Authors: Rebecca West
But the refusal to condemn all the seven organizations was greatly resented by some of the spectators. It was felt to be a sign that the tribunal was soft and not genuinely anti-Nazi. This was partly due to temperamental and juristic differences among the nations. The four judges took turns at reading the judgment, and this section was read by the English member judge, Lord Oaksey. His father before him was a judge, who was Lord Chief Justice in the twenties; and he had the advantage which the offspring of an old theatrical family have over other actors. He had inherited the technique and he refined on it, and could get his effects economically. He read this passage of the judgment in a silver voice untarnished by passion, with exquisite point; but to a spectator who was not English it might have seemed that this was just one of the committee of an English club explaining to his colleagues that it was necessary to expel a member. The resemblance need not have been disquieting. People who misbehave in such clubs really do get expelled by their committees, and they remain expelled; whereas the larger gestures and rhetoric of history have often been less effective. But this was not understood by those whose national habit it is to cross-breed their judges with prosecutors or to think that the law should have its last say with a moralist twang. There was, in other quarters, a like unease about the verdicts on the Service defendants, on Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl and Admirals Doenitz and Raeder. Keitel and Jodl were found guilty on all four counts of the indictment: first, of conspiracy to commit the crimes alleged in the other counts, which were crimes against peace, crimes in war, and crimes against humanity. Raeder was found guilty on the three counts, and Doenitz was found guilty on the second. There was some feeling among those who attended only the end of the trial, and a very great deal of strong feeling among people all over the world who did not attend the court, that these defendants had been put into the dock for carrying out orders as soldiers and sailors must. But there is a great deal in the court’s argument that the only orders a soldier or a sailor is bound to obey are those which are recognized practice in the Services of the time. It is obvious that if an admiral were ordered by a demented First Sea Lord to serve broiled babies in the officers’ mess he ought to disobey; and it was shown that these generals and admirals had exhibited very little reluctance to carry out orders of Hitler which tended towards baby-broiling. Here was another point at which there was a split between the people who had attended the trial, or long stints of it, and the people who had not. Much evidence came up during the hearings which proved these men very different from what the products of Sandhurst and Dartmouth, West Point and Annapolis, are hoped to be. Doenitz, for example, exhorted his officers to be inspired by the example of some of their comrades who, confined in a camp in Australia, found that there were a few Communists among the other captured troops, managed to distract the attention of the guards, and murdered these wretched men.
But it was in the case of the admirals that the court made a decision which proved Nuremberg to be a step farther on the road to civilization. They were charged with violating the Naval Protocol of 1936, which reaffirmed the rules of submarine warfare laid down in the London Naval Agreement of 1930. They had, and there was no doubt about it, ordered their submarines to attack all merchant ships without warning and not stop to save the survivors. But the tribunal acquitted them on this charge on the grounds that the British and the Americans had committed precisely the same offence. On May 8, 1940, the British Admiralty ordered all vessels in the Skagerrak to be sunk on sight. Also Admiral Nimitz stated in answer to interrogatories that unrestricted submarine warfare had been carried on by the American Navy in the Pacific Ocean from the first day that the campaign opened. The fact was that we and the Germans alike had found the protocol unworkable. Submarines cannot be used at all if they are to be obliged to hang about after they have made a killing and throw away their own security. The Allies admitted this by acquitting the admirals, and the acquittal was not only fair dealing between victors and vanquished, it was a step towards honesty. It was written down for ever that submarine warfare cannot be carried on without inhumanity, and that we have found ourselves able to be inhumane. We have to admit that we are in this trap before we can get out of it. This
nostra culpa
of the conquerors might well be considered the most important thing that happened at Nuremberg. But it evoked no response at the time, and it has been forgotten.
But in this court nothing could be clear-cut, and nothing could have a massive effect, because it was international, and international law, as soon as it escapes from the sphere of merchandise (in which, were men good, it would alone need to be busy), is a mist with the power to make solids as misty as itself. It was true that the Nazi crimes of cruelty demanded punishment. There in Nuremberg the Germans, pale among the rubble, were waiting for that punishment as a purification, after which they might regain their strength and rebuild their world; and it was obvious that the tribunal must sit to disprove Job’s lament that the houses of the wicked are safe from fear. A tyrant had suspended the rule of law in his country and no citizen could seek legal protection from personal assault, theft, or imprisonment; and he had created so absolute a state of anarchy that when he fell from power the courts themselves had disappeared and could not be reconstituted to do justice on him and his instruments. Finally he had invaded other territories and reproduced this ruin there. Plainly some sort of emergency tribunal had to take over the work of the vanished tribunals when it was possible, if the Nazis were not to enjoy a monstrous immunity simply because they had included among their crimes the destruction of the criminal courts. It was only just that the Nazis should pay the due penalty for the offences they had committed against the laws of their own land, the millions of murders, kidnappings and wrongful imprisonments, and thefts. “Of course,” people said then and still say, “it was right that the Nazis should have been punished for what they did to the Jews. To the left wing. To the religious dissidents. To the Poles. To the Czechs. To the French deportees. To half Europe. But aggressive war, that was a new crime, invented for the occasion, which had never been written on the statute books before.” They spoke the very reverse of the truth. The condemnation of aggressive war as a crime was inherent in the Kellogg-Briand Pact; whereas no international body has ever given its sanction to a mechanism by which crimes committed in one nation which had gone unpunished because of a collapse of civil order could subsequently be punished by other nations. It is to be doubted whether the most speculative mind had ever drawn up the specification for such a mechanism.
Here one sees the dangers of international law. It would seem entirely reasonable to give nations which had remained at the common level of civilization the right to exercise judicial powers in nations which have temporarily fallen below that level and are unable to guarantee their citizens justice. But we can all remember how Hitler prefaced his invasions by pretences that civil order had been destroyed wherever there was a German minority, how it was roared at the world over the radio that Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland and Yugoslavia were being beaten in the streets and driven out of their houses and farms and were denied all police protection. Such an article of international law would give both knight-errantry and tyranny their marching orders. This, at Nuremberg, was not a remote consideration, though Germany seemed to lie dead around us. Each of the judges read some part of the judgment; and when the Russian had his turn there was a temptation not to give the earphones the right switch to the English version, for the Russian language rolled forth from the firm fleshy lips of this strong man like a river of life, a river of genius, inexhaustible and unpredictable genius. To listen to Slav oratory is to feel that Aksakov and Dostoevski and Bishop Peter Nyegosh had half their great work done for them by the language they used. But soon the desire to know what he was talking about proved irresistible. It turned out that the Russian was reading the part of the judgment that condemned the Germans for their deportations: for taking men and women away from their homes and sending them to distant camps where they worked as slave labour in conditions of great discomfort, and were often unable to communicate with their families. There was here a certain irony, and a certain warning.
The trouble about Nuremberg was that it was so manifestly a part of life as it is lived; the trial had not sufficiently detached itself from the oddity of the world. It was of a piece with the odd things that happened on its periphery; and these were odd enough. Some visitors to the trial were strolling through a village outside Nuremberg after the Monday session had ended, to freshen their brains with the evening air, when a frizzled and grizzled head was popped over a garden fence. There are women whom age makes look not like old women but immature apes, and this was one of them. She was not unlikeable, she was simply like an ape. She demanded, in English, to know whether we were English. Two of us were. “I shot your King Edward,” she assured us, her bright eyes winking among her wrinkles, her teeth clacking at a different rate from her speech. In view of the occasion that had brought us to Nuremberg this seemed a not unlikely fantasy to vex a failing mind grounded in its environs, and there was the coo of “Yes, yes, yes,” of which lunatics must grow weary. But she stepped through her garden gate into the road, and one of the party, a devoted student of the text and illustrations in such books as the autobiographical works of the sixth Duke of Portland, recognized a familiar accent in the drain-pipe tweed coat, the thin ankles and high-arched feet turned outwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. “You mean you went shooting with King Edward?” she suggested. “Yes, yes, in your Norfolk!” Chattering like the monkeys in Gibraltar at sundown, she cried out the names of great English houses, of great English families, but briefly, for she had a more passionate preoccupation. “Well, have you sentenced all the scoundrels? What have they done to them?” She stamped her little foot on the ground. “What have they done to Sauckel? To Sauckel? That, that is what I wish to know.”
It was explained to her that that day the judges had delivered judgment only on the Nazi organizations and the validity and significance of the indictment, and that the verdicts and sentences on the Nazi leaders would not be pronounced till tomorrow. She was disappointed. “I wanted to hear from you that Sauckel is to be hanged. I hope that I might have that good news. I shall not sleep happy till I have heard that that scoundrel pays for his crimes. Never,” she cried, standing on tiptoe as if she were about to spring into the branches above us, “never will we undo the harm he did by bringing these wretched foreign labourers into our Germany. I had a nice house,
a home,
yes,
a home,
inherited from my family, in the village that is ten miles along the road, and what did this Sauckel do but send two thousand foreign workers to the factories in the district, two thousand wretches, cannibals, scum of the earth, Russians, Balks, Baits, Slavs—Slavs, I tell you. What did they do when our armies were defeated but break loose? For three days they kept carnival; they looted and they ate and drank of our goods. I had to hide with my neighbours in their cellar, and they slept in my bed and they ate in my kitchen and there was not a potato left, and they took all my good china and my linen and all they could carry, the brutes, the beasts!”
Somebody murmured that the foreign workers would have preferred to stay at home, and she glittered agreement. “Yes, yes, of course they should have been left at home, the place for a pig is in the sty. Oh, hanging will be too good for Sauckel, I could kill him with my own hands. You are doing very well at that trial. You English do all things well; we Germans should never have had a war with you. I am glad that you are giving”—she laughed—
“what for
to the Nazis. They were
canaille,
all of them. Not one had one known before, in the old days. But there is one quarrel I have with you. I am not against the Jews—of course it was terrible what Hitler did to the Jews, and none of us had any idea of what was going on in the camps—but to have a Jew as your chief prosecutor—really, really now, was that quite
gentleman?”
She looked from face to face in coquettish challenge. Nobody said anything, she was so very old. After a pause she pressed, “Was it now?” and shook her forefinger at us, showing a palm embarrassing to the sight, because it was tiny and plum-coloured and pulpy like the inside of a monkey’s paw. Someone said sadly, “But Sir David Maxwell Fyfe is not a Jew.”
She gave a trill of kind but derisive laughter. “Oh, but I have seen him.”
“All the same, he is not a Jew. Some dark types of Scotsmen are very difficult to tell from Jews.”
“But how, how, can you be so simple?” she gasped into her handkerchief. “Think, you dear people, of the name. The name. David. Who would call his son David but a Jew?”
“Many Englishmen, many Scotsmen, and a great many more Welshmen,” she was told. She could not contain her laughter; it blew away from her in a trail of shrillness. “Oh, you English are so simple; it is because you are aristocrats. A man who called his son David might tell you that he was English or Scotch or Welsh, because he would know that you would believe him. But we Germans understand a little better about such things, and he would not dare to pretend to us that he was not a Jew.”
From this village an agreeable path ran beside a stream for a mile or two, by woods and meadows, to one of the villas where guests were billeted. It was strange to follow that path alone, a conqueror walking unarmed among the conquered, during his climax of conquest. But unless some lunatic boy had run amok there was no danger. The peasants in the fields were as indifferent as the fields themselves; after a single sidelong glance they bent their heads again to look at the work they were doing to feed their kind. This was the spectacle which Germany presented at this time: the people had lost the wherewithal by which human beings live, the food, the clothing, the fuel, and they were making it again for themselves by a process which seemed as instinctive as a cow’s growth of a thick coat for the wintertime. But though the peasants were working on into the evening hours, the town dwellers kept an easier urban schedule. The stream took a hairpin bend, and the path mounted a little bluff above the curve, and there, below it on a sandy patch by the water’s edge, a town dweller was going through his exercises. The stream was at its deepest here, and he had been swimming. His trunks and his towel were neatly stretched out on the grass, and he was standing in his khaki shorts, slowly flailing his arms above his head and down to the ground. It was patent that he came from the town, for his body was city-white and he had been worse fed than the peasants were. Indeed, rarely can there have been a body so thin that was in such a state of muscular cultivation. He had little flesh on his bones, but even so it could be noted that it was not through starvation but through exercise that he had no belly; and when one of his arms windmilled up above his head, transmitting by the miracle of nervous force a command to his stomach muscle, which responded proudly, the concavity was still more concave. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not know when he was watched. Between him and his body there was a real love. It was not vanity. He had a long and bony face, with high cheekbones and a tortured three-cornered mouth, thoughtful but not intelligent, even silly; and a silly German face can be much more alarming than a silly English face. But there was no threat of perversity about his tranced and anxious stare. Simply he had come a long way to bathe in a stream which here was clean, as it would not be when it reached the fouled city where he had to live, and now he was affirming that though he had lost everything else, he still had his body, he still had that surely quite remarkable stomach muscle, he still was his unique self.