Authors: Rebecca West
But for some on whom the burden of the trial had lain most heavily that happiness did not last intact after the sun went down. One lawyer said, in answer to nothing, after turning on the lights long before the dusk had fallen, “Damn it all, I have looked at those men for ten months. I know them as I know the furniture in my room. Oh, damn it all.” Some of these who felt the tragedy of the trial most deeply had to remain there to fulfil certain legal formalities, which could not be performed till some days had passed; and it was discovered that, though it was hard to fly westward from Nuremberg, it was very easy to fly eastward, since nobody wanted to go in that direction. Some Americans and English and French filled in this time of waiting by going to Prague on a plane that had to run a diplomatic errand. The city astonished by its beauty: by its trumpeting baroque, by the little streets on its waterways, by clean farmlands that dropped in terraces to the heart of the capital. It astonished also by its catastrophic situation, which was going unrecorded in the press of the world.
The Sudeten Germans had been driven out of Czechoslovakia into Germany. On paper this looked good; they had allowed themselves to be made the pawns of Henlein, of Hitler. But the effect was not what might have been foreseen. There were many shops in the city filled with specimens of the glassware for which the country has been famous through the centuries; and an American lawyer went from one to another, trying to order a set of table glass. Each shopkeeper in turn admitted that it would take at least two years to fulfil the order, if it were possible to fulfil it at all. It seemed that this, like several other major industries, had been to a large extent manned by Sudeten Germans, and that the expulsions had thrown the machine out of gear. On the farms left empty by the expellees the unharvested crops were rotting; but it appeared that not much effort had been made to harvest them, since UNRRA was flooding the country with American grain. It was also flooding the country with gasoline, of which there was such an abundance that the Czechs were holding a touring automobile race. At that time, and for another four years or so, gasoline was still rationed in Great Britain and in France, and the meagreness of the supplies allowed officials in the British and French Zones of Western Germany was a serious handicap to the efficiency of the Control Commission. The American Ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, spent his days and nights begging the State Department to stop the flow of raw and manufactured materials which UNRRA was pouring into the country without real regard for its needs. When the Germans were first driven out of Czechoslovakia the struggle of the armies left the people in a state of privation only to be medicined by large-scale relief work, and there was still some scope for soup-kitchen charity. But what the Czechs really needed by this time was aid in the reorganization of their existing economy, and the return of some Sudeten Germans and the training of substitutes.
The Treaty of Munich had inflicted on the country the pain and wrong of annexation and occupation, but it also had the unpredictable result that no Continental industrial power except Switzerland came out of the war with its industry less damaged. The plants were for the most part still standing, and greatly improved by the up-to-the-minute modernization that the Germans had given them for military purposes. That took us back to Nuremberg. In 1945 Hitler had ordered the destruction of Czechoslovakian industry: but he had given the order to Speer, whom we had just seen sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for complicity in slave labor. He had quietly held his hand and done nothing.
The last thing this highly developed country required was the horde of amateur administrators imported by UNRRA. If Czechoslovakia could revive its foreign trade it would enjoy prosperity again, and there was no material obstacle to prevent this. The hotels were full of American businessmen who had come in the hope of reanimating agreements that had operated before the war, greatly to the benefit of the Czechs. But they were all in despair. Their claims were not denied, nor were they recognized. They were pigeonholed. These powerful economic friends of Czechoslovakia were allowed neither to enter into possession of their property, nor to take any other step that might lead to the resumption of the manufacture in which they were interested. The cunctative process at work was explained by the lists which most of them carried in their wallets: lists prepared for them by their Prague agents, which consisted of the names of civil servants and politicians whom they would have to approach in the prosecution of their claims, and what manner of men they were. This one was honest and would consider cases on their merits and strive to act appropriately. But this one could be bribed; he had a daughter in the United States for whom he wanted dollars, and perhaps he might be considering emigration. That one too could be bribed; in a concentration camp during the war, he now had poor health and had begun to drink, and cared only for the moment. This one could be bribed too, but it was believed that he was under Communist discipline and was ordered to accept bribes so that the party would ultimately be able to publish the facts of the transaction, to the discredit of transatlantic capitalist hyenas. The next one could not be bribed, and the papers would lie on his desk and never travel a foot farther. He was a Communist, and he was both preparing the ground for the expropriation which would follow the Russian engulfment of the country and making it clear to his colleagues what pattern of behaviour would earn the approval of the Russians. And the papers would lie long on this other man’s desk though he was not a Communist. He was merely one of the colleagues who was willing to learn that lesson.
Morning broke over Czechoslovakia, and there was day, and then there was night; but the clock had stopped. The people of Prague knew it and, though free and walking where they chose in their own city, were of like mind with their enemies, the prisoners of Nuremberg, concerning time. They wished it for ever suspended, knowing that when the hands of the clock moved again their doom would fall on them. They even found it in their hearts to dislike the American businessmen who were stirring themselves to serve the supreme Czech interest of trade, because they were trying to start the clock again. Only in one place was it claimed that the hours were passing at their customary speed and that the future was not precisely known. In the Hradcani Palace there were four hundred and forty rooms; and among them was a splendid baroque chamber designed for the conduct of great business, which the autumn sunlight coloured as hock gilds the glass that holds it. There President Beneš sat and declared that all was going well with his country. His reason for this optimism? To him it was clear. This had been his room before the war. Then for a long time it was not his room. And now it was his room again. The little lame old man hobbled to the window and stood at it, with his back to Prague, and explained that it was at this very window that Hitler had stood and wept for joy because Prague was his. Well, where was Hitler? And where was he, Beneš? It is a sad sight, an old gambler boasting of his luck, for age is a proof that no luck lasts for ever.
But he was alone, alone as Lear; only it was the rest of the cast that wandered on a blasted heath, while he was within doors. All Prague was in fear of the Russians, as all Berlin was in fear of the Russians. The blankness of a new page of history was being inscribed with a black text; and even those who had come to Prague in order to escape from the Nuremberg trial rarely thought of it. Though sometimes it came back.
There was at that time in Prague a British Film Festival which the liberals and Social Democrats were attending as a demonstration of their faith. This was a sign of their extreme desolation.
They did not love Great Britain, for it had betrayed them at Munich. But at least Britain was not the USSR. So they stared loyally at the screen, even though what they saw was Mr. Noel Coward’s
Brief Encounter,
a masterpiece which made little appeal to their sympathies. Sexual renunciation on secular grounds is not a theme which Central Europe understands; and the Czechs are forthright and matter-of-fact even for that territory. They looked at the doctor and the suburban housewife and supposed that they would sleep together if their desire to do so was sufficiently strong, and that they would not sleep together if their desire to do so was sufficiently weak. This reduced the element of conflict in the story to negligible proportions. They also asked themselves with some emotion whether it could really be true that in England there were no other places than railway buffets where lovers could meet. The drab and inhibited little drama seemed to unfold very slowly before this audience, which so plainly felt that if such cases of abstinence occurred in a distant country there was no need why it should have to know about them; and there was drowsiness in the air when an American voice spoke loudly out of the darkness. A minor character had crossed the screen and at the sight this voice was saying in horror, “By God, that man looks just like Göring.” It was one of the American lawyers from Nuremberg, who had fallen asleep and had awakened to see the screen as a palimpsest with the great tragedy imposed on the small. The trial had begun its retreat into the past. Soon none of us, we thought, would ever think of it, save when we dreamed of it or read about it in books.
Yet we were soon to think often and gravely of Nuremberg and its prisoners. We had already had some warning in an uneasy incident. It had happened after the trial was over, when all the prisoners had been sentenced and the courtroom vacated. The correspondents were sitting in the press room, typing the last takes of their stories when there suddenly appeared before them the three men who had been acquitted: Fritzsche and von Papen and Schacht. They smiled at the astonished journalists with a soliciting amiability. The Russian judges had dissented from all three acquittals; and therefore all the Communist journalists were savagely incensed against these men and set up a howl at the sight of them. Some of the other journalists were of the same mind; and even those who accepted the acquittals as a logical consequence of the terms of the Nuremberg charter felt that they preferred the men who had done no hedging and trimming in their service of evil and were now to pay the penalty. So even the correspondents who felt the least hostility to them cried out mocking questions, which they answered, still smiling; and some threw apples and chocolate bars at them, which they picked up, as if taking part in a joke. The news spread through the Palace of Justice, and the correspondents who had been filing their pieces at the cable offices rushed down to the press room to see the fun, but the three men had suddenly turned their backs and gone back to the prison. The correspondents were left with the belief that they had witnessed an amazing feat of impudence. But actually the three men had been in terror of their lives.
Quite rightly, they had suspected that the German civil administration would arrest them as soon as they left prison and bring them before a denazification court on the charge of having betrayed the German people. This was not to be as severe an ordeal for them as they sometimes feared. It was a fact, and not a fiction of the Nuremberg court, that these men had succeeded in varying degrees in keeping themselves uninvolved in the major Nazi crimes; and the Allies succeeded sufficiently well in reimposing the rule of law on Germany to make their fears for their lives quite groundless. The denazification courts acquitted Schacht altogether and gave the other two sentences of imprisonment of which they served only part, von Papen being released in 1949 and Fritzsche in 1950. But their ordeal was to be severe enough. They were subjected to enormous fines, and their legal expenses ate up all their means; and the German authorities, uncertain how to apply the novel procedure, arrested them and released them and arrested them again. During their periods of freedom they had difficulty in getting a roof over their heads, and though their lives were to be safe, one of them at least was to suffer physical violence. Von Papen was set on by a fellow prisoner in a labour camp and had his head battered to a pulp, at seventy years of age. When the three men had been acquitted at Nuremberg they had foreseen their fate as worse than this, and they had come to see the journalists to test a demented hope that they had made an endearing impression of innocence in court and could rely on international opinion to protect them from their own people. They had turned their backs on the mockers and taken refuge in their cells because they saw that that hope was baseless. After three days of dread Fritzsche and Schacht left the prison under the cover of darkness and were soon arrested. It throws a light on Schacht that he was willing to try his luck with Fritzsche, who was many years younger. Von Papen had to be coaxed and bullied over weeks before he would face his freedom.
The authorities should have allowed none of these things to happen. It was worse than absurd to let the acquitted defendants stray about the Palace of Justice as they chose, when its corridors and halls were still thronged with excited people who were not merely spectators but, owing to the nature of the case, interested parties. A number of decent journalists were surprised into an act of cruelty which they would not have committed, however unappetizing they found the three, had it been known that they were frightened. And these men had reason for fear: they were exposed to unlawful outlawry, as the Allied Control Commission did not trouble itself to make an arrangement with the German authorities which would have ensured that these men were quietly arrested as soon as they were acquitted by the International Military Tribunal, kept in safe custody, and given an expeditious trial. During the first few days of October it became clear that the Allies had failed in common sense, and that the consequences of that failure might be ugly. As the month went on that apprehension joined uneasily with the visceral mournfulness excited by the knowledge of the condemned men’s fate, that sympathy evoked by all doomed flesh, any doomed flesh, whatever the value of the spirit that infused it.