by Alan Gold
Broderick had spent the weekend listening to politicians, city planners, military and financial experts explain the new landscape of Europe. Even general of the Army George C. Marshall, now the new US Secretary of State in Harry Truman’s White House, had spoken to them. At the end of his speech, everybody in the conference hall was excited about his plan to rehabilitate the economies of seventeen western and southern European nations in order to create stable economic and democratic conditions and prevent them falling to the Communists.
But it was in the interludes between the sessions that Theodore enjoyed himself most. It was light relief from the indissoluble gloom of a war crimes trial.
And it was in these after-conference sessions that he met with his counterparts from England and France and Russia. On the Sunday evening, just before he was due to catch the transport back from Berlin to Nuremberg to begin the defense of his client, Wilhelm Deutch, Theodore accepted an invitation to dine with the Chief Liaison Officer for the American Forces of Occupation, Colonel Donald Gerherty. The two men knew each other slightly from other conferences. But Gerherty’s influence had been profound in the early days of Theodore’s working and social life in Nuremberg. When the American lawyer first arrived in Germany, Donald had sent him a package of information as well as some useful contacts which had made his stay more pleasant and enabled him to circumvent almost all of the red tape which caused so many problems for civilian workers in the allied military administration. It was good to get to know such a man as Gerherty.
Over martinis before their dinner, Gerherty asked about the defense strategy he was planning for Deutch. ‘What sort of defense can I put up against the overwhelming weight of evidence against him? God knows I’ve tried to find witnesses who’ll testify on his behalf, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Even if there was someone out there who knew him, why in heaven’s name would they come forward and testify for him?
‘He still claims he was only a cog in the machine. But past trials of major war criminals have found the entire hideous machine guilty, and being a cog isn’t an excuse any more. D’you know what they’re calling the ‘I was only following orders’ excuse? The Nuremberg Defense. Funny, isn’t it?’
Gerherty sipped his martini. He had huge, pudgy hands and stood at least a foot taller than Broderick. The conical martini glass, with its delicate glass needle of a stem, seemed ridiculously dainty in his fist. ‘Do you think there’s any justification in what he says, though? I mean, so many of these bastards weren’t bastards to start with. They were just ordinary joes, then Hitler came along, swept them down into the sewers, and now in the sweet light of day, so many of them are saying, ‘My God, what did we do?’’
‘Bit late for that. Under similar circumstances, how many Americans would have put on a Nazi uniform and built concentration camps and joined a squad like the Einsatzgruppen?’ asked Broderick.
Gerherty thought for a moment and said, ‘How many American Indians are left in the old Wild West, Theo? Wasn’t that as much of a genocide as what the Nazis did to the Jews? Aren’t the reservations where we’ve got the remnants of the Red Indian nations just like concentration camps, only on a larger scale?’
The lawyer refused to acknowledged the point. ‘Sure, that was a genocide, but it wasn’t ever a government genocide. The army was uncontrolled and the individuals were at the forefront of civilisation, and sure, evil things happened. And yes, there was a genocide of the native Indian. Nobody’s denying that. But here, things are altogether different … Here you have a nation state, a supposedly civilised nation state of philosophers and scientists and theologians and writers and artists, acting in complicity with a government whose official decree was to dehumanise one of its groups of citizens. And worse, here you have a government which legitimises the right of its citizens to kill a minority just because they’re Jews. No, Donald, this genocide was nothing like the genocide of the Indians. This was altogether on a more evil scale … indeed, it was so bestial, it was off the scale of humanity.’
Donald Gerherty was grateful when the waiter arrived at the bar and showed them to their table. They ordered shrimp as an appetiser before they went on to order their main course. However, Gerherty wouldn’t let Broderick’s comment go unanswered.
‘Theo, I accept what you were saying about the particular evil of Hitler. But when the war came to an end, and we could travel around the country, I was ordered by Allied Command to go around and photograph and film the evidence of what the Nazis had done. I was one of the first to enter the German concentration camps. Believe me, I’ve seen things which would turn your stomach and give you nightmares for the rest of your days. I’ve seen evil in the concentration camps which made me puke; the piles of clothes; the bodies; the gas chambers; the ovens, the mounds of humanity … or what once was humanity. I know as much as anybody about what the bastards did. I don’t excuse it for one moment. But I’m still trying to come to grips with it. Before the war, I was a doctor. A psychiatrist …’
Broderick looked at him in surprise. Although he hadn’t known Gerherty’s profession before he enlisted, from his efficiency, contacts, and demeanour, he suspected that he was a business executive. Gerherty smiled; Broderick’s was a common reaction.
He continued, ‘That’s one of the reasons I was so keen to get over here in the last days of the confrontation. We’d heard reports back in the States about what the Nazis had done, and like you, I had to come over and see for myself what can happen to a mature and sophisticated nation when it’s in trouble, and hands over the reins of government to a demonic force. To try to understand what happened to a national psyche which lost its collective conscience and became a collective of beasts. To try to find answers to how an entire nation went nuts.’
‘Yes! You’re right. That’s precisely the reason I’m here,’ said Broderick. ‘What happened between 1933 and 1945 was so incomprehensible to me, that as an ethicist and a jurist, I felt I had to be here in the midst of things and try to come to comprehend the reasons that the German people suddenly threw off all the trammels of civilisation. How a nation which can not only produce a Beethoven and a Bach, a Schiller and a Heine and a Thomas Mann, which can worship their geniuses as demigods and promote these great men to the rest of the world, can also go on to produce monsters like Hitler and his Nazis.’
Gerherty thought for a moment and then said, ‘Ever heard of a psychiatric term called psychopathy?’
‘Are you saying that the entire German people are psychopaths?’
‘If you look at Nazism as a psychiatric, rather than as a social manifestation, then you’ll get somewhere. You’re concerning yourself with the ethics of the situation. But for ethics to come into play, you have to have sanity. A national attack of psychopathy could explain much more than we realise about what happened to the German people … that it wasn’t a conscious act of deliberately following a monster like Hitler, but an unconscious illness which suddenly gripped the country.’
Broderick looked at him in amazement. ‘You’re talking about tens of millions of people suddenly falling ill at the same moment?’
‘It’s not so out of the ordinary as you’d think. Remember the Crusades. The whole of Britain and France and German went nuts, just on the say-so of a couple of bishops and the pope. And tens of thousands of formerly normal people tramped across Europe slaughtering whatever got in their way.
‘It’s what could have happened in Germany. Psychopathy is an unusual ailment. In individuals, it manifests itself in relatively unconflicted deceptiveness or duplicity and the characteristic absence of empathy, compassion, or remorse toward the victims of the psychopath’s exploitative self-interest. I don’t want to use too much psychiatric mumbo jumbo and jargon, but it really does explain a lot about what happened to the German people when they came under the spell a demagogue like Hitler.
‘A psychopath can lie, cheat, steal, extort, exploit, or hurt another human being without normal compunction. But does that apply
to an entire nation? I think in this case, it does. You see, one of the first things which Hitler did was to make the Jews, the homosexuals, the Communists, the Slavs, the infirm, and the insane into non-people. He dehumanised them. So suddenly, the German people weren’t looking at Jewish or Slavic human beings … they were looking at non-people. At things. At objects. Just like the American frontiersman and the army portrayed the native American Indian as a non-person … ‘The only good Injun’s a dead Injun’ … as the saying goes. By officially, by governmentally, taking away the humanity from an entire group, you change the perspective of the majority to that group; you make it much easier to kill and harm and destroy that group. And once Adolf had dehumanised them, he enacted laws which denied them the protection of the state.
‘Suddenly, the German people were faced with a minority group within their boundaries which was officially classed as subhuman, and who could not claim any privilege under any of the states laws. The government and the law said that you could do what the hell you liked to a Jew and get away with it. That, in my opinion, led to a national attack of psychopathy. Suddenly good German herrs and fraus and frauleins, well-meaning and professional teachers and doctors, lawyers and accountants, grocers and butchers and fishmongers, didn’t have to apply the normal customary niceness to Jews and Slavs; didn’t have to treat them in any way of respect. Suddenly, the base nature which is in all of us was allowed out, to take a holiday. And not only didn’t they need to be nice to Jews any more, but they could do what the hell they wanted to them and get away with it.
‘The question is, did that make the entire German people, rather than individuals, into a nation of psychopaths? That’s what I’m trying to answer.’
The waiter placed a platter of shrimp between them. Broderick forked a couple up, but before he ate them, he said, ‘What you’re saying is very dangerous. We’ve been prosecuting these war criminals on the basis of individual responsibility. On the basis that they knew what they were doing, and that they were acting outside of the compass of internationally recognised norms of behaviour. Now you’re saying that the entire nation is incapable of taking responsibility for its actions because it was suffering some sort of mass psychiatric attack. If what you’re saying is right, then that makes the whole basis for the trials, even for the responsibility for these monstrous acts, beyond the power of the victors to mete out justice for crimes against humanity, and for the victims to seek revenge from the perpetrators. I find that impossible to accept.’
Gerherty nodded and ate his food. They dropped the subject, and talked pleasantries while they ate their shrimps, but there was an underlying mood that there was something much deeper, of far greater moment, yet to surface. By the time their steaks arrived, Theodore said, ‘As a law professor, I can comprehend the parameters of good and bad, and the redemptive quality of punishment, and of the way in which the law is integral to civilisation. When I was attorney general for New York, I felt myself part of the apparatus for fighting crime. My city was founded on law and order which led to justice. I was the arm of the law and the police were the arm of order, but we were different sides of the same body, which was named justice.
‘I came over here in order to defend people for whom I feel the most unutterable hatred because of what they did. But everybody needs access to defense counsel, so I put my personal feelings to one side. And now, I feel as though by association, I’m floating in the same cesspool as they inhabit. I feel I’m becoming corrupted by my affiliation with these monsters.’
‘What can you do about it? Do you have any more cases after this Deutch character?’
Broderick shook his head. ‘They want me to be part of a body which assists non-Nazi German jurists, men who played no part in the machinery of evil, in putting together a legal code for the future nation. But there are others just as competent. I think I’ve done enough here to last me a lifetime. Perhaps it’s time I went home.’
‘Have you learned what it was you came to learn?’
It was an odd question from someone with whom he’d never shared more than a few social occasions. He’d never before divulged to anyone in Germany that his real purpose in coming to the War Crimes Tribunal was for a personal journey into his soul.
‘No,’ Broderick said softly. ‘I haven’t learned much. I was hoping to understand evil, to see it in its true perspective, but all I can see is pathetic, ordinary, banal men who did extraordinary and utterly evil things.’
‘Who are you talking about? The Nazis, the Russians, the Yanks, the Limeys, the French, the Poles who willingly cooperated with the Germans, the Ukrainians who worked alongside the SS in the camps … who?’
‘Oh, I know that evil flourishes in wartime, and that all armies did evil things, but nobody sank to the level of bestiality to which these SS people sank. Nobody. Sure, you can play the angle of psychopathy for as long as you want, but for me, that doesn’t explain how an entire nation supported a regime which performed the consummate evil which the Nazis inflicted on the weak and the defenseless. And I won’t have you trying to blacken the name of the Allied forces by aligning their names with people like Himmler and Göring and the others.’
‘Theo, I’m not trying to blacken anyone’s name. Just trying to strike a pose of interventional neutrality. You’ve got to open your eyes to what others have done in this war, especially when Germany was collapsing, and the Reds were moving in.’
‘Is this anti-Communist rhetoric I’m about to hear?’ the lawyer quipped.
‘This is fact, brother. Straight down the line, hard-core fact. The Russians did things when they were entering Berlin that make what the SS did look as innocent as a Sunday School picnic.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Broderick retorted. ‘I’ve heard the stories. I know what went on. But …’
‘But nothing. Tell me, where were you in May, ’45? At home with your wife and kids? Teaching law? Driving your Packard to your country club? Spending the weekend in the Adirondacks?’
Broderick left the rhetorical question unanswered.
Geherty continued, ‘I was in France, mopping up after the occupation, liaising with de Gaulle, arresting collaborators and members of the Vichy Government. Then we heard reports about what was going on here, in Berlin.’
Gerherty cut a cube of steak and put it into his mouth, hardly stopping the conversation. Broderick hated people who talked while eating, but remained quiet, knowing that he was no longer a dinner partner, but an audience.
‘When the Reds arrived, they found a city pounded into rubble by American B-17s and the other massive bombers which dropped death from the skies on a city which was already defeated. But that didn’t stop the Russians. Oh no, not them. They blasted their way to the centre of the city with tanks and guns and rockets. Sure, they encountered fierce resistance for every block they took, but the resistance came from old men and boys. Before they arrived, the Berliners were living in holes in the ground. Their apartment blocks had collapsed under the Allied bombardment like matchboxes. And under the rubble, tens of thousands of bodies were rotting and decomposing and stinking to high heaven. They were bloated or charred or torn apart by rats and dogs … and people who were still living were starving. There was typhoid and dysentery and tuberculosis and diphtheria … It was like something out of hell itself.
‘And everybody was waiting for the Allies, they were even waiting for the hated Russians, because everybody was starving to death and there was no government in the city. Oh sure, when they arrived, the Soviets set up soup kitchens, but it was nowhere near enough. The Berliners even raided the zoo and butchered the animals, they were so hungry.
‘But that wasn’t a half of their problems. When the main Soviet army arrived, they busied themselves emptying the central banks of gold and money and credits; they even emptied the city of the treasure of Schliemann, the treasure of Helen of Troy, for God’s sake. And they rounded up tens of thousands of German soldiers and carted them away to captivity in the Soviet Union. God
knows if any of them are still alive. We certainly don’t have any idea what happened to them. We and the Red Cross have asked the Russians, and we get no answers.’
Broderick started to interrupt, but Gerherty held up a fork with another lump of meat on it as a sign to allow him to continue unabated, ‘In the streets, there were gangs of trümmerfrauen, rubble women, who spent morning till night picking up bricks from the mountains of rubble, in order to clean them of their mortar so they could be used to build brick houses.
‘Like I said, the first wave of Russian soldiers were battle hardened and tough as they come. They were professional soldiers, and well disciplined. They obeyed orders and didn’t break ranks.
‘No, the problem wasn’t with them; it was with the second wave. It was those animal bastards who caused all the problems, and their Russian commanders knew all about what these scum were doing. The second group were support soldiers, and many had been prisoners of the Germans, or in the siege of Stalingrad, or were criminals in Russia before the war and had been co-opted into the army when Stalin was desperate for more cannon fodder. Well, these lovely gentlemen came into Berlin looking for fun. They’d been brutalised by the Nazis, and they weren’t going to forgive. They roamed the streets, just looking for a woman. Any woman, no matter what age. Every single woman in Berlin was available to them, regardless of how old she was or whether she was pretty. The only ones spared were women with children, because these Russians still had some humanity or upbringing or fear of God to consider mothers to be sacrosanct; oh, and they never bothered women in trousers, which the Russkies didn’t like. They thought they were like men.
‘But every other poor bitch was fair game. I’d go so far as to say that with a few exceptions, every woman who ventured out on the streets of Berlin was raped repeatedly every day. Some women hired out their babies to neighbours for protection if they had to go somewhere. Others used their husbands’ or fathers’ wardrobes. They’d wear trousers and jackets and even shirts and ties to make themselves look like men, or even transvestites.