The Wives

To the world, the two men were great, almost impersonal evildoers; but to their wives, they were still only husbands--and pretty good ones, as husbands went.

In Tokyo last week Mrs. Fujiko Homma, wife of Lieut. General Masaharu Homma, knew that she would soon be a widow. She had fought with quiet tenacity to save the General's life, had broken an ancient Japanese custom--according to which wives should be seen, not heard--by appearing in court and giving a newspaper interview in her husband's defense. With the submissive dignity of a Japanese lady, she related that she was his second wife, that she had borne him two children --a girl, now 18, and a boy now 16, both now attending school in Tokyo. Mrs. Homma firmly described her husband as a man of peace.

Last week she was informed that General MacArthur had approved the death sentence passed on General Homma for war crimes in the Philippines. Said she: "Today's judgment does not come from God, it comes only from a human. I believe that some day God will pass final judgment. I am satisfied--and I know my husband is satisfied--to be buried in Yasukuni Shrine with the rest of the Japanese soldiers who fell at Corregidor."

Near the village of Neuhaus, Germany, exActress Emmy Sonnemann Goering lived in a three-room porter's lodge with her seven-year-old daughter Edda. Once Mrs. Goering had been Germany's most spectacularly wealthy woman; now she said tearfully: "I don't know what will become of Edda and me. But there is no use discussing that. What matters is that I haven't the companionship of my husband."

Twenty-five miles away, in Nuernberg, her husband, concluding his swaggering performance on the witness stand, was consistently eluding Prosecutor Jackson's angry questioning. Said Mrs. Goering. "I'm awfully proud of my husband because of his manliness and because he is standing up for his beliefs." She was surprised that he still spoke reverently of the Fuehrer. Hitler, who was the godfather of her daughter Edda, "must have been awfully sick mentally at the end," she declared. "To think he wanted even our little Edda executed beside my husband--not to speak of me!"

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