The Bitter Taste of Victory (31 page)

Whatever the outcome of the Nuremberg trial, both Erika and Klaus Mann now believed that the moral values of Germany would remain unchanged. For Erika it was outrageous that Göring should charm a courtroom of spectators daily from the dock. For Klaus it was even more absurd that Göring’s former protégé should delight audiences nightly at the theatre. And it was doubly maddening that he himself should accord in finding his former lover ‘as attractive as ever’. Day after day some of the best legal minds in the world sat in the courtroom at Nuremberg arguing about tortuous questions of legality. The tribunal was still broadcast on the radio and newspapers throughout Germany dutifully reported its findings. But while de Menthon talked about collective guilt and the courtroom reeled at the descriptions of the concentration camps, resilient former Nazis curried favour with their conquerors and the opportunities of the brief zero hour after the war seemed on their way to being lost.
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9

‘Let this trial never finish’

Boredom: May–August 1946

As the trial continued into the summer, the pervading mood was one of boredom. After the excitement of Göring’s stand in the witness box, the lengthy questioning of the more minor Nazis and their witnesses quickly began to seem tedious. On 23 May, Birkett grumbled that when he considered the ‘utter uselessness of acres of paper and thousands of words and that life is slipping away’ he despaired at the shocking waste of time. Outside Nuremberg, other Nazis had been examined in smaller war crimes trials that had concluded in a matter of weeks; the US had already begun proceedings against the leaders in Japan that were evidently going to be conducted much more swiftly.
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In a memorandum to the other judges a few days later, the Soviet judge Nikitchenko complained that the tribunal was being stretched unjustifiably and that all clarity had been lost. But neither Birkett nor Biddle thought it was possible to speed up the trial without losing the pervading sense of fairness. They distracted themselves by writing and reading light verse, occasionally addressed to each other:

Birkett to Biddle after one long dreary afternoon

At half-past four my spirits sink

My mind a perfect trance is:

But oh! The joy it is to think

Of half-past seven with Francis.

They were grateful that the weather at least was improving. Spring came abruptly to Nuremberg that year and blossomed into summer. The
Autobahnen
were now lined with thick broom; there was a carpet of crocuses along the river. Biddle later described how ‘a thousand years settled in the valley of the old river, and there was time to stretch again under the warmth of the ancient summer sun’.
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Once the defendants left the witness box in June, the tribunal considered important but hardly riveting questions about the validity and possible interpretations of the law. July was dominated by the summing up of the defence counsel; there were twenty-two of them and it took twenty-one days. The judges were determined to give the defence a fair hearing and therefore did not question the relevance of speeches that meandered through world literature and history before addressing the questions in hand.

Nineteen days into the defence counsel speeches, the novelist Rebecca West arrived from England. West had been summoned to Germany by Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor, because following Harold Nicolson’s refusal the British judges now wanted West to write a book about the trial. The travel arrangements were typically last-minute: on the evening of 22 July she was informed that she needed to report to Berkeley Square in London by eight the next morning. Busy arranging transport, West left her secretary to pack. When she arrived in London she found that she had not been provided with a change of underwear but instead with a hot-water bottle and a large straw hat that she usually wore for the Henley Regatta.

West travelled with Shawcross (whom she thought a genius of a lawyer but too small town and shy to succeed politically) and Maxwell-Fyfe (‘the Churchill of the next generation’). The journey was chaotic. They had to wait for two hours at the airport because an army car had failed to pick up the other half of their party. When they did arrive at Nuremberg there was no transport to meet them and when they finally made it to the courthouse Shawcross had no pass.
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Entering the court West found herself in a ‘citadel of boredom’. The judges on the bench were plainly ‘dragging the proceedings over the threshold of their consciousness by sheer force of will’; the lawyers and their secretaries sat sagging in their seats and the faces of the white-capped guards were puffy with tedium. They all wanted to leave Nuremberg as urgently as the dental patient under the drill wanted to leave the dentist’s chair.
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West was not disposed to be bored. She had come to Germany seeking adventure. Like Evelyn Waugh she was finding the postwar austerity of England demoralising, despite regular food parcels sent by her editors at the
New Yorker.
And the greyness of her surroundings reflected a more personal feeling of drabness. Ten years earlier West’s husband Henry Andrews had stopped desiring her; aged fifty-three she was in a celibate marriage. This was all the more galling because West was a woman who had, half-unwillingly, forged her identity through sex.

Born Cicily Fairfield in 1892, West had borrowed her name aged twenty from a character in Ibsen’s
Rosmersholm.
‘Live, work, act,’ says Ibsen’s heroine; ‘don’t sit here and brood.’ By the time of her twenty-first birthday, West was famous for her savage reviews and her dark, troubled eyes. She was also pregnant with the child of one of the most famous novelists of the day, H. G. Wells. Anxious to avoid scandal, Wells hid West away in Southend. ‘Jaguar’ now visited his ‘Panther’ whenever he could, although once the baby arrived Wells was irritated that West had less time to look after him.
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By shamelessly mothering an illegitimate child, West inadvertently became one of the first women publicly to broadcast the female need for sex. Both because of her domestic situation and because of the stridency of her writing, she acquired a public sensuality that seems to have made her a frightening figure for men. After the relationship with Wells ended in 1922, West engaged in a series of brief liaisons with men who pursued her only to reject her when she succumbed (Charlie Chaplin and Max Beaverbrook among them). She was therefore pleased to escape both the humiliation and precariousness of her position as an unmarried mother by marrying Henry Andrews in 1930. He was a banker who could recite the timetables of any railroad in Europe, even
for countries he had never visited; he was dependable, adoring and apparently desperate to look after her. ‘My husband can do everything that I can, better than I can,’ West once said, somewhat wishfully.

The marriage gave West confidence as a public figure. She made her name as an investigative journalist and produced a series of books culminating in the magisterial
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, her account of 1930s Yugoslavia. She fought fascism and then communism. But Andrews turned out to be neither as strong nor as devoted as West had hoped. After seven years it transpired that he saw sex as an activity better suited for secretaries than wives. As Andrews became less affectionate, he also became more erratic; he was forgetful, irascible and chaotic. Increasingly West found it hard to work, pressed in by her husband’s rages and by the difficulty of maintaining order in their home, a farmhouse in Ibstone in Buckinghamshire.
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West was hopeful that her stay in Nuremberg would distract her from the disappointment and exhaustion that now characterised her days at home with her husband. She did not anticipate feeling much conflicting sympathy for the Germans. Visiting Germany in the 1930s she had asked her sister why the British had not put every man, woman and child of that ‘abominable nation’ to the sword in 1919: ‘The insane mercy and charity of the Treaty of Versailles makes me gnash my teeth.’ She found the Germans ‘a great galumphing fool of a people’ and thought that the women in particular lacked both intellectual pretentions and domestic skills. But her views were not consistently this extreme. Later she recalled that she had ‘always been able to distinguish between the Nazis and the decent German people’; she and her husband helped his German relatives as much as they could during the war, including those who remained in Germany. In her more generous moments, she was hopeful that the trial would distinguish between Germans and Nazis and provide the world with a way forward.
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Observing the inhabitants of the ‘citadel of boredom’, West found that the defendants had the appearance that historical characters assume in bad paintings. They were wreathed in the suggestion of death. The judges by contrast were stately. West had known Biddle in the US in the 1920s and then in 1935 when she was reporting on the New Deal.
She was now impressed by his aristocratic bearing. She found Lawrence dignified and efficient; his father had been a Lord Chief Justice and he seemed to bring to the proceedings the quality that the second generation of a theatrical family brings to Shakespeare.

At dinner two days into her trip, West met Biddle again. She had always been aware of his attraction to her and was excited to see him now, in a stranger and freer context. She told him that she was doing a piece for the
New Yorker
and was worried that she had not seen enough of the background to the trial. Biddle immediately announced that the
New Yorker
was one of the few things that had kept him sane in Nuremberg and suggested that she came to stay at his villa. The next day he summoned her from the visitors’ gallery and took her to the Villa Conradti, where he had persuaded the authorities to move him in the spring. This had initially been used as the VIP house and was a large villa furnished with heavy wooden furniture from the Bismarck period and enclosed in acres of gardens adorned by pines, a park and a lake.

Biddle told West that since they had last met, he and his wife Katherine had read her books aloud to each other in the evenings. He was distressed that West did not seem to have looked after her appearance. ‘You could be as wonderful as ever.’ Shyly, she murmured that she was growing old. He dismissed her concerns and whisked her off to have her hair done. It was an odd courtship, but a successful one. For ten days they were lovers. West felt rejuvenated and happy, despite an attack of gastroenteritis and a daily battle with her only set of underwear, which she washed inconveniently in her bath. She cleaned her bra and knickers on alternate days and entered the solemn courtroom either knickerless or braless each day.
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West was impressed by Biddle’s erudite authority. ‘Isn’t it curious that the only aristocrat on the bench is American,’ she observed in his hearing. She was irritated by his account of his wife Katherine, who had refused sex with her husband for eighteen months after the birth of their second child, supposedly wanting to punish him for the pain of childbirth. Now, however, Katherine was safely at home in America and it was West who accompanied him to lunches, dinners and parties. In the rare moments of freedom between court sessions they escaped
for walks in the woods and explored nearby villages, picnicing by the river and stretching under the warmth of Biddle’s ‘ancient summer sun’. Most people around them were probably aware of the affair but it was not unusual. One of Biddle’s colleagues later described the atmosphere of Nuremberg as ‘relaxed, tolerant and philanderous’. Indeed, the sexually charged atmosphere was encouraged by the erotic paintings which hung opposite the beds in the main bedrooms of all the villas. ‘Apparently Germans had to have a signpost put up on the straightest road,’ West informed her editor at the
New Yorker
.
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On the day that West moved into Biddle’s villa, the prosecutors began their concluding speeches. Jackson, opening the proceedings, pressed the charge of conspiracy, arguing that it was impossible for criminality on a scale such as this simply to have occurred spontaneously as the defendants claimed. He impressed the onlookers with his one-sentence portraits of the defendants. Göring, he said, was ‘half-militarist, half-gangster. His pudgy finger was in every pie’; Ribbentrop was ‘a salesman of deception’. He insisted that the men themselves were fully conscious of their guilt. ‘If you were to say of these men that they were not guilty, it would be as true to say that there had been no War, there had been no slain, there had been no crime.’ West found the speech ‘a masterpiece, exquisitely relevant to the indictment’. She thought the reference to Göring’s fingers was especially pertinent: ‘The courtroom is not small, but it is full of Göring’s fingers. His soft and spongy white hands are forever smoothing his curiously abundant hair or covering his wide mouth . . . or weaving impudent gestures of innocence in the air.’
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That afternoon Shawcross took over, impressive in his clarity, calling for the death sentence for all the defendants. Continuing the next day, Shawcross made a rare mention of the Nazi crimes against Jews, addressing the explicit charge of ‘crimes against humanity’. Citing the Nazi orders for the Final Solution, intended to lead to the extermination of the entire Jewish race, he stated that: ‘There is one group to which the method of annihilation was applied on a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there were no other crime against these men, this one alone,
in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors.’