A Train of Powder Read online

  It might seem that this is only to say that at Nuremberg people were bored. But this was boredom on a huge historic scale. A machine was running down, a great machine, the greatest machine that has ever been created: the war machine, by which mankind, in spite of its infirmity of purpose and its frequent desire for death, has defended its life. It was a hard machine to operate; it was the natural desire of all who served it, save those rare creatures, the born soldiers, that it should become scrap. There was another machine which was warming up: the peace machine, by which mankind lives its life. Since enjoyment is less urgent than defence it is more easily served. All over the world people were sick with impatience because they were bound to the machine that was running down, and they wanted to be among the operators of the machine that was warming up. They did not want to kill and be grimly immanent over conquered territory; they wanted to eat and drink and be merry and wise among their own kind. It maddened them further that some had succeeded in getting their desire and had made their transfer to peace. By what trickery did these lucky bastards get their priority of freedom? Those who asked themselves that bitter question grew frenzied in the asking, because their conditions became more and more exasperating. The prisoners who guarded the prisoners of Nuremberg were always finding themselves flaring up into rage because they were using equipment that had been worn out and could not be replaced because of the strain on the supply lines. It could not be credited how often, by 1946, the Allies’ automobiles broke down on German roads. What was too old was enraging; and who was too new was exasperating too. The commonest sight in a Nuremberg office was a man lifting a telephone, giving a number, speaking a phrase with the slurred and confident ease that showed he had used it a thousand times before to set some routine in motion, and breaking off in a convulsion of impatience. “Smith isn’t there? He’s gawn? And you don’t know anything about it? Too bad….” All very inconvenient, and inconvenient too that it is impossible to imagine how, after any future war, just this will not happen—unless that war is so bad that after it nothing will happen any more.

  The situation would have been more tolerable if these conquerors had taken the slightest interest in their conquest; but they did not. They were even embarrassed by it. “Pardon my mailed glove,” they seemed to murmur as they drove in the American automobiles, which were all the Nuremberg roads then carried save for the few run by the British and French, past the crowds of Germans who waited for the streetcars beside the round black Nuremberg towers, which were hollow ruins; or on Sundays, as they timidly strolled about the villages, bearing themselves like polite people who find themselves intruding on a bereaved family; or as they informed their officers, if they were GIs, that such and such a garage proprietor or doorman was a decent fellow, really he was, though he was a kraut. Here were men who were wearing the laurels of the vastest and most improbable military victory in history, and all they wanted was to be back doing well where they came from, whether this was New York or the hick towns which comedians name to raise a laugh at the extreme of American provincialism. Lines on a young soldier’s brow proclaimed that he did not care what decoration he won in the Ardennes; he wanted to go home and pretend Pearl Harbor had never been troubled and get in line for the partnership which should be open for the right man in a couple of years’ time. A complexion beyond the resources of the normal bloodstream, an ambience of perfume amounting almost to a general anaesthetic for the passer-by, showed that for the female the breaking of traditional shackles and participation in the male glory of military triumph cannot give the pleasure to be derived from standing under a bell of white flowers while the family friends file past.

  Considering this huge and urgent epidemic of nostalgia, the behaviour of these exiles was strangely sweet. They raged against things rather than against one another. At breakfast in the Grand Hotel they uttered such cries as, “Christ, am I allergic to powdered eggs with a hair in ’em!” with a passion that seemed excessive even for such ugly provocation; but there was very little spite. The nicknames, were all good-humoured, and were imparted to the stranger only on that understanding. When it was divulged that one of the most gifted of the interpreters, a handsome young person from Wisconsin, was known as the Passionate Haystack, care was taken to point out that no reflection on her was implied, but only a tribute to a remarkable hair-do. This kindliness could show itself as imaginative and quick-witted. The Russians in Nuremberg never mixed with their Allies except at large parties, which they attended in a state of smiling taciturnity. Once a young Russian officer, joyously drunk, walked into the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, which was crowded with American personnel, and walked up to a pretty stenographer and asked her to dance. The band was not playing, and there was a sudden hush. Someone told the band to strike up again, the floor was crowded with dancing couples, a group gathered round the Russian boy and rushed him away to safety, out of the hotel and into an automobile; and he was dumped on the sidewalk as soon as his captors found an empty street. It is encouraging that those men would take so much trouble to save from punishment a man of whom they knew nothing save that he belonged to a group which refused all intercourse with them.

  This sweetness of atmosphere was due chiefly to the American tradition of pleasantness in superficial social relations, though many of the exiles were constrained to a special tenderness by their personal emotions. For some of them sex was here what it was anywhere else. There is an old story which describes a native of Cincinnati, returned from a trip to Europe, telling a fellow townsman of an encounter with a beautiful girl which had brightened a night he had spent in Paris. On and on the story goes, dwelling on the plush glories of the restaurant, the loveliness of the girl and her jewels and her dress, the magic of a drive in the Bois de Boulogne, the discreet luxury of the house to which she took him, till it rises to a climax in a bedroom carpeted with bear skins and lined with mirrors. “And then?”

  “Well—then it was very much like what it is in Cincinnati.” To many, love in Nuremberg was just as they had known it in Cincinnati, but for others the life of the heart was lived, in this desolate place given over to ruin and retributive law, with a special poignancy.

  Americans marry young. There was hardly a man in the town who had not a wife in the United States, who was not on the vigorous side of middle age, and who was not spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile. To the desire to embrace was added the desire to be comforted and to comfort; and the delights of gratification were heart-rending, like spring and sunset and the breaking wave, because they could not last. The illusion was strong that if these delights could go on for ever they would always remain perfect. It seemed to many lovers that whatever verdicts were passed on the Nazis at the end of the trial, much happiness that might have been immortal would then be put to death. Those wives who were four thousand miles away haunted Nuremberg like phantasms of the living and proved the sacredness of what was to be killed. “He loves me, but he is going back to her out of old affection and a sense of duty to his children. Ah, what I am losing in this man who can still keep a woman in his heart, when passion is gone, who is a good father.” These temporary loves were often noble, though there were some who would not let them be so. There were men who said, “You are a good kid, but of course it is my wife I really love,” when these terms were too perfunctory, considering his plight and the help he had been given. There were also women who despised the men who needed them. Through the Bavarian forests, on Saturdays and Sundays, there often drove one of the more exalted personalities of Nuremberg, accompanied by a lovely and odious female child, whom he believed, since he was among the more elderly exiles and was taking exile badly, not to be odious and to be kind. She seemed to be sucking a small jujube of contempt; by waving her eyelashes and sniffing as the automobile passed those likely to recognize its occupants, she sought to convey that she was in company that bored her.

  Those who loved the trial for the law’s sake also found the course of their love running not too smoothly. Thi
s was not because they were uncomfortably impressed by the arguments brought forward by the declared opponents of the Nuremberg prosecutions. None of these was really effective when set against the wholeness of the historical crisis which had provoked it. It was absurd to say that the defendants were being tried for ex post facto crimes when the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 had made aggressive warfare a crime by renouncing the use of war as an instrument of policy; and it was notable that even those opponents who had a special insight into that pact because they had helped to frame it were unable to meet this point, save by pleading that it had not been designed to be used as a basis for the prosecution of war criminals. But that plea was invalid, for in 1928 the necessary conditions for such prosecutions did not exist. There was then no country that seemed likely to wage war which was not democratic in its government, since the only totalitarian powers in Europe, the Soviet Union and Italy, were still weak. It would not be logical to try the leaders of a democracy for their governmental crimes, since they had been elected by the people, who thereby took the responsibility for all their actions. If a democracy breaks the Briand-Kellogg Pact, it must pay by taxation and penalties that fall on the whole people. But the leaders of a totalitarian state seize political power and continually declare that they, and not the people, are responsible for all governmental acts, and if these be crimes according to international law, their claim to responsibility must make them subject to trial before what tribunal international law decrees. This argument is so much in accordance with reality that, in the courtroom itself, it was never doubted. All the defendants, with one exception, seemed to think that the Allies were right in indicting not the German people, but the officers and instruments of the Nazi Government, for conspiring together to commit crimes against peace and the rules of war and humanity; and in most cases their line of defence was that not they, but Hitler or some other members of the party, had taken the actual decisions which led to these crimes. This line of defence, by its references to Hitler alone, concedes the basis of the Nuremberg trials. The one dissenter who would not make this concession was Schacht, who behaved as if there had been a democratic state superimposed on the Nazi state, and that this had been the scene of his activities.

  There was obviously more in the other argument used by the opponents of the trial: that even if it were right to persecute the Nazi leaders on charges of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and the rules of war and humanity, it could not be right to have a Soviet judge on the bench, since the Soviet Union had convicted itself of these crimes by its public rape of Finland and Poland and the Baltic Provinces. Truly there was here often occasion for shame. The English judges sat without their wigs, in plain gowns like their American colleagues, as a sign that this was a tribunal above all local tribunals. The Russian judges sat in military uniform as a sign that this was no tribunal at all, and when Vishinsky visited Nuremberg in the early months of the trial, he attended a banquet at which the judges were present, and proposed a toast to the conviction of the accused, a cantrip which would have led to the quashing of the trial in any civilized country.

  This incident appeared to recommend the obvious idealistic prescription of trying the Nazi leaders before a tribunal which should exclude all representatives of the belligerent powers and find all its judges in the neutral countries. But that prescription loses its appeal when it is considered with what a laggard step would, say, the Swedish judge have gone home from Nuremberg, after having concurred in a verdict displeasing to the Soviet Union. But that there had to be a trial cannot be doubted. It was not only that common sense could predict that if the Nazis were allowed to go free the Germans would not have believed in the genuineness of the Allies’ expressed disapproval of them, and that the good Germans would have been cast down in spirit, while the bad Germans would have wondered how long they need wait for the fun and jobbery to start again. It was that, there in Germany, there was a call for punishment. This is something that no one who was not there in 1946 will ever know, and perhaps one had to be at Nuremberg to learn it fully. It was written on the tired, temporizing faces and the bodies, nearly dead with the desire for life, of the defendants in the dock. It was written also on the crowds that waited for the streetcars and never looked at the Allied personnel as they drove past, and it was written on Nuremberg itself, in many places: on the spot just within the walls of the old town, outside the shattered Museum of Gothic Art, where a vast stone head of Jehovah lay on the pavement. Instead of scrutinizing the faces of men, He stared up at the clouds, as if to ask what He himself could be about; and the voices of the German children, bathing in the chlorinated river that wound through the faintly stinking rubble, seemed to reproach Him, because they sounded the same as if they had been bathing in a clear river running between meadows. There was a strange pattern printed on this terrain; and somehow its meaning was that the people responsible for the concentration camps and the deportations and the attendant evocation of evil must be tried for their offences.

  It might seem possible that Britain and America might have limited their trials to the criminals they had found in the parts of Germany and Austria which they had conquered, and thus avoided the embarrassment of Soviet judges on the bench. But had they done so the Soviet Union would have represented them to its own people as dealing with the Nazi leaders too gently, to the Germans in the Eastern Zone as dealing with them too harshly. So there had to be an international tribunal at Nuremberg, and the Americans and the British and the French had to rub along with it as best they could. The Nuremberg judges realized the difficulty of the situation and believed that the imperfection could be remedied by strict adherence to a code of law, which they must force themselves to apply as if they were not victors but representatives of a neutral power. It was an idealistic effort, but the cost was immense. However much a man loved the law he could not love so much of it as wound its sluggish way through the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg. For all who were there, without exception, this was a place of sacrifice, of boredom, of headache, of homesickness.

  Here was a paradox. In the courtroom these lawyers had to think day after day at the speed of whirling dervishes, yet were living slowly as snails, because of the boredom that pervaded all Nuremberg and was at its thickest in the Palace of Justice. They survived the strain. The effect on the defendants could be tested by their response to the cross-examinations of Göring. They were frightened when Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the chief acting British prosecutor, cross-examined him and in a businesslike way got him against the wall and extorted from him admissions of vast crime; and they were amused when Mr. Justice Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, could not cross-examine Göring at all well, because he had a transatlantic prepossession that a rogue who had held high office would be a solemn and not a jolly rogue, and was disconcerted by his impudence. But to the Russian cross-examination of Göring neither they nor anyone else in the court could bend their attention, because it was childish; it might have been part of a mock trial organized by a civics teacher in a high school. This was perhaps a superficial impression. It might be that the Russians were pursuing a legal aim other than ours. “It seems to me, when I look back on the last few months,” said one of the journalists who sat through the whole trial, “that again and again I have seen the Russians do the most mysterious things. I don’t think I dreamed that one of the leading Russian lawyers, all togged up in his military uniform, stepped up to the rostrum and squared his shoulders as if he were going to do some weight-lifting and shouted at whatever defendant it was in the box, ‘Did you conspire to wage an aggressive war against the peace-loving democracies? Answer yes or no.’ When the defendant said ‘No,’ the Russian lawyer thought for a long time and said, ‘I accept your answer.’ I cannot work that one out.” The men in the dock did not try.

  But they were inert before the French. These were veiled from us by a misleading familiarity, an old and false association of images. They wore the round caps and white jabots and black gowns we have seen all our
lives in Daumier drawings, and we expected them to be the wolves and sharks and alligators that Daumier drew. But they were civilized and gentle people, who gave a token of strength in their refusal to let what had happened to them of late years leave marks on their French surface. The judge, Monsieur Donnedieu de Vabres, was like many men that are to be seen all over France, and in many old French pictures, and in the plays of Molière and Marivaux: small and stocky, with a white moustache, and a brow kept wrinkled by the constant offences against logic perpetrated by this chaotic universe; a man whom one might have suspected of being academic and limited and pedantic, though sensible and moderate; a man whom one would not have suspected of having been, only two years before, released from a term of imprisonment in a German jail, which would have left many of us incapable and fanatic. From the slightly too elegant speeches of all these French lawyers it could be divined that when they were little boys they were made to learn Lamartine’s Le Lac by heart. From the speeches of none of them could it be divined that France had lately been shamed and starved and tortured. But they could not press their case so that the men in the dock found themselves forced to listen to it. They were too familiar with that case; they had known all about it before the Nazis ever existed, from the lips of their fathers and their grandfathers; they had been aware that if the Germans practised habitually the brutalizing business of invasion they would strengthen the criminal element in their souls till they did such things as were now being proved against the men in the dock. Their apprehensions had been realized through their own agony. They had been so right that they had suffered wrongs for which no court could ever compensate them. The chief French prosecutor, Auguste Champetier de Ribes, had been the chief anti-Munich minister in Daladier’s cabinet, and had followed his conscience before the war in full knowledge of what might happen to him after the war. The fire of their resentment was now burned to ashes. It did not seem worth while to say over again what they had said so often and so vainly; and the naïve element in the Nazis noted the nervelessness of their attack and wrote them off as weaklings. It was here that the Americans and the British found themselves possessed of an undeserved advantage. Through the decades they had refused to listen to the French point of view. Now they were like the sailor who was found beating a Jew because the Jews had crucified Christ. When he was reminded that that had happened a long time ago, he answered that that might be, but he had just heard about it.