A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  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.

  The villa could be seen a long way off through the pine woods; all the rooms were lit up because there was going to be a dinner party, given for those so closely concerned with the trial that they would not wish to dine alone that night. The lights of the factory belonging to the villa owner shone behind the tree trunks, and the twilight was shaken by the hum of its dynamos. Here fertilizers were extracted from the air, and so it was working day and night to restore the starved fields of Germany. Along the gravel path there hurried towards the village a sober shadow of a woman who often helped in the house when there were parties, the wife, neither young nor old, of a foreman. She never spoke, she was not like the other servants, who were young and unembarrassed by conquest, but now she stopped and asked grimly and tersely what sentence the court had passed on Streicher. When she heard that he was still unsentenced she did not move on but halted, staring at a great earthenware vase that stood by the gravel path, reflectively, as if the nasturtium growing from it had some meaning for her. Then she expressed the hope that he would be hanged. She had always hoped that something would happen to him ever since he had come to the village one Sunday before the war. They had been told that he was coming to speak at the Town Hall, and the police had come round to tell them that they must all go to hear him and take their children. So she and her husband had dressed up their sons and daughter and gone to the hall, and Streicher had got up on the platform and had spoken about politics for some time, which, she said, with holy simplicity, “did nobody any harm.” But quite suddenly he had begun to talk filth, gibbering filth about the Jews, describing the sexual offences he pretended they committed and the shameful diseases he pretended they spread, using dreadful words. She and her husband, and several other couples, had got up and led their children to the doors, but SS men were standing there and ordered them to return to their seats. Yes, quite young boys had forced her and her husband to stay with their children in this bath of mud. Again she fell silent, and her face was a solid white circle in the dusk. Then she burst into a rage of weeping, and went away.

  6

  The next day, the last day of the trial, there was something like hatred to be seen on the faces of many Germans in the street. The Palace of Justice was even fuller than before, the confusion engendered in the corridors by the inefficient scrutiny system was still more turbulent. There were some bad officials at Nuremberg, and that day they got completely out of hand. One of them, an American, male and a colonel, had always been remarkable for having the drooping bosom and resentful expression of a nursing mother who has had a difficult parturition, and for having throughout the trial nagged at the correspondents as if they were the staff of the maternity ward that had failed him. Hitherto he had not been arresting; the mind had simply noted him as infringing a feminine patent. But standing this day at the entrance of the gallery, staring at obviously valid passes, minute after minute, with the moonish look of a stupid woman trying to memorize the pattern of a baby’s bootee, he was strangely revolting in his epicene distress.

  The defendants were, however, quiet and cool. They were feeling the relief that many of us had known in little, when we had waited all through an evening for an air raid and at last heard the sirens, and, ironically, they even looked better in health. In the morning session they learned which of them the court considered guilty and which innocent, and why; and they listened to the verdicts with features decently blank except when they laughed. And, miraculously enough, they found the standing joke of the judges’ pronunciation of German names just as funny today as before; and the acquittals amused them no end. Three of the defendants were found not guilty. One of these was a negative matter which caused no reaction except
comradely satisfaction: that Hans Fritzsche, the radio chief of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, should have been found innocent recalled the case of poor Elmer in the classic American comedy, Three Men on a Horse. Elmer, it may be remembered, was a gentle creature, who neither smoked nor drank nor used rough words, and when he was found in a compromising attitude with a gangster’s moll, and the gangster was wroth, one of the gang inquired, “But even if the worst was true, what would that amount to, in the case of Elmer?”

  But the acquittals of von Papen and Schacht were richly positive. The two old foxes had got away again. They had tricked and turned and doubled on their tracks and lain doggo at the right time all their lives, which their white hairs showed had not been brief; and they had done it this time too. And it was absolutely right that they should have been acquitted. It would only have been possible to get them by stretching the law, and it is better to let foxes go and leave the law unstretched. Von Papen had never performed an official act, not even to the initialling of a faintly dubious memorandum, which could be connected with the commission of a war crime or a crime against humanity. He had intrigued and bullied his way through artificially provoked diplomatic crises with the weaker powers, he had turned the German Embassy in Vienna into a thieves’ kitchen where the downfall of Schuschnigg was planned and executed; but this skulduggery could not be related to the planning of aggressive warfare, and if he had been found guilty there would have been grounds for a comparison, which would have been quite unfair but very difficult to attack on logical grounds, with Sir Neville Henderson. As for Schacht, he had indeed found the money for the Nazis’ rearmament programme, but rearmament itself had never been pronounced a crime; and it is impossible to conceive an article of international law which would have made him a criminal for his doings and not given grounds for a comparison with Lord Keynes. Indeed, the particular jiggery-pokery he had invented to make Germany’s foreign trade a profitable racket, particularly in the Balkans, was so gloriously successful, and would have produced such staggering returns if it had been uninterrupted, that he cannot have wished for war.

  But, all the same, these were not children of light, and the association of innocence with their names was entertaining. When the verdict on von Papen was pronounced the other defendants gave him good-natured, rallying glances of congratulation; and he looked just as any Foreign Office man would look on acquittal, modest and humorous and restrained. But when the defendants heard that Schacht was to go free, Göring laughed, but all the rest looked grim. A glance at Schacht showed that in this they were showing no unpardonable malice. He was sitting in his customary twisted attitude, to show that he had nothing to do with the defendants sitting beside him and was paying no attention to the proceedings of the court, his long neck stretched up as if to give him the chance to breathe the purer upper air, his face red with indignation. As he heard the verdict of not guilty he looked more indignant than ever, and he tossed his white hairs. Had anyone gone to him and congratulated him on his acquittal he would certainly have replied that he considered it insulting to suppose that any other verdict could have been passed on him, and that he was meditating an action for wrongful imprisonment. There was, to be sure, nothing unnatural or illogical in his attitude. The court had cleared him with no compliments but with no qualifications, and the charges which had been brought against him were definitely part of the more experimental side of Nuremberg. Why should he feel grateful for the acquittal that was his right? There was no reason at all. But it must have been trying to be incarcerated over months in the company of one whose reason was quite so net and dry, who was capable of such strictly logical behaviour as Schacht was to show over the affair of the orange.

  This was quite a famous affair, for it amused the other defendants, who laughed at it as they had not been able to laugh at his acquittal, and told their wives. That was how it got known, long before one of the court psychiatrists told it in his book. Each defendant was given an orange with his lunch; and of the three acquitted men two had the same inspiration to perform a symbolic act of sympathy with their doomed comrades by giving their oranges away. Von Papen sent his to von Neurath, and Fritzsche sent his to von Schirach. But Schacht ate his own orange. And why not? Why should a man give up an orange which he had a perfect right to eat and send it to somebody else, just because he had been acquitted of crimes that he had not committed and the other man had been found guilty of crimes that he had committed? The laughter of his fellow prisoners was manifestly unjust. But surely they earned the right to be a little unjust, to laugh illogically, by what happened to them later at the afternoon session.

  Something had happened to the architecture of the court which might happen in a dream. It had always appeared that the panelled wall behind the dock was solid. But one of the panels was really a door. It opened, and the convicted men came out one by one to stand between two guards and hear what they had earned. Göring, in his loose suit, which through the months had grown looser and looser, came through that door and looked surprised, like a man in pajamas who opens a door out of his hotel room in the belief that it leads to his bathroom and finds that he has walked out into a public room. Earphones were handed to him by the guard and he put them on, but at once made a gesture to show that they were not carrying the sound. They had had to put on a longer flex to reach from the ground to the ear of a standing man, and the adjustment had been faulty. His guards knelt down and worked on them. On the faces of all the judges there was written the thought, “Yes, this is a nightmare. This failure of the earphones proves it,” and it was written on his face too. But he bent down and spoke to them and took a hand in the repair. This man of fifty-three could see the fine wires without spectacles. When the earphones were repaired he put them on with a steady hand and learned that this was not a nightmare, he was not dreaming. He took them off with something like a kingly gesture and went out, renouncing the multitudinous words and gestures that must have occurred to him at this moment. He was an inventive man and could not have had to look far for a comment which, poetic, patriotic, sardonic, or obscene, would certainly have held the ear of the court and sounded in history; and he was a man without taste. Yet at this moment he had taste enough to know that the idea of his death was more impressive than any of his own ideas.

  A great mercy was conferred upon him. At this last moment that he would be seen by his fellow men it was not evident that he was among the most evil of human beings that have ever been born. He simply appeared as a man bravely sustaining the burden of fear. This mercy was extended to all the prisoners. It must be recorded that there was not a coward among them. Even Ribbentrop, who was white as stone because of his terror, showed a hard dignity, and Kaltenbrunner, who looked like a vicious horse and gave no promise of restraint, bowed quietly to the bench. Frank, the governor of Poland, he who had repented and become a good Catholic and wore black glasses more constantly than any of the others, gave an odd proof of his complete perturbation. He lost his sense of direction and stood with his back to the bench until he was spun round by the guards. But then he listened courageously enough to his sentence of death.

  There was a deep unity in their behaviour as there was a unity in their appearance. The only diversion was the mad little slap Hess gave the guards when they tried to hand him his earphones. He would not wear them, so he did not hear his sentence. The Service defendants, too, were distinct in their bearing, for they had experience of courts-martial and knew the protocol, and bowed and went out when their sentences were delivered. The others seemed to believe that the judge would add to their sentences some phrase of commination, and waited for it, looking straight in front of them; and, curiously enough, they seemed to be disappointed when the commination did not come. Perhaps they hoped that it would also be an explanation. That was what all in the court required: an explanation. We were going to hang eleven of these eighteen men, and imprison the other seven for ten, fifteen, twenty years, or for life; but we had no idea why they had done what they did. All
but Streicher had Intelligence Quotients far above the average, and most of them had not been unfavoured in their circumstances. We had learned what they did, beyond all doubt, and that is the great achievement of the Nuremberg trial. No literate person can now pretend that these men were anything but abscesses of cruelty. But we learned nothing about them that we did not know before, except that they were capable of heroism to which they had no moral right, and that there is nothing in the legend that a bully is always a coward.

  Then the court rose. It did so in the strict physical sense of the word. Usually when a court rises it never enjoys a foot of real elevation; the judge stalks from the bench, the lawyers and spectators debouch through the corridors, their steps heavy by reason of what they have just heard. But this court rose as a plane takes off, as gulls wheel off the sea when a siren sounds, as if it were going to fly out of the window, to soar off the roof. The courtroom was empty in a minute or two, and the staff hurried along the corridors into one another’s offices, saying good-bye, good-bye to each other, good-bye to the trial, good-bye to the feeling of autumn that had grown so melancholy in these latter days, because of the reddening creepers and the ice in the sunshine, and these foreseen sentences of death.