These rules were the subject of general mirth in Nuremberg, but the higher American authorities neither put an end to them nor took their existence as a warning that perhaps the court should be controlled on more sensible lines. An eccentricity prevailed which came to its climax in the security arrangements for these two final days. There was a need for caution. Certainly in Berlin nobody would have lifted a finger to avenge the Nazis, but here in Bavaria there were still some people who had never had any reason to feel that the Nazi regime had been a bad thing for them, and among them there must have been some boys who had been too young for military service and had enjoyed their time with Hitler Youth. It might also have been that Martin Bormann, who at the end of the war had replaced Göring, and who was said to have been killed by Russian fire after escaping from the Chancellery, and who was being indicted in absentia at this trial, might now choose to reappear.
It therefore seemed obvious that there would be stringent precautions to see that no unauthorized person entered the Palace of Justice, and we had imagined that we would have to queue up before a turnstile, by which competent persons would sit and examine our passes under a strong light. There was a rumour that there was a mark on the passes which would show only under X-rays. But, instead, authority jammed the vast corridors of the Palace of Justice with a mass of military police, who, again and again, demanded the passes of the entrants and peered at them in a half-light. It was extremely unlikely that these confused male children could have detected the grossest forgery, but the question was never posed, for the corridor was so dark that it was difficult to read large print. No attempt had been made to clarify the situation by posting at strategic points men who could recognize the legal personnel; and thus it happened that, outside the judges’ entrance to the courtroom, a military policeman, switching his white club, savagely demanded, “And how the hell did you get in here?” of a person who was in fact one of the judges. In the midst of this muddle certain precautionary measures were taken which were at once not strict enough and too strict and quite ineffectual.
Men were forbidden to take briefcases into court, and women were forbidden to carry handbags or wear long coats. These prohibitions were undignified and futile. Women’s suits are not made with pockets large enough to hold passes, script, fountain pens, notebooks, and spectacle cases, and few women went into court without a certain amount of their possessions packed away inside their brassieres or stocking tops. One French woman journalist, obedient to the ban on long coats, came in a padded jacket which she had last worn on an assignment in the Asiatic theatre of war, and when she was sitting in court discovered that in the holster pocket over her ribs she had left a small loaded revolver. It may look on paper as if those responsible for the security arrangements at Nuremberg could justify themselves by pointing to the fact that the Palace of Justice was not blown up. But those who were there know that there was just one reason for this: nobody wanted to blow it up. But although the problem raised by Nuremberg security need not have been approached so eccentrically, it never could have been brought to a satisfactory solution. There were no persons qualified by experience to take control at a high level, for there had never been a like occasion; and there was not such a superfluity of customs officials and police workers that a large number of them could have been abstracted from their usual duties and seconded to special duties without harm; and if there had been, the business of transporting them and housing them would have created fresh problems. This was a business badly done, but it could have been done no better.
It seemed natural enough that nobody should have been very anxious to blow up the Palace of Justice when the defendants came into the dock that Monday. The court had not sat for a month, while the judges were considering their verdicts, and during that time the disease of uniformity which had attacked the prisoners during the trial had overcome them. Their pale and lined faces all looked alike; their bodies sagged inside their clothes, which seemed more alive than they were. They were gone. They were finished. It seemed strange that they could ever have excited loyalty; it was plainly impossible that they should ever attract it again. It was their funeral which the Germans were attending as they looked down on the ground when they walked in the streets of the city. Those Germans thought of them as dead.
They were not abject. These ghosts gathered about them the rags of what had been good in them during their lives. They listened with decent composure to the reading of the judgments, and, as on any other day, they found amusement in the judges’ pronunciation of the German names. That is something pitiable which those who do not attend trials never see: the eagerness with which people in the dock snatch at any occasion for laughter. Sometimes it seems from the newspaper reports that a judge has been too facetious when trying a serious case, and the fastidious shudder. But it can be taken for granted that the accused person did not shudder, he welcomed the little joke, the small tear in the lent of grimness that enclosed him. These defendants laughed when they could, and retained their composure when it might well have cracked. On Monday afternoon the darkened mind of Hess passed through some dreadful crisis. He ran his hands over his brows again and again as if he were trying to brush away cobwebs, but the blackness covered him. All humanity left his face; it became an agonized muzzle. He began to swing backwards and forwards on his seat with the regularity of a pendulum. His head swung forward almost to his knees. His skin became blue. If one could pity Ribbentrop and Göring, then was the time. They had to sit listening to the judgment upon them while a lunatic swayed and experienced a nameless evil in the seat beside them. He was taken away soon, but it was as if the door of hell had swung ajar. It was apparent now, as on many occasions during the trial, that the judges found it repulsive to try a man in such a state; but the majority of the psychiatrists consulted by the court had pronounced him sane.
The first part of the judgment did not refer to the defendants but to bodies they had formed. It had been argued by the prosecution that the seven Nazi organizations—the Gestapo, SD,SS, Reich Cabinet, Corps of Political Leaders, General Staff and OKW, and Storm Troops—should be declared criminal in nature and that membership in them should by itself be the subject of a criminal charge. The judges admitted this in the cases of the first three, on the grounds that at an early date these organizations had so openly aimed at the commission of violence and the preaching of race hatred that no man could have joined them without criminal intent. The image of a rat in a trap often crossed the mind at Nuremberg, and it was evoked then. No man who had ever been an SS member could deny it. The initials and the number of his blood group were tattooed under his arm. But, of course, that trap did not spring. There were too many SS men, too many armpits, for any occupying force to inspect. The Storm Troopers were not put in the same category, because they were assessed as mere hooligans and bullies, too brutish to be even criminals. Of the others it was recognized that many persons must have joined them or consented to remain within them without realizing what Hitler was going to make of them. This was reasonable enough, for it meant that members of this organization could still be prosecuted if there was reason to believe they had committed crimes as a result of their membership.
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 colle
agues 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 Edw
ard,” 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!”
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