Authors: Rebecca West
But the Germans were shocked by another feature of the Nuremberg procedure. Fritzsche stated it in a ridiculous form; but the grievance was there. He was indignant because he was lodged in a prison cell during his trial instead of being allowed to live in a hostel and come to court daily; and it is plain that all the defendants thought it scandalous that they were detained in jail before they were convicted. It was, of course, sheer impudence of the Nazis to quarrel with the justice that overtook them on any ground, since they had done their best to murder justice; and it is probable that had the Nazis not been jailed some fanatics would have tried to rescue them. But there is some substance to this complaint. It is one of the injustices inherent that it is impossible to handle persons awaiting trial without inflicting on them hardships which are a reproach to the community if these persons are proved innocent. In Great Britain and America we deal with this problem by allowing accused persons out on bail; but if any man cannot find bail or seems likely to run away or threatens to commit new crimes, he has to endure imprisonment under conditions nearly as disagreeable as those which punish the convicted.
The German conscience has always, except during the Nazi regime, been much more tender on this point; and they avoided detention wherever possible and treated detained persons with greater consideration. There can be no doubt that many anti-Nazis were shocked because the defendants in Nuremberg were kept in jail, on jail diet and in jail clothes, and under the supervision of warders during their trial. Some might even have expected that at least the admirals and generals and diplomats would be allowed to live in some dignified form of house arrest; for most Germans, even when they are anti-Nazi, revere rank. Here, again, proceedings which the British and Americans took as normal and inevitable must have been regarded by German spectators as an abuse of the power given by conquest.
But there is a more disquieting suggestion in Fritzsche’s pages. It seems that not only the defendants but their counsel were slow in understanding the English and American theory of the function of the prosecutor. They did not understand how a lawyer could be a public prosecutor and yet not act under the instructions of the court. Fritzsche wrote:
Our German lawyers, too, were often under the impression that an attack on the prosecutor implied an attack on the bench; they failed to realize that such an attack was considered perfectly legitimate, since it was aimed only at their opponent in this species of legal duel.
Certain incidents in the early stages of the trial suggest that this was true; and it means that the German counsel, who in taking part in a trial conducted on British and American lines were as much at a disadvantage as a pianist who is suddenly called upon to give a violin recital, at times did not feel free to bring forward arguments in favour of their clients which they believed to be valid, because they thought that this would exasperate the judges, in whom they assumed a determination to convict. Thus, through no fault of the authorities, there were certain moments when the defendants did not receive a fair trial according to the standards we had hoped to impress on the Germans.
But truly the courtroom at Nuremberg was a tank filled to the brim with misapprehension. Fritzsche tells an illuminating anecdote regarding the appearance in the witness box of an SS leader named Bach, who gave evidence for the prosecution:
As the witness was conducted down the hall and out by the central door he had to pass the corner of the dock where Göring sat. As he went by the Field Marshal rose and said
“Schweinehund.”
He spoke quietly, without the least sign of emotion, but loud enough for the whole court to hear. The blood rushed to Bach’s face and he stopped short in his tracks; but he did not turn his head and left the court in silence. The insult was not translated over the microphone, but everyone who was not familiar with the expression inquired what it meant, even the judges leaning back to question the two interpreters who always sat behind them.
Alas, it is unfortunately true that there are a number of beautiful and subtle German words which we cannot adequately translate—who amongst our most gifted linguists could find a perfect English equivalent for
Wesen
or
Gemüth
or
Sittlichkeit?
But all of us know the meaning of
Schweinehund,
and what worried the judges at that moment was the problem of conducting the trial if these crazy barbarians in the dock started barracking the witnesses. Fritzsche’s anecdote is alarming because it shows not only that the defendants were so far off the mark as to think that the judges were awed by Göring’s panache, but that none of their lawyers understood the situation either, for if they had, they would certainly have explained it to their clients with a view to indicating what sort of conduct they had better avoid. Again, it must be asked whether the defendants would properly be defended by counsel who did not understand the court before which they were pleading. It is written that when the Lord saw men building the Tower of Babel, He said, “Now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” But the confusion which circumscribes us goes deeper than language. All of us had our earphones, there was not a person in court who did not understand the literal meaning of every word that was said. Yet there was this welter of misunderstanding, this frustration, this incapacity to demonstrate the Rule of Law anything like as clearly as had been hoped.
But of course it would be absurd to take Fritzsche’s book as the last word on the Nuremberg trial. He could hardly be expected to acknowledge that the world was under a necessity to find some way of punishing the Nazi leaders; that a gaping hole would have appeared in our moral system had it been possible for villains to commit a vast number of vile crimes in their own and other countries, and to escape punishment because they had created ruin so general that it had consumed all courts of law. Civilization could no longer have been regarded as a viable idea if Dr. Frank, the governor of Poland, could not be punished for breaking Polish laws simply because he had murdered Poland and the corpse was incapable of prosecuting him. And it would have been too much to ask of Fritzsche that he should appreciate the service rendered to history by the Nuremberg trial.
This was immense. Many thousands of documents from enemy archives were submitted by the prosecution, and as they could be challenged by the defence their authenticity was guaranteed; and the witnesses annotated them and had to prove their annotations under cross-examination. Though they are not now easily accessible to the general reader, they are there for the student; and the lawyers had to act with a haste that was all to the good. The historians would have taken them to their studies, shut the doors, and dealt with them at the slow pace of scholarship, and scholarly prejudices and obsessions would have struck deep roots and grown a quickset hedge about the facts before the work was done. The glands of some don might have a second springtime, or even a first, while he weaved an erotic fantasy about Göring; and a don of the other sort, that shines on television, looking for a unique stance, might find it in a thesis that Goebbels was a man of elevated character who might have saved Europe had it not been for the machinations of the British Foreign Office. Indeed, as the Allies drew apart and each went back to its party strife, the Nuremberg documents might have suffered the fate which was later to overtake less important but still interesting material. It does no good to history when a ministry takes out of its files a batch of documents and, instead of issuing the texts as a government paper, gives it to a writer to use for his own personal profit as material for a book to be sold through the ordinary commercial channels. This might easily amount to bribing a writer to twist the evidence for a policy favoured by a government, or by a minister, or by a caucus of civil servants within a ministry. Hence, if the Nazi archives had not been aired at Nuremberg, enthusiasm for the European Defence Community might have produced some pleasing pastel portraits of the Service defendants that would be taken as accurate, and a contrary view might have taken us out of the field of Daumier to the terrible microcosm of Hieronymus Bosch when the policy veered towards appeasement of the Soviet Union. Though the printed record of the truth is hidden from the general reader, its existence preserves him from much mischievous special pleading.
But for the rest the Nuremberg trial must be admitted as a betrayal of the hopes that it engendered. Its makers devised it as well as the times allowed. Conducted by officials sick with the weariness left by a great war, attended by only a handful of spectators, inadequately reported, constantly misinterpreted, it was an unshapely event, a defective composition, stamping no clear image on the mind of the people it had been designed to impress. It was one of the events which do not become an experience.
To lay down
The Sword in the Scales
and look round at the economists on the hotel veranda taking some time off between their congress meetings, was not to lose sight of the international situation. Englishmen were among them, and Frenchmen and Belgians and Dutchmen and Scandinavians and Italians; and though none of them was doing badly, or they would not have been there, they all looked poor beside the Americans. It seemed natural that this should be the pattern, and it was startling when it changed. But there was one nationality not at first represented. The congress was to last a week, and the latter half was to be devoted to an inquiry into the economic condition of Germany; and on the third day German officials and journalists arrived, who bustled in with the air, modest yet consequential, of not being the performers but of being essential to the performance, like the men who run into the ring at horse shows and put up the walls and hurdles for the jumping competition. The next day came the performers, conscious of being a people of state, and on the last morning the star, the Minister of Economic Affairs himself, descended on the congress, bright as courting Jove. But by that time the miracle had already been effected. By the side of the Germans the Americans were looking poor.
Suit for suit, tie for tie, shirt for shirt, briefcase for briefcase, the Americans and the Germans were running level. Both had the best of everything; but the Germans had better than that. Their grooming spoke of a wealth of shaving sticks and brilliantine and toilet water in a country where, four years before, there had not been enough soap. Their confidence spoke of productiveness that had risen to one and a half times what it had been before the war, with a standard of living only slightly below the British level. But the extravagant glory that shone from them came not from their prosperity but from a conclusion which they were drawing from that prosperity: a conclusion that gave them a happiness which all other people of our age lacked. It took some spectators back to the early twenties. In those days it was believed that the golden age had dawned and would not end. An American newspaper owner, who had also vast industrial interests, was showing some European guests round his newspaper building, and had some difficulty with a Negro elevator man, who proved to be new, from the South, and illiterate. One of the guests, an educationist, said, “Ah, yes, you Americans have your problems like the rest of us.” The newspaper owner looked brutal in his contempt as he said, “No, we have not. You have all the problems there are over in Europe. But here in America we have nothing to do but just go ahead and get rich. We shall be a country with no history.” Since the crash of 1929 no American capable of attaining any sort of distinction would have used those words; but it could be believed that they might come very naturally to the lips of these Germans. It was because they felt rich as Americans did before 1929 that they seemed richer than the Americans of 1953.
It would not have surprised those strong and ruddy men that we were afraid of them. But they would have mistaken the nature of our dread. They would have imagined that we feared them as industrial rivals who would drive us out of the world market, or as conquerors in another war. It would be hard for them to believe that, not in panic, but in weariness, we feared lest, for a third time, their gross addiction to defeat should reassert itself and seek to drag us into a common tomb. It was not that a revival of nazism seemed probable. The illustrated paper
Der Spiegel
operates on a very shrewd estimate of the greatest common mental measure of the German population, and it reviewed
The Sword in the Scales
in the spirit of a family that has heard that Cousin Sam, who had coshed Grandmamma and emptied Father’s till, was to be let out of Broadmoor. But all the same the German people are subject to bad dreams, and though that nightmare might not return they might be visited by another; and it was these dreams which alarmed us, and not their daylight selves.
In that greenhouse which now proved to have been the only solid building in Nuremberg, the one-legged man who grew enormous cyclamens with the help of a child of twelve was certainly frightening, but not because he grew enormous cyclamens. He terrified because his absorption in industry left a vacuum in his mind which sooner or later would be filled. If no religion or philosophy or art came to bind this man’s imagination to reality, then the empty space would be flooded with fantasy which would set him at odds with life. Above the greenhouse the Schloss had soared like a huge doll’s house, designed to house all the characters out of Grimm’s Tales; and some of those tales are very brutal. When men do not put away childish things in time, they turn on their tracks and seek the sources of death, such as the Nazis unsealed for them. But the Germans had a right to propound that we had no right to fear them; for they had lifted from us part of our moral guilt for the plight of the displaced persons and the refugees and expellees. In their reckless and speculative prosperity they had provided for these homeless people as we could not have done.