Americans to internment camps. At the same time, several Latin American countries also sent their Japanese residents to camps in the U.S.

Ueunten: “Peru got a lot out of that deal. There was also that latent anti-Japanese hostility, and opportunists who thought if they got rid of the Japanese they could take over their businesses and land.”

That’s Wesley Ueunten, an assistant professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco state university. Ueunten traveled to Peru to study the internment of its’ Japanese citizens.

Wesley Ueunten, left, plays a sanshin, or Okinawan guitar, at a celebration of Okinawan-Americans in San Francisco. Ueunten is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. He traveled to Peru to research and study the Japanese-Peruvian experience during and after World War II. Peru sent more than 1,800 of their citizens to U.S. internment camps.

Ueunten: “Peru and the U.S. got into these agreements where Peru would cooperate with the U.S. defense efforts with sending the Japanese to the u.s. In exchange, Peru received loans for things like steel processing plants, ammunitions, and etcetera. The U.S. needed a body of hostages, people they could use to exchange for U.S. citizens caught in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor. They specifically targeted Japanese in other countries because they didn’t want to send Japanese Americans. It would have looked really bad.”

In Peru, police detained Yamamoto’s father. The next morning Yamamoto and dozens of other Japanese Peruvian families went to the police station.

Yamamoto: “And all the mothers sobbed silently. We didn’t even know if we’d see him again. And we waved good-bye, and we waved until we couldn’t see them anymore.”

Six months later, Yamamoto and her family were also put on a ship and deported from Peru.

Yamamoto: “It was a very terrifying time. On the plank they were lined with us soldiers who had guns, pointing at us and we thought we were going to shot.”

Yamamoto was reunited with her father in a detention camp in crystal city, Texas. The war ended in 1945. But Yamamoto and her family remained in the camp for another two years.

Yamamoto: “The government said sorry you’re all illegal aliens and you have to leave. You have to go to Peru or Japan. But Peru wouldn’t take us back.”

Most internees from Latin-American moved to Japan. But Yamamoto, her family and three hundred others fought to stay in the United States. In the 1950’s they were granted permanent residency.

Art Shibayama holds a portrait of his family taken in Peru. Art was born in Lima, and was also deported to an American internment camp.

Grace Shimizu makes dinner for her 96-year-old mother at their Bay area home. She tears up as she looks at a portrait of her father. Shimizu often asked her dad about his forced deportation from Peru to the U.S.

Grace Shimizu holds a portrait of her father Susumu Shimizu. Susumu was a Japanese-Peruvian sent to America's World War II internment camps. Thirteen countries in Latin-America sent some of their ethnically Japanese citizens to U.S. camps.

Shimizu: “I think the way he expressed it was wartime … “shikataganei,” it couldn’t be helped.”

Shimizu believes differently. She co-founded the Japanese-Peruvian oral history project, which tries to shed light on internment experiences. The organization also tries to help other communities that are under attack. The group spoke up for Muslim-Americans in the days following September 11th.

Shimizu: “The message of peace and standing with our neighbors who were also under attack because they are also considered the enemy was so important. During World War II we know what it meant when other did not send by our side.”

Grace Shimizu embraces her mom Yoneko Shimizu following dinner at their home in El Cerrito, Calif. Grace started the Japanese-Peruvian Oral History Project in 1991. The organization is dedicated to telling the stories from Japanese-Peruvians and their internment experience.

For The World, I’m Tyler Sipe in Berkeley, California.

photos: Tyler Sipe

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On the history podcast this week a compilation of recent stories. Gerry Hadden tells us the story of a Nazi traitor who finally had his conviction overturned. Alex Gallafent tells us about changing U.S. views of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. And Marco Werman interviews Loyola University historian Elizabeth Schmidt about the significance of the September 28th stadium in Guinea.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Tens of thousands of German soldiers defied the Nazis during World War Two, and they were convicted of treason. This month Germany overturned their sentences. The move comes too late for most of the fighters. Almost all of them were executed, or died in concentration camps, or were killed in so-called death battalions during the war. Still, exonerating these rebellious ranks has symbolic importance for a country that’s still dealing with its Nazi past. The World’s Gerry Hadden met one of the three surviving German traitors.

GERRY HADDEN:  It was 1942 in German-occupied France. A 21-year-old German sailor named Ludwig Baumann was stationed in the port of Bordeaux. His assignment was to pace the deck scanning the sea for enemy boats. He had a lot of time to think, he says, and that’s when he began to question Hitler’s war.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] I was non-political at the time, but whenever I heard Hitler on the radio demanding more room for our people in the east I wondered, what about the people already living there? Are they going to be destroyed or what? Then our army began invading country after country. I saw newsreels of hundreds of soviet prisoners huddling in a field in winter. I thought, those people are surely going to freeze to death. I didn’t want to be part of this great crime. I just wanted to live.

GERRY HADDEN:  In Bordeaux Baumann and another young sailor named Kurt Oldenburg became friends with some of the French dockworkers. When the Germans told them they were thinking of deserting, the French offered to help.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] One night after dark we left the ship. Our French friends were waiting for us in a truck around the corner. They gave us civilian clothes and Basque hats, and drove us to the no man’s land between occupied and non-occupied France. They dropped us there and drove back to town.

GERRY HADDEN:  The plan was to slip past German patrols and reach a safe house, then continue on to Morocco and finally to the United States.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] But unfortunately we walked right into the arms of a German patrol. We had our side arms locked and loaded. We could have shot them right there on the spot but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. They took us back to base and that’s where our suffering began.

GERRY HADDEN:  Like tens of thousands of German deserters, Baumann and Oldenburg were sentenced to death by a military court. Awaiting execution, they spent the next several months in prison where they were starved and tortured.

[SOUND CLIP]

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann is eighty-eight years old today. His wartime story does not end in prison, but the frail, white-haired man takes a break from the telling. He’s still traumatized by his

experiences, he says, as he prepares coffee for visitors at his modest home in the suburbs of Bremen.

[SOUND CLIP]

GERRY HADDEN:  He then pulls out two documents. One, his death sentence, the other his pardon. After a year on death row his sentence and Oldenburg’s were commuted. But it wasn’t clemency. The two had been assigned to one of Hitler’s death battalions. They were to be sent on suicide missions designed to hold off the Soviet army.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] Hitler once said, German soldiers at the front might die, but the deserters must die.

GERRY HADDEN:  The death battalions were usually wiped out in a matter of weeks. The troops were forced out into the torched fields and towns the retreating Nazi’s left behind. Baumann says they became cannon fodder.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] One day we were under siege in a vast wasteland of ashes in Belarus. Most of us were killed, including my good friend Kurt Oldenburg. I only escaped because I was badly wounded and sent to the hospital.

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann took a bullet in the back defending the very army he’d tried to desert. When the war was over, he figured he’d paid for his crime on the battlefield, but that was not the case.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] On the contrary, we were called cowards and deserters. I myself received threatening phone calls at home, my father too. He died of a broken heart. I myself, I took to drinking.

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann says even German civilians who’d opposed the Nazis branded him a traitor. German historian Wolfgang Eichweder says such treatment was common.

WOLFGANG EICHENWEDER:  Because in the public memory of Germany, in the fourth decades after the Second World War, we made a strong difference between the regime of Hitler and the German army. A lot have been convinced for lot of years, that the German army has acted as normal soldiers. That means more or less in an honorable sense.

GERRY HADDEN:  Ludwig Baumann’s honor seemed lost forever. In the decades after his father’s death, he was shunned by society. He didn’t get sober until he was widowed and left with six kids to raise. He joined Germany’s peace movement, and founded an association called The Victims of Nazi Justice. He fought to clear his name but encountered obstacles. For years various German governments argued that desertion was an official crime at the time and therefore the convictions must stand. The second argument, Baumann says, struck him as scandalous.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] It went like this: an act of treason might have endangered the lives of other German soldiers, therefore we can’t absolve you. But what I say is, if only more soldiers had committed treason so many millions of lives could have been saved, in the concentration camps and so on. You can’t place the lives of some soldiers above all those millions who died. And until Germany recognizes this, it will not have broken with its Nazi past.

GERRY HADDEN:  Germany has in fact recognized this. Last month, it finally overturned the Nazi traitors’ convictions. Today Baumann is the only ex-convict left to relish this final legal victory, two others are still alive but suffer from severe senility. Baumann says there’s been no celebration.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] There was no one left to witness the reversal of the sentences. All of them are dead, executed. But these were people who morally and ethically acted in an honorable fashion. Some of them hid Jews or helped prisoners. They took great risks, so they should be especially honored. For us to be the last group of victims to have our sentences reversed is an outrage.

GERRY HADDEN:  An outrage, he says, that it took more than half a century. But Baumann says this was his dream. His honor has been restored. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Bremen, Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

This week’s podcast is a compilation of items from the radio show. First, the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII: Marco Werman interviews Svetlana Savranskaya of The National Security Archive at The George Washington University about Russian memories of WW2. You may remember Savranskaya; she helped us consider the parallels between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 in HWGH#10. In another story pegged to the 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, The World’s Laura Lynch reports on a reunion of Holocaust survivors in London. And finally, in a footnote to HWGH #19 (about Gabon’s President Omar Bongo), The World’s Marco Werman tells us about the musical career of Bongo’s son and successor, Ali Ben Bongo. >>> Click here to join the “How We Got Here” Facebook Group Page.