The Bitter Taste of Victory (26 page)

These lawyers were in a difficult position; they were German lawyers who had been appointed late in the day and were uneasily aware that the guilt of their clients extended to most of their compatriots. They had begun by questioning the legality of the court and the possible neutrality of the conqueror judges, but these arguments were becoming less tenable as more and more hard evidence was produced. That afternoon Erika Mann heard one lawyer declare ‘the sooner my client is hanged, the better’. Ribbentrop’s counsel seemed to her paler than he had looked before. ‘I feel more and more like a deputy defendant,’ he complained, ‘sitting shield-like in front of these men. But as a German I, too, have to pay, even if ten days ago I did not know yet how dear was the price.’
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As December began and Nuremberg became covered with snow, both the Anglo-American and German publics became less interested in the proceedings at the trial. The London
Evening Standard
enlivened its coverage by sending the in-house cartoonist David Low to observe the courtroom. For Low this was primarily a visual spectacle: Frick was dirty brown and Funk light green. Like Dos Passos, Low found the defendants oddly ordinary and oddly small. He was captivated by Göring, who flapped his hands, stroked his mouth and patted his hair in a manner that seemed calculated to convey expression without words. Low enjoyed conveying this on paper although he was interrupted from his work when Göring turned his gaze to hook the cartoonist’s eye: ‘After about 20 seconds of mutual glaring it dawned on me that he was trying to stare me down. The childish vanity of it! How silly! (I won, by the way).’
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The Allied-sponsored newspapers continued dutifully to provide news of the tribunal but most of their readers were focused on questions of survival. ‘
Deutschland, Deutschland ohne alles
,’ began a parody of the national anthem going about at this time, ‘
ohne Butter, ohne Fett
’ (without butter, without fat). Hunger levels were now dangerously high throughout Germany. Partly as a result of this, Peter de Mendelssohn found that the attitude of the Germans he met towards the trial was one of ‘contemptuous indifference’. They were unable to see why the victors did not just hang the twenty men immediately, as Hitler would have done. ‘The trial?’ one man said to William Shirer, who had gone out into the snowy ruins to interview the cave-dwellers beneath; ‘
Ja
 – propaganda! You’ll hang them anyhow. So you make a trial for propaganda. Why should we pay any attention? We’re cold. We’re hungry.’ One man who had once been a distinguished engineer complained that Göring had been quite right to build up his air force and that if he had only done a better job of it Nuremberg would not be in ruins.
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On 19 December, Erika Mann went on the radio to inform the German people about the importance of the proceedings. She insisted
that although the trial was not sensational, it was all the more effective in its understated carefulness:

It is not intended for the excitement or entertainment of the present but rather for the edification of the future, enabling later generations to learn from history. And there is an educational value in the pedantic way in which an enormous number of facts is presented in a very quiet and undramatic manner. I think this has a great advantage in terms of history.

But she did not have much impact on her listeners, who continued to complain that this was both a show trial and an unnecessary expense. And the trial’s critics were amused that the proceedings were not only tedious but frequently shambolic. The American prosecutors had not put sufficient effort into pruning their speeches or deciding precisely on the relevance of their evidence. At one stage Captain Sam Harris began a speech on the Germanisation of occupied territories with the announcement that ‘my knees haven’t knocked so much since I asked my wonderful little wife to marry me’. Francis Biddle wrote ‘Jesus’ in his notebook, irritated that an American lawyer had embarrassed the profession in front of the British.
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Surveying the court from the judges’ platform, both Biddle and Lawrence interrupted the prosecutors frequently and tersely with demands for clarity and relevance. Increasingly the proceedings were marked by a palpable tension between Biddle and Jackson. For years in the US, Biddle had been subservient to Jackson, serving as solicitor-general after Jackson was promoted from solicitor-general to attorney-general in 1940, and then filling Jackson’s vacated post once again as attorney-general. Now as judge, Biddle was in the senior position and enjoyed making this apparent. He also believed himself to be superior to the other judges, even though Lawrence was technically in charge. ‘Lawrence depends on me for everything and I’ll run the show,’ he had written in his notebook after grudgingly nominating Lawrence as chair. The British were characteristically suspicious of non-self-deprecating arrogance and were dismissive of Biddle in private, as were many of the journalists. Erika Mann announced proudly to her
father that she had gained approbation in the press camp for coining the phrase ‘too biddle and too late’.
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These personal rivalries and tensions were exacerbated by the homesick loneliness of almost everyone at Nuremberg. The judges in particular were isolated, cut off both from their compatriots and from the locals by the high security of their armoured cars. They felt that it would be inappropriate to socialise with the prosecutors and so remained secluded in their villas, busy entertaining the VIP visitors sent from home whose reactions to the drama in the courtroom were predictable. The monotony was occasionally interrupted by an invitation to a Russian party. After one of these, the Soviet alternate Alexander Volchkov drove Biddle back to his villa where Biddle was surprised to find the Russian embracing him like an ‘affectionate bear cub’ before springing back into his car and bursting into song.
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Unlike the judges, the journalists and lower-level officials could assuage their loneliness at the Grand Hotel, which provided a beacon of light in a city blacked out at night. Once this had been the hotel where foreign VIPs were housed during Nazi rallies; now it was filled with the Allied conquerors, drinking amid the red plush furnishings and artificial marble of the reception hall and jitterbugging in the Marble Room. Here underfed singers, dancers, acrobats and midgets came in tarnished finery to entertain the imprisoned victors.

On 20 December the court adjourned. Erika Mann spent Christmas in Zurich with an incestuous ensemble composed of her brother Klaus, her lover Betty Knox and her former lover Therese Giehse. It was a happy reunion for both lovers and siblings but Erika’s health continued to deteriorate. On New Year’s Day she checked into hospital, succumbing at last to the illness she had been postponing all winter. This seems to have been not so much a particular virus as a general physical collapse. She claimed rather improbably in a letter to Lotte Walter that she had come down with an array of diseases that included mumps, toxic poisoning, foot-and-mouth disease and an unusually strong cough. She recovered in a spa in Arosa, where she felt cut off from life in California and especially from Bruno Walter, whom she yearned for despite the presence of Betty Knox. In the letter to Lotte, Erika commanded Lotte
and her father to feel embraced and begged them both to write swiftly. ‘I want to know everything – what you do and what you don’t do, conduct, think, read, talk and mean,’ she demanded, adding that she would like reassurance that they also thought of her with affection. It was difficult writing to a lover via his daughter; the colourful list of her physical afflictions had to serve as her statement of need.
²⁴

Francis Biddle had a relatively healthy Christmas in England at the house of Norman Birkett, where the two men spent their evenings reading poetry and listening to gramophone records. At the start of January the court reconvened and the next few weeks were spent hearing the case for the British prosecution, which focused on the arguments against the individual defendants. There were now Germans alongside the Allies in the spectators’ gallery. One of the defence lawyers had complained after the Christmas break that his family thought of the trial as something ‘taking place on the moon’ and suggested that seats should be allocated to Germans, although not many took up the offer.
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Most Germans continued to feel distant from the tribunal, although it was broadcast twice a day on the radio. The US authorities estimated that 19 per cent of newspaper columns in their zone were devoted to coverage of the proceedings, but there was only one newspaper for five inhabitants in both the US and the British zone and after twelve years of inaccurate news coverage the Germans had little faith in the news reports anyway. Aware of the limited immediate impact of the trial, the Allies continued to seek other ways to confront the Germans with their culpability. Near the end of January the US concentration camp documentary was finally ready to screen in their zone. Released under the title
Die Todesmühlen
(
Death Mills
), this was a twenty-two minute version of the film that did not incorporate the editing done by Billy Wilder.

As well as exhibiting the appalling conditions of the camps, the film reminded its audiences of how difficult it had been for ordinary Germans not to know of their existence. They had lived within walking distance, heard the cries of the victims and smelt the stench of their corpses; they had eaten produce fertilised by human bone and worn
wigs made from human hair. The film emphasised the distasteful efficiency of the camps – the assembly-line operation of death – and showed surviving men, women and children transformed by years of humiliating imprisonment into ‘animal-like creatures’. The final sequence superimposed shots of mass graves onto images from Riefenstahl’s footage of the Nuremberg rallies. An imaginary German spectator commented: ‘Yes, I remember – at the Nuremberg party assembly I yelled “Heil!”, then when the Gestapo took my neighbour I thought “What do I care?”’

Attendance at a screening of
Death Mills
was compulsory in some parts of Bavaria for anyone who wanted to obtain their food ration cards, although the Information Control Division was sceptical about this enforced viewing. But after it had been screened for a month only 12 per cent of Bavarians responding to a survey had seen the film, which is not that surprising as only 35 per cent of Bavarians went to the cinema at all. It was clear that there was no easy way to convince a starving nation of its crimes, though the lawyers at Nuremberg continued in their attempts. On 17 January 1946 the French case for the prosecution opened with a speech from the chief prosecutor, François de Menthon. This comprised an admirably calm description of the German Occupation of France and an analysis of German guilt. Now that Jackson and Shawcross had detailed the particular crimes committed by the Nazis, de Menthon proposed to explain how they had happened. Specifically, he wanted to describe how all the ‘organised and vast criminality’ sprang from what he termed ‘a crime against the spirit’: ‘This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring.’
²⁶

Up to this point, there had been no suggestion in the courtroom that the entire German nation was guilty. Jackson had been careful in his speech to imply that ordinary Germans themselves could be victims of the Nazi conspiracy. Now de Menthon suggested that the German nation as a whole had been ‘intoxicated’ by Nazism for years: ‘certain of their eternal and deep seated aspirations, under this regime, have found a monstrous expression; their entire responsibility is involved, not only by their general acceptance but by the effective participation
of a great number of them in the crimes committed.’ The Germans had sinned primarily through their emphasis on racial origin, believing that ‘man, of himself, has no value except when he is of service to the German race’. This was the principle behind all the Nazi crimes.
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