After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Churchill had said in 1944, when people were speaking of what reparation to extract from Germany: ‘I agree with Burke. You cannot indict a whole nation.’10 That is why the trials were so helpful. The chief villains who had led Germany into the Nazi abyss were the ones who were indicted, allowing for the possibility that Germany might rejoin the civilized world in the ‘sunlit uplands’. If one says that the value of the Nuremberg trials was in their theatre, one does not mean to diminish the appalling seriousness of what was being discussed. Heinrich Himmler had poisoned himself by swallowing a cyanide capsule after his capture by the British at Lüneburg, but the trial could hear repeated his words, proudly spoken to the SS generals at Posen in October 1942, and which many of his colleagues had helped to carry out.

  I want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter … I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about – ‘The Jewish race is being exterminated’, says one party member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our programme – elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them’. And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has a decent Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

  Himmler was wrong there. The Nuremberg trials of the twenty-two surviving movers in the Third Reich made it clear, beyond any doubt, that this was a regime founded upon the idea of aggressive war, sustained by banditry, theft and the abolition of morality and justice, and glutted like some blood-feeding ogre on mass murder. The catalogue of crimes, the abuses of science by doctors, the systematic use of slave labour, and the detailed programme to eliminate the Jews, could not, after the trials, be in any doubt. Those who were acquitted only got away on technicalities. It was unfortunate that Franz von Papen was acquitted – he lived on until 1969, incredibly. A special indictment should have been devised for this centrist career politician, since it was his weakness, his preparedness to sup with the devil, which had persuaded General Hindenburg in 1933 to suppress the Prussian socialist government and to form a coalition with the National Socialists – thereby not merely allowing Hitler in, but more or less legalizing him. Papen could be said to have done more damage to the human race than many who were subsequently hanged, since he was the great midwife, the enabler of the hideous regime which ruined not merely Germany but the whole of old Europe.

  What I mean by using the word theatre is that nothing, of course, could undo the crimes which these Nazi leaders had unleashed upon the world. Some satisfaction could be derived from the fact that Ribbentrop, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Julius Streicher, Wilhelm Frick, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Keitel and the other horrors were hanged, but would be a gruesome sort of satisfaction. The stronger aspect to the ‘theatre’ of the trial was that these appalling individuals, with their list of shabby, inexcusable and undeniable crimes, were confronted, not by a firing squad, not by a court martial, but by the trappings of an old-fashioned trial, a courtroom, a judge, advocates prosecuting and defending. Against the brutal, amoral nightmare which they had knowingly created, the old world of order and morality was posited, embodied by the trial judge, Lord Justice Lawrence (Sir Geoffrey Lawrence). He was a Pickwickian in appearance, but firm, gentlemanlike, serious with occasional flashes of humour. ‘His rare smile was a joy,’ wrote one witness, ‘so humanly kind that you found yourself smiling with him, and looking over to the long dock and its strained, sombre men you saw that some of them were smiling too.’11

  The first stage of the trials, then, the hearings about the twenty-two chief Nazis, was a purgative experience, for Germany, for the Allies, and for the world. The trial tried to set the precedent, alas too optimistic, that any future tyrant would know that one day he would stand answerable for his crimes before the bar of justice and the law.

  Clearly, when it came to dealing with all the tens of thousands of underlings who had done the dirty work in the Third Reich, and, even more complicated, with the numberless thousands who had somehow or another colluded in the crimes while not actually perpetrating murder or theft, what was to be done? For several years after the war, many of the nastier individuals involved in labour and death camp atrocities and so on had escaped to South America. Most of them escaped justice altogether. On 15 January 1951, Ilse Koch was sentenced to prison in West Germany. In 1947 she had been imprisoned for four years for her activities in Buchenwald as wife of the sadistic commandant Karl Koch, whom the SS had themselves hanged for corruption in 1945. She received a life sentence and committed suicide after sixteen years. Yet three weeks after her sentence, the American High Commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy, issued a general amnesty to all those industrialists who were on trial for using slave labour. All the remaining generals awaiting trial were also given an amnesty. Among the industrialists released was Alfried Krupp von Bohlen, whose factories had depended on the unscrupulous and vast use of slave labour. Henry Morgenthau Jnr, US Treasury secretary, had drawn up a plan during the war which would have forbidden Germany to be an industrial power. It would have been an entirely agrarian economy. If one thinks of it as a return to the rural duchies of the eighteenth century, each with its Ruritarian schloss, its harpsichord-playing grand duke, and its gambolling beer-fed peasants, it might have been quite charming, like the world of the fat duke and his sinister toymaker in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. One would quite like to have lived in Morgenthau’s Germany, sitting in the castle library of some prince bishop, reading a volume of Kant as one watched the Brueghelesque figures in the cornfields hunched over their scythes. Morgenthau’s ideas, farfetched as they might seem today, were seriously entertained for a while. By the time of the 1950s, however, America needed not revenge but a rebuilt and revivified West Germany in its Cold War against Russia. German industry depended upon the most successful German industrialists, and if that required the help of a few slave-drivers and Nazi fellow travellers, so be it. Thus were the loftier ideals which led to the setting up of the Nuremberg trials reduced to moral absurdity.

  Retribution is always visited, at the end of wars, by the victors upon the defeated. But here, as in so many other respects, the Second World War was unusual. The true victors suffered as well as the defeated.

  Winston Churchill had three major claims on the gratitude of the British people. First, by his rhetoric in 1940 he had stiffened their resolve, and the gamble had paid off. He had stood up to Hitler, and from that autumn and winter of resistance had been made possible the ultimate victory of the Allies over the Third Reich. The many blunders Churchill made as a strategist do not take away from this fundamental fact. It is true that if Dowding had not prevented him from making the ultimate blunder – that of sacrificing the RAF to the defence of France in May 1940 – the resolve and bloody-minded courage of late 1940 might have had to confront a Nazi invasion of Britain. But his willingness to climb down and accept Dowding’s judgement (albeit something he played down in his own account of the matter) is part of his greatness.

  The second thing for which the British had to be grateful to Churchill was that he refused the pressures from Stalin and Roosevelt to open up a Second Front, and invade France from the shore before 1944. The cataclysm of the Dieppe raid in August 1942, when so many young Canadians were simply massacred by the Germans, showed that without proper landing craft, and without a severe weakening of the German position in France and Eastern Europe, as well as Allied mastery of North Africa and the Mediterranean, the victory would be uncertain. This slow haul was, once again, full of mistakes and blunders by all concerned, but the overall strategy, insisted upon so doggedly and bravely by Churchill, was right. Without it, British troops migh
t once again, even if or when they managed to land in France, have found themselves involved in the sort of costly military stalemate which had wiped out millions of young lives in the First World War.

  The third thing for which the British had to be grateful to Churchill was that he had formed what was in effect the first working socialist government in English history. ‘Except for you and me,’ he remarked to Anthony Eden when the chancellor of the exchequer, Kingsley Wood, died in 1943, ‘this is the worst Government England ever had.’ But the wartime government had prepared for peace very responsibly. Rab Butler had drawn up, and implemented, his educational reforms. Churchill had been frequently driven to exasperation by some of the Labour MPs whom he had invited to join his cabinet, but there was a side of him which was always a good old Edwardian liberal.

  ‘Oh to be in England now that Winston’s out,’ crowed Pound.12

  A major reason for Churchill’s losing the election of 1945 – though it did not feel like this to him at the time – was in fact the small-c conservatism of the electorate. They voted for what they had been having already. They voted for the continuation of a state-controlled system of ration-books, housing provision, and so forth, to which they had become accustomed from Ernest Bevin, Clem Attlee, Stafford Cripps and others who had all been in office for the previous four or five years. Churchill could mock his Labour colleagues. Of Sir Stafford Cripps he said that ‘there but for the grace of God, goes God’; he also said that Cripps had ‘all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire’.

  Once the war in Europe was over, the Labour members of Churchill’s government withdrew their support. He wanted them to stay on to form a Government of National Unity at least until the war with Japan was thoroughly finished. The truth was that, as Churchill’s remarks to Eden, just quoted, show, there was little or no sympathy between Churchill and his cabinet. The Labour party could not forget the prewar years of poverty and unemployment and were determined that the postwar years should not be a repetition. So the king accepted Churchill’s resignation, and the old man formed a caretaker government until the General Election.

  Harold Nicolson, standing as a Conservative in West Leicester, wrote to his son Nigel: ‘people feel, in a vague and muddled way, that all the sacrifices to which they have been exposed and their separation from family life during four or five years, are all the fault of “them” – namely the authority or the Government. By a totally illogical process of reasoning, they believe that “they” mean the upper classes or the Conservatives, and that in some manner all that went ill was due to Churchill.’13

  Churchill did not help his own cause. He rejected the Beveridge Report, which proposed the establishment of the modern Welfare State and which had a 90 per cent public approval rating. In his radio election broadcasts he could have been conciliatory, speaking to One Nation as the grand old man who was all but above party politics. Instead, he gave them a taste of the old prewar, unreasonable, cantankerous Churchill:

  No Socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some sort of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil Servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.14

  It was a singularly inept speech, coming from the one British Prime Minister (except perhaps Lloyd George) who ever had wielded something very like absolute power and who had, as Tory Home Secretary, made numerous attempts to censor the press and the BBC.

  So it was that Britain, in common with its vanquished foes and its exhausted liberal allies, changed its government. Of all the prewar leaders in Europe, Stalin alone remained in place at the end of the war. Hitler had shot himself to avoid the fate of Mussolini. Laval, Pétain’s deputy, was executed, together with innumerable French collaborators. Pétain was arraigned for treason, and locked up for life, dying in captivity in 1951. Winston Churchill, subsequently seen as the Greatest Englishman, and the Saviour of his Nation, was, at the first chance given to the electorate, voted decisively out of office. Instead of the orator, with his boozy, polychromatic phrases, his courage, and the sense he gave that life was an adventure, the British voted in as Prime Minister the ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’, as Churchill had called him: Clement Attlee, a pipe-smoking, bald figure who looked like the respectable headmaster of a small private school somewhere on the South Coast. Why did the nation turn against their saviour? Attlee himself said: ‘They didn’t turn against him, they turned against the Tories.’15 It did not feel like that to Churchill himself. Clementine tried to tell Winston Churchill that perhaps the election defeat might be a blessing in disguise. If so, he replied, ‘at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised’.16 There was not even domestic comfort to console either of them. ‘I cannot explain how it is,’ Clementine wrote to her daughter Mary, ‘but in our misery we seem, instead of clinging to each other to be always having scenes. I’m sure it’s all my fault, but I’m finding life more than I can bear. He is so unhappy & that makes him very difficult … I can’t see any future.’17 In fact, being in Opposition allowed Churchill some much-needed rest. It also stung him into some of his best jokes and sallies, as when he accused an MP called Bossom of ‘being neither one thing nor the other’; or as in his response to Air Vice Marshal Bennett standing as a Liberal candidate at Croydon – it was ‘the first time he had ever heard of a rat actually swimming out to join a sinking ship’.18 When Clementine Churchill expressed such despondency in 1945, neither she nor Churchill could know how short-lived, nor how unpopular, Attlee’s benign attempt at state socialism was going to be.

  *i.e. Twice-born

  35

  The End of the British Empire – India and Palestine

  Astrologers had deemed 14 August to be an unlucky day for Hindus, and so India was born as a nation at midnight between the two days of 14 and 15 August 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech to the Constituent Assembly was a splendid piece of rhetoric:

  Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the larger cause of humanity.1

  An age had indeed ended. Churchill, now leader of the Conservative Opposition, was despondent. ‘In handing over the Government of India to those so-called political classes, we are handing over to men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain … Many have defended Britain against her foes, none can defend her against herself.’2 Earlier, he had petulantly told the Americans that he had not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. But that dissolution was the ineluctable consequence of the war Churchill had waged, so bravely and so defiantly, against Hitler. His doctor, Lord Moran, travelling with him in America in 1952, when the old man had once again become the Prime Minister, sensed that Churchill had begun to understand this. Bowling along on the train from Washington to New York, Churchill allowed his mind to wander back to his youth, to dinners with Joe Chamberlain in 1895, to his absorption of Kipling, in whose writings, he said, he could have sat an examination, and to the attitude of mind which these imperialists had instilled in him. ‘When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man.’ There was an unspoken ‘but, now …’ hovering after this paragraph. ‘Was he t
oo’, asked the doctor, ‘having second thoughts? Was the India of his youth, Kipling’s India, a mistake after all? Had he been wrong about the Empire?’3

  Moran leaves the question in the air. The wistful moment in the American railroad carriage, however, suggests that within five years of India having its independence, even the doughtiest defender of the British Empire had come to see its dissolution as an inevitability. Interestingly, Churchill focuses upon its racialism as the core of why it was unworkable, and that, surely, historically, is right. The India of Clive, and of the East India Company making a whole series of alliances with local princes, was the beginning of the Empire; but it had not begun with an imperialistic idea. It was trade which had led the British to India, and those who went there, absorbing Indian customs, very often falling in love with India’s language, philosophies, religions, women, did not in the first instance come with the sense that European culture was superior to Indian, still less white faces superior to brown. These things developed as the deadly combination of Benthamite economists and Christian missionaries enforced in the British a sense of Indian barbarism. The Indians, like the poor at home in Britain, needed to be improved. That was when the trouble started. After the tragic events of 1857–9, the so-called Indian Mutiny, the East India Company was wound up and the British governor became a viceroy. Eighteen years later the queen became the empress of India, and the whole aberration of the ‘British Empire’ was enforced. It lasted, as far as India was concerned, just ninety years, a very short period in the lives both of Britain and of India.