History Manga / Adolf

An epic story of war, friendship, and betrayal from [[Creator/OsamuTezuka the God of Manga himself]]. Spanning approximately half a century, from the Berlin Olympics to the then-present of TheEighties, focusing primarily on the years leading up to UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, ''Adolf'' is [[GenreBusting by turns a]] ComingOfAgeStory, SpyFiction, Romance and a fairly well-done AuthorTract about the evils of war and racism.

* AnAesop: Racism is evil and unnatural.

[[caption-width-right:300:''Der Führer ist Jüde''[[note]] "The Führer is Jewish" [[/note]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300:''Der Führer ist Jüde''[[note]] "The Füer is Jewish" [[/note]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300:''Der Führer ist Jüde'']]

An epic story of war, friendship, and betrayal from [[Creator/OsamuTezuka the God Of Manga himself]]. Spanning approximately half a century, from the Berlin Olympics to the then-present of TheEighties, focusing primarily on the years leading up to UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, ''Adolf'' is [[GenreBusting by turns a]] ComingOfAgeStory, SpyFiction, Romance and a fairly well-done AuthorTract about the evils of war and racism.

* ThoseWackyNazis in several forms (well they have to be there).

* MilkingTheGiantCow: Hitler's performance at the Nuremberg rally was already a real-life example of this, but the goofy ArtShift Tezuka uses for this scene turns it UpToEleven.

* BerserkButton: Adolf Kaufman hates when others refer to his Japanese mother as a geisha and always blows his top. Even if it is ''Hitler himself'' saying it.
* BigBrotherInstinct: Toge's whole motivation is finding the murderer of his younger brother. He rapes Rosa when he finds she betrayed him to the Nazis.

* ButNotTooForeign: Adolf Kaufman. Elisa is also part Asian, having some Chinese ancestry.

* {{Irony}}: Adolf Kaufman starts out wanting nothing to do with Nazism, despite the demands of his father's Nazi associates. [[spoiler: By the end of the story, he becomes so fanatical, he supports Hitler even when it becomes clear the war is lost]].

* MightyWhitey: Adolf Kaufman fulfills this trope on many levels. He rises quickly through the SS despite being [[ButNotTooForeign Half-Japanese]]. Tezuka attempts to justify this by having Hitler take a personal interest in him as a way of trying to learn about Japan from him so he can understand his Japanese allies better. After the war, he takes refuge with a group of Palestinian fighters and ends up becoming one of their top men, though this does make a bit of sense considering his extensive military training. The fact that the man is a ''Nazi'' may or may not make this a very twisted, circuitous LampshadeHanging...

* BerserkButton: Adolf Kaufman hates when others refer to his Japanese mother as a geisha. Even if it is ''Hitler himself'' saying it.

* GreedyJew: While most of the Jewish characters are decent people, Elisa's father plays the part of the greedy, scheming old Yid to the hilt. The man sells out his own people by having business dealings with Nazi-affiliated companies, encourages his daughter to get into a relationship with a psychotic Hitler Youth she doesn't even like because a party member marrying into the family would give him even more connections & eventually gets himself and most of his family killed because he didn't want to leave his cash behind when he fled the country.

* OnlyAFleshWound: Averted. Toge gets shot in the shoulder, but never rests afterward: the wound becomes infected and he loses the nerves in his left arm, rendering it useless. One should remember that Tezuka graduated in Medicine.

* TragicVillain: Adolf Kaufmann.
* UsedToBeASweetKid: Kaufmann.

** For the two Adolfs, their story is ''a lot'' more bitter, borderline DownerEnding. [[spoiler: Their friendship never recovers from the war. Kaufman, after becoming an international fugitive, [[RetiredMonster joins the Palestinian Liberation Organization]]. Adolf Kamil and his family move to Israel. [[NotSoDifferent Kamil, out of revenge, murders Kaufman's Palestinian family]]. The two confront each other for the last time, and Kaufman ends up dying to Kamil. Kamil survives with his family to see the end of the war, but according to the records has committed genocidal massacres of Palestinians [[DroppedABridgeOnHim and is killed in a Palestinian attack]]]].

One thing that makes ''Adolf'' fairly unique is that, despite having only one name in the title, it has [[NamesTheSame three title characters]]. They are Adolf Kaufman, the son of a German diplomat and his Japanese wife; Adolf Kamil, the Japanese-born son of a pair of Jewish German expatriate bakers; [[UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and some art school reject with a funny mustache]].

An epic story of war, friendship and betrayal from [[Creator/OsamuTezuka the God Of Manga himself]]. Spanning approximately half a century, from the Berlin Olympics to the then-present of TheEighties, focusing primarily on the years leading up to UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, ''Adolf'' is [[GenreBusting by turns a]] ComingOfAgeStory, SpyFiction, Romance and a fairly well-done AuthorTract about the evils of war and racism.

One thing that makes ''Adolf'' fairly unique is that, despite having only one name in the title, it has [[NamesTheSame three title characters]]. They are Adolf Kaufman, the son of a German diplomat and his Japanese wife; Adolf Kamil, the Japanese-born son of a pair of Jewish German expat bakers; [[UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and some art school reject with a funny mustache]].

What's also interesting is that unlike most WWII stories you're probably familiar with, it gives an intimate look into the daily lives of people in the Axis Powers. Tezuka himself lived through the war and many of the later chapters were based on his own experiences with dodging American incendiaries as a lad.

It was published in English by Cadence Books and Viz for a time, but was out of print for a while. There is also an English {{Scanlation}} floating around on the internet, though of questionable quality. Vertical released a new translation in August 2012 under the title ''Message to Adolf''.

** For Toge, it is more sweet: [[spoiler: He survives the war, albeit having gone deaf and with permanent nerve damage in his arm. Yukie, his first love in a while, ends up dying in the war, but not before giving birth to a new daughter. Toge quits the newspaper business, embittered by the oppression he suffered during the war, but goes on to work in the restaurant industry]].
** For the two Adolfs, their story is a lot more bitter, borderline DownerEnding. [[spoiler:Their friendship never recovers from the war. Kaufman, after becoming an international fugitive, [[RetiredMonster joins the Palestinian Liberation Organization]]. Adolf Kamil and his family move to Israel. [[NotSoDifferent Kamil, out of revenge, murders Kaufman's Palestinian family]]. The two confront each other for the last time, and Kaufman ends up dying to Kamil. Kamil survives with his family to see the end of the war, but according to the records has committed genocidal massacres of Palestinians [[DroppedABridgeOnHim and is killed in a Palestinian attack]]]].

* BlackAndGreyMorality: Rather unusual for a WWII story, though not exactly surprising, considering where it came from. Though the forces of Japanese militarism and Nazism are unquestionably vile, the Allies don't come off too well, either. FDR knowingly sends hundreds of sailors to their deaths as part of a BatmanGambit and after that we only see the Americans as the Japanese civilians did: a faceless boogeyman periodically raining firey death on the heads of soldiers and civilians alike. And then there's the whole UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict bit at the end...
** Toge is probably the character the reader most likely relates to, however he ''did'' rape Lampe's daughter in retaliation to his brother's murder.

* ComplexityAddiction: During the confrontation with Toge on an island, Lampe could easily have shot him, but he wanted him alive to torture him and perform horrible experiments on him. Lampe then gets startled by a flock of seagulls, allowing Toge to shoot him instead (he gets better however).

* CreatorCameo: Osamu Tezuka as taxi driver.

* DefectingForLove: Subverted massively with Adolf Kaufman and Elisa's relationship. Elisa thinks he's horrible for wanting to destroy her race and only wanting to save her because he has a hard-on for her. She only goes along with it at the insistance of her scheming father who thinks having a Nazi in the family will keep the Gestapo from rounding them up. [[RapeAsDrama Things go even worse when they meet up again later on...]]

* DroppedABridgeOnHim: [[spoiler:After everything he went through, Adolf Kamil is unceremoniously killed off-screen by a random suicide bomber in a shopping district not long after he retired from the Israeli army]].

** Kamil may or may not have pulled one as well. [[UnreliableNarrator According to the PLO]] he was directly responsible for several massacres, but the only time we actually see him after war's end is during his duel with Kaufman, so it's hard to tell.
* ForegoneConclusion: We know from the prologue that Toge will survive the war and that Adolf Kamil will be the last of the three Adolfs to die, which takes a lot of dramatic tension out of [[spoiler:his climactic duel to the death with Adolf Kaufman]].

** Adolf Kamil is generally a victim of Kaufman's descent into supervillainy. [[spoiler:After the war, he ''murders Kaufman's wife and daughter'', ignores this as he puts Kaufman down, and apparently goes on to commit genocide of Palestenians before finally getting killed offscreen, showing as little remorse for his actions as Kaufman did.]]

* OnlyAFleshWound: Averted. Toge gets shot in the shoulder, but never rests afterwards: the wound becomes infected and he loses the nerves in his left arm, rendering it useless. One should remember that Tezuka graduated in Medicine.

* ReusedCharacterDesign: Like most of Tezuka's more "serious" works, very few of them are featured, though Lamp's performance here is widely considered his definitive role. Ham Egg also plays a fairly major role as the sinister ''kempeitai'' Inspector Akabane, Duke Red is a Hungarian smuggler, Tawashi appears briefly as an icecream shop owner and Marukabi Boon makes a rapid cameo as an old friend of Toge.

* SlowlySlippingIntoEvil: Adolf Kaufman starts out as a nice young boy, but is gradually corrupted by his Nazi teachers. [[spoiler:After murdering Kamil's father, he gradually sinks more and more into the Nazi ideology]].

** He gets a ''bigger'' one in the end, when he eventually [[spoiler: gets his hands on the secret documents proving Hitler's ancestry. Just before he's going to destroy them, he's informed of Germany's defeat and Hitler's death, which means that he basically wasted his life in going after useless trash. He starts laughing and then cries.]]
* {{Yakuza}}: Present as the important meaning behind a [[spoiler:tattoo.]] Namely, the female bar owner who falls for Toge has one, signifying that anyone who harms her would have to face the wrath of her family. [[spoiler:That said, some of her dialogue implies that she's not really Yakuza, she just lets people ''think'' she is.]]