Authors: Rebecca West
But though it might be right to hang these men, it was not easy. A sadness fell on the lawyers engaged in the trial. They had all been waiting for this day when judgment would be delivered and the defendants sentenced, and they could get back to the business of living. They had all surely come to loathe the Nazi crimes and criminals more and more in the slow unfolding of the case. But now this day of judgment had come they were not happy. There was a gloom about the places where they lived, a gloom about their families. In these last days of the trial all automobiles were stopped on the main roads for search and scrutiny by the military police. At a search post two automobiles were halted at the same time, and a visitor travelling in one saw that in the other was the wife of one of the judges, a tall Scandinavian notable for her physical and spiritual graces. They exchanged greetings, and the visitor said, “I shall be seeing you in court tomorrow.” The other looked as if she had been slapped across the high cheekbones. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no. I shall not be in court tomorrow.” Yet she had attended almost all other sessions of the court. Around the house of another judge a line of automobiles waited all the evening before the day of judgment, and passers-by knew that the judiciary was having its last conference. The judge’s wife came to the window and looked out over the automobiles and the passers-by into the pine woods which ringed the house. But as she stared out into the darkening woods it could be seen on her sensitive face that she was living through a desert of time comparable to the interval between a death and a funeral.
There was another house in the outskirts of Nuremberg where this profound aversion from the consequences of the trial could be perceived. This, like the press camp, was a villa which an industrialist had built beside his factory, but it was smaller and not so gross, and it had been the scene of a war of taste which had in the long run been won by the right side. The industrialist had furnished it in the style of a Nord-Amerikan liner; but he had had two sons, who, according to the patriarchal system of his class, lived in the villa, the older on the first floor, the younger on the top floor. One of them had married a Frenchwoman who was still in the house, silently and efficiently acting as butler to the conquerors, with an exquisite and chivalrous care not to detach herself from the conquered, since her marriage vows had placed her in their company. She had a deep knowledge and love of Greek art and of the minor Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of her collections had been taken from her at the beginning of the war by the German government and stored in caves. When defeat came the guards in charge of the caves ran away, and the stores were rifled. She went there to look for her goods, and found some shards of her Greek vases trodden into the earth at the mouth of the caves, and nothing else. But she had insisted on keeping with her some of her Greek sculptures, and they still stood in the house among monstrous Japanese bronzes and moustachioed busts of the men of the family. In one room there were two marbles which, in the Greek way, presented the whole truth about certain moments of physical existence. There was a torso which showed how it is with a boy’s body, cut clean with training, when the ribs rise to a deep and enjoyed breath; and there was the coiffed head of a girl who knew she was being looked at by the world, and, being proud and innocent, let it look.
The approach to this house at night was melancholy. About it, as about all houses inhabited by legal personnel, armed guards paced, and searchlights shone into the woods. The white beams changed to crudely coloured cardboard the piebald trunks of the birch trees, the small twisted pines, the great pottery jars overflowing with nasturtiums which marked the course of the avenues. From the darkness above, moth-pale birch leaves fell slowly, turned suddenly bright yellow in the searchlight beam, and drifted slowly down to the illuminated ground. Autumn was here, winter would be here soon. People concerned with the trial drove through these sad avenues and were welcomed into the house, and sat about in its great rooms, holding glasses of good wine in their hands, and talked generously of pleasant things and not of the judgment and the sentences, and looked at the Greek sculptures with a certain wonder and awe and confusion. If a trial for murder last too long, more than the murder will out. The man in the murderer will out; it becomes horrible to think of destroying him.
Monday, September 30, 1946, was one of those glorious days that autumn brings to Germany, heavy and golden, yet iced, like an iced drink. By eight o’clock a fleet of Allied automobiles, collected from all over Western Germany, was out in the countryside picking up the legal personnel and the visitors from their billets and bringing them back to the Palace of Justice. The Germans working in the fields among the early mists did not raise their heads to look at the unaccustomed traffic, though the legal personnel, which had throughout the trial gone about their business unattended, now had armed military police with screaming sirens in jeeps as outriders.
This solemn calm ended on the doorstep of the Palace of Justice. Within there was turbulence. The administration of the court had always aroused doubts, by a certain tendency toward the bizarre, which manifested itself especially in the directions given to the military police in charge of the gallery where the VIPs sat. The ventilation of the court was bad, and the warm air rose to the gallery, so in the afternoon the VIPs were apt to doze. This struck the commandant, Colonel Andrus, as disrespectful to the court, though the gallery was so high that what went on there was unlikely to be noticed. Elderly persons of distinction, therefore, enjoyed the new experience of being shaken awake by young military policemen under a circle of amused stares. If they were sitting in the front row of the gallery an even odder experience might overtake them. The commandant had once looked up at the gallery and noted a woman who had crossed her ankles and was showing her shins and a line of petticoat, and he conceived that this might upset the sex-starved defendants, thus underestimating both the length of time it takes for a woman to become a VIP and the degree of the defendants’ preoccupations. But, out of a further complication of delicacy, he forbade both men and women to cross their ankles. Thus it happened that one of the most venerable of English judges found himself, one hot summer afternoon, being tapped on the shoulder with a white club by a young military policeman and told to wake up, stay awake, and uncross his legs.
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.