Read A Higher Form of Killing Online
Authors: Diana Preston
The German authorities realized that some appearance of democracy might lessen Allied hostility to “militaristic,” “autocratic” Germany in armistice negotiations. Prince Max of Baden, a liberal, was appointed chancellor and the most “respectable” of the dreaded socialists—the Social Democrats—were invited to join the government. On October 4, Prince Max tentatively approached President Wilson about possible terms for an armistice, choosing him as likely to be the most sympathetic of the Allies. Wilson initially replied encouragingly and without consulting the other Allied leaders. However, his attitude changed when a week or so later a German submarine sank the
Leinster
,
a passenger ferry en route between Ireland and England. Four hundred and fifty lives were lost, several of them American. This was the very sort of “barbaric” action that had brought the United States into the war, and Wilson toughened his stance. Germany must cease submarine warfare at once and produce convincing evidence of its democratization. In any case, armistice—as distinct from peace terms—was a matter for military commanders.
All the time the Allied troops were advancing toward Germany. On October 17 the British took Lille. A week later, an Allied offensive in Italy threw the Austro-Hungarian army back in confusion. On October 30 Turkey signed an armistice. So too did the Austro-Hungarians on November 3 . Emperor Karl abdicated and several of the empire’s component nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia proclaimed their independence. On November 3 too, the German navy mutinied at Kiel and socialist revolutionaries appeared on the streets of several German cities. On November 8, a Germany delegation met an Allied one to request an armistice. The next day, the kaiser went into exile at Amerongen in Holland where his first request was for “a cup of hot, good, real, English tea.” He formally abdicated at the end of November. Nevertheless, when at eleven
A.M.
on November 11, the 1,586th day of the war, Germany signed an armistice, its armies still stood on foreign soil.
Among those who had survived was twenty-nine-year-old corporal Adolf Hitler, recently awarded the Iron Cross for gallantry on the recommendation of the Jewish adjutant of his Bavarian regiment. On October 12 during one of the final Allied pushes, he had been temporarily blinded by the contents of a British mustard gas shell near the village of Wervik in the Ypres Salient. On the day of the armistice, having been evacuated by hospital train he was recovering in a German military hospital in Pomerania. That same day a British sergeant major, Richard Tobin, who had fought through since 1914 wrote, “The armistice came, the day we had dreamed of. The guns stopped, the fighting stopped. Four years of noise and bangs ended in silence. The killings had stopped. We were stunned . . . I should have been happy. I was sad. I thought of the slaughter, the hardships, the waste and the friends I had lost.”
*
U-20
had run aground off Denmark in November 1916. Some parts of it including its conning tower are preserved in a museum in Jutland.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the first years of the conflict, Britain in particular had made many pronouncements about, and promises of, war crimes trials in response to German actions such as the razing of Louvain, the unrestricted U-boat campaign, the bombing of London, and the executions of Edith Cavell and merchant captain Charles Fryatt. These had, however, been headline-grabbing statements designed to secure a propaganda advantage with neutrals such as the United States and to bolster morale at home. The authorities had given little thought as to how, where, and under what legal framework any such trials would be carried out. Since no international arrangements had been agreed or even discussed at the Hague conferences to judge impartially cases brought against either side in a conflict for infringements of the laws of war, any trials were bound to be “victor’s justice.” Even so, no lawyers had been put to work drafting detailed legal mechanisms, no consultations carried out among the Allies on the processes involved.
In the late summer and early autumn of 1918, with the realization victory was close, Allied talk of the trial of German leaders for war crimes resumed with added impetus, having subsided during the difficult times in 1917 and early 1918 when all thoughts had been concentrated on how to win the war. Now public pressure in the Allied nations mounted for trials, and lists of suitable candidates were drawn up. They included Haber for the use of poison gas, von Tirpitz for the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign, and above all the kaiser for “having provoked or brought about an aggressive and unjust war.”
Such talk of war crimes trials clearly reached and unsettled the German imperial court. At the end of August 1918, the kaiser inquired of Admiral von Müller, the head of his naval cabinet, whether his [the kaiser’s] February 1915 unrestricted submarine warfare orders had permitted the sinking of the
Lusitania
without warning. Von Muller was in turn told by his advisers that they had. However, he persisted on the kaiser’s behalf, writing “His Majesty still expresses his doubts whether the wording of the orders of February 4 1915, legally allowed the
unwarned
[
sic
] sinking of the
Lusitania
” but to no avail. The kaiser seems to have been trying to shift the blame for the sinking on to the now dead Walther Schwieger for exceeding his instructions.
The kaiser’s anxiety about war crimes at this time may also have led to the destruction of some of the documents one would have expected to find about the authorization of gas warfare. While this cannot be proved, what is undoubtedly true is that on some occasion, quite probably around this time, the surviving copy of Walther Schwieger’s
U-20
war diary for the cruise on which the
Lusitania
was sunk was crudely doctored. Some of the alterations were designed to show that Schwieger had not known which ship he was attacking until he had seen the
Lusitania
’s name on her bow as she sank. These amendments undermined the German authorities’ long-argued contention that the
Lusitania
was legitimately sunk as an armed ammunition and troop-carrying vessel. If Schwieger had not known which ship he was attacking, he could not have known her armament, cargo, or passenger list, thereby invalidating any justification for the torpedoing based on them. The tampering also introduced other inaccuracies, together with spurious and discursive comments intended to put the sinking in the best light possible from the German perspective.
*
Just after the war ended, in December 1918, in the British general election won by the sitting prime minister, Lloyd George (who had taken over from Herbert Asquith in December 1916), one of the most popular slogans was “Hang the Kaiser.” King George V regarded with equanimity the trial of his cousin: “I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war . . . with all its misery.”
Participants in the Paris Peace Conference in early 1919 hotly debated the issue of war crimes. The United States was averse to any mechanisms that might set a precedent for infringements of national sovereignty in such matters by the creation of international bodies before which Americans might be compelled to appear as a result of future conflicts. Additionally, as a historian, President Wilson worried about making a martyr of the kaiser: “Charles I [of England and Scotland] was a contemptible character and the greatest liar in history [but] he was celebrated by poetry and transformed into a martyr by his execution.” France, although in favor of war crimes trials, saw them as a side issue, its greatest concerns being to retrieve its lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine and so to weaken Germany as to prevent any future aggression on its part for generations. None of the three powers wished to set precedents that might limit their troops’ freedom of action in future wars.
Nevertheless, when the peace treaty with Germany was signed on June 28, 1919, it provided for suspected war criminals to be tried by military courts and for the kaiser to be brought before a tribunal of Allied judges if the Dutch permitted him to be extradited from his place of exile at Amerongen. Even at the time of the treaty’s signature the Allies knew the latter would be unlikely. Subsequently with Germany increasingly stricken by social unrest—partly caused by the blockade that had been maintained in force albeit with growing slackness until the signature of the treaty to prevent any German renunciation of the armistice—the Allies began to fear that if the envisaged trials of the over one thousand alleged war criminals went ahead they might lead to further violence and thereafter to a full-scale revolution and the triumph of the Bolshevism they both feared and detested. This concern, combined with confirmation of the Dutch refusal to hand over the kaiser, whose trial would have caused the greatest upset of all, led the Allies eventually to settle for the German Supreme Court at Leipzig trying a small number of individuals, mostly for the severe ill-treatment of prisoners of war. In those cases—by no means all—when the Leipzig court convicted the defendants, the sentences were light. Although this outraged Allied public opinion, Allied governments were too preoccupied with other issues, either internal or external, to take further action.
One case, however, formed some precedent for future war crimes trials. Two U-boat officers were found guilty by the Leipzig court—even if they were given sentences of only four years and escaped after a few weeks, quite possibly with the connivance of the authorities, and were never recaptured—of murdering survivors from a British hospital ship, the
Llandovery Castle
. Their U-boat had sunk the vessel in June 1918 without warning and the submariners had killed some of those who had managed to get into the lifeboats. In total 283 out of the 303 people aboard died. The Leipzig judgment stated that the U-boatmen should not have followed the orders of their commander to kill the survivors which they knew to be illegal. Most important, it specified that international law in such matters overrode national law: “The firing on the boats was an offence against the Law of Nations. In war . . . at sea the killing of shipwrecked people, who have taken refuge in lifeboats, is forbidden. The killing of enemies in war is in accordance with the will of the state that makes war . . . only in so far as such killing is in accordance with the conditions and limitations imposed by the Law of Nations.”
The Allies did not sign a formal peace treaty with Turkey until August 1920 at Sevres in France. It was neither ratified nor implemented because of revolution in Turkey and conflict between Greeks and Turks. The possibility of war crimes trials, both for the Turkish ill-treatment of Allied prisoners of war and the massacres of Armenians, which had at one time seemed highly likely, lapsed.
**
Hitler would later ask, “Who remembers the Armenians today?” Coroner John Horgan, who had presided over the first
Lusitania
inquest at Kinsale, wrote after the Second World War about the failure to punish the crime of the
Lusitania
sinking: “Modern history might have taken a far different course had not legal scruples and political pusillanimity eventually combined to prevent the appropriate punishment being put into effect.” Some historians and lawyers would later argue that the failure to prosecute German and Turkish First World War crimes and thus to establish both the nature of their crimes and their guilt for them were factors in future conflicts. It allowed Hitler and other German nationalist leaders to deny any “war guilt” for the First World War and proclaim that the army had been “stabbed in the back” by social revolutionaries at home while still fighting proudly on foreign soil; and to believe genocide would go unpunished as had the Armenian massacres. The victims of their crimes would simply disappear nameless and unavenged into “
Nacht und Nebel
” (Night and Fog), as Hitler would put it.
***
An International Criminal Court was eventually established in 2002, with its base at The Hague, to try war crimes. However, several major nations are not party to the treaty founding the court, which therefore, has no jurisdiction over them or their citizens. The United States is among them, maintaining the view expressed by President Wilson at Versailles that the court would infringe U.S. sovereignty. Other states which are not a party to the treaty or have not ratified it include China, Israel, India, and Russia.
Although international law emerged from the First World War battered, bruised, and in some cases disregarded and broken, in its aftermath governments recognized international agreements as still their only hope to regulate warfare. Therefore, in the sidelines of the peace conferences, and subsequently in greater earnest, governments once more met to negotiate conventions designed to limit what weapons should be used in future conflicts and against whom, even if they could agree no mandatory mechanism for enforcement.
Poison gas was a particular concern. Although it had not proved the decisive war-winning weapon as Haber among others had hoped, by the end of the war it had become a prominent component of the arsenals of all the belligerents. Some 124,000 tons of poison gas had been used, half of it by Germany. At one time or another in the conflict sixty-three different kinds of poison gas had been deployed albeit not all successfully. By November 1918, the United States, for example, was working on sixty-five gas projects including one gas that would leave soil barren for seven years and a few drops of which would cause a tree “to wither in an hour.” Fort Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland—the center of the U.S. effort that employed forty-eight thousand people in total—had been completed in less than a year after construction began in November 1917, had cost around forty million dollars, had 218 manufacturing facilities, twenty-eight miles of railway, fifteen miles of road, and was capable of producing two hundred thousand chemical bombs and shells per day. Gas was a government scientific project unrivaled in size or cost until the Manhattan A-bomb project a quarter of a century later. The British in 1916 had established their own chemical research laboratories on three thousand acres at Porton Down.