SOURCE: Grigg, John. “Fifty Years On, When Afar and Asunder.” Spectator 273, no. 8662 (16 July 1994): 31-2.

In the following review, Grigg evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Wages of Guilt.

The author of this interesting book [The Wages of Guilt] is of Anglo-Dutch parentage. He was educated in Holland in the 1950s, and was taught there to regard Germans (not just the Nazis) as enemies. In the 1970s and 1980s he spent much time ‘in or around Japan,’ and Japanese is one of his six languages. Fascinated by Japanese attitudes to the second world war, he was struck by the lingering influence of certain notions from 19th- and early 20th-century Germany, including ‘pseudo-scientific racialism,’ which he had reason to believe had become ‘distinctly unfashionable’ in their country of origin. He therefore decided to write about German attitudes to the war as well, and since 1989 has been travelling extensively in...