"The Stories of Three Adolfs"

"Jewish, german, all that has nothing to do with it!"

"A Story of Three Adolfs" is a long Manga that features three men who coincidentally have the same first name of "Adolf." The story is set in both Japan and Germany during World War II. In 1936, Toge Sohei goes to Germany to cover the Berlin Olympic Games as a reporter. There, he finds that someone has killed his brother, who was studying in Germany. Later it becomes clear that his brother was killed because he sent a secret document to Japan concerning Adolf Hitler. The document contains a secret of Hitler's birth: that he in fact has Jewish blood. At around the same time, Wolfgang Kauffmann, who works for the German Consulate General in Kobe, Japan, is searching for the document at the order of the German government. Kauffmann has a son named Adolf, who he wants to become an ultra nationalist and hard-line supporter of Adolf Hitler. But Adolf Kauffmann, who has a Jewish friend named Adolf Kamil, is not attracted to Nazi Germany because it approves of the killing of Jewish people. The era of terror completely changes the destinies of the two men named "Adolf."

January 6, 1983 to May 30, 1983
Appeared serially in "Shukan (Weekly) Bunshun" (Bungeishunju Ltd.)

"A Story of Three Adolfs" appeared serially in a weekly magazine for adults, "Shukan Bunshun." Compared with other Tezuka Osamu works, it is a surprisingly serious and hard-core social drama. Tezuka Osamu crafted the work this way because the editor in chief of "Shukan Bunshun" asked him to do so. One of the two settings for the story is Kobe, where Tezuka Osamu lived as a boy and during the war, so this work conveys the atmosphere of Kobe in those days. As Tezuka Osamu was hospitalized while he was writing this work, the episodes in the latter part were largely cut but later rewritten by Tezuka Osamu himself when published in book form.