The Bitter Taste of Victory (25 page)

Now, Jackson and the three other chief prosecutors were in Nuremberg. Sir Hartley Shawcross led the British team while Roman Andreyevich Rudenko and François de Menthon headed the Russian and French teams. The judges were the American Francis Biddle (who had replaced Robert Jackson as attorney-general during the war, only to be dismissed once Truman came into office), the British Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (Lord Justice of Appeal at home), the French Henri Donnedieu de Vabres and the Russian General Iona Nikitchenko (vice-chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court and a former lecturer in criminal law).

All of these men were already finding life in Nuremberg claustrophobic. Biddle, who was an East Coast aristocrat and former friend of Roosevelt’s, was disturbed to find himself sharing a villa with his alternate, or assistant, complaining in letters home to his wife that he had been returned to ‘fraternity life’. He was also distressed that much of the basic furniture had arrived after they did, fresh eggs and milk were unobtainable and there were no lightbulbs bright enough for him to read in the evenings. Frustratingly, the army was unsympathetic to his plight, impatient with a trial that involved bringing over 600 men to
kill a mere twenty-one Nazis and with senior officials who seemed unaware that resources were so overstretched that there were GIs living nearby in tents. Luckily Biddle had made friends very quickly with the British alternate, Norman Birkett, a tall angular man who was known in London as one of the great trial lawyers of his day and was generally seen to possess one of the most astute legal minds in Nuremberg. Biddle and Birkett shared a love of literature and the arts, though Biddle’s cultural credentials were worn more ostentatiously.
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On 20 November 1945 the tribunal began. It was an icy, grey day and Dos Passos found that the courthouse felt warm and luxurious in contrast to the cold outside. Certainly, it would have seemed that way to the town’s starving inhabitants if they had been allowed in to witness the events apparently staged partly for their benefit. The courtroom was a dark, wood-panelled room with thick bottle-green curtains and marble surrounds to the walls that smelt of the fresh paint applied the previous day. Because the tribunal was being filmed, the curtains were permanently drawn to exclude daylight and the artificial lighting quickly made the room oppressively hot and bright. The prisoners were already seated when Dos Passos entered, installed on two benches guarded by the white-helmeted American Military Police who were known as ‘Snowdrops’ on account of their hats. The guards seemed to Dos Passos to have the look of a high-school basketball team, their eager innocence highlighted by the contrast with the worn and crumpled faces of the defendants.

Dos Passos entered the press area, which was on the far side of the room from the prisoners, behind the prosecutors’ tables and in front of the gallery for general spectators. This was the most comfortable part of the courtroom; the generously upholstered seats were spaced unusually widely apart. Here he was joined by reporters including Erika Mann, Peter de Mendelssohn, Janet Flanner and William Shirer. Leading journalists and writers from all the Allied nations had come to Europe out of both curiosity and duty. Shortly before the trial began, Erika Mann had encouraged her American readers to attend to the events in
Nuremberg on the grounds that: ‘It is incredibly important for the future of mankind to state in front of the eyes of the whole world that there are certain laws and rights for all peoples of the earth and that everyone who transgresses these norms will be held responsible.’ Mann and many of her fellow journalists believed that it was crucial that the tribunal receive widespread international attention if they were to succeed in providing a template for the re-education of Germany and a deterrent against future persecution and war.
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The opening session on 20 November was preceded by half an hour of frantic whirring as the press photographers snapped the defendants. Once the trial was in progress, filming would be restricted to the cameras installed in sound-proof booths. The onlookers spent the morning staring at the prisoners, whom many of them had seen only on film. Most journalists were surprised by the ordinariness of these men who for years had seemed to personify evil. Deprived of the heroic camera angles and podiums of Riefenstahl’s films and of their extravagant uniforms, they looked elderly, sallow and small. Dos Passos found that Göring had the ‘leaky-balloon’ look of a fat man who had lost a great deal of weight; Hess’s ‘putty face’ had fallen away leaving him with a pinched nose and hollow eyes; Ribbentrop, in dark glasses, had the ‘uneasy trapped expression of a defaulting bank cashier’; Streicher looked like a horrible cartoon of a ‘foxy grandpa’. He went on to observe the lawyers, struck by Biddle’s ‘long sanctimonious face’ with its tall forehead and thin nose and by the ‘indescribable Hogarthian look’ of the British. Like so many aspects of the trial, the judges’ costumes had proved impossible to standardise. All except the Russians were attired in gowns (though without judicial wigs) where the Soviet judges were dressed in military uniforms that seemed to place an inappropriate emphasis on their dual role as assessors and victors.
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At last the tribunal began, but the first day was dominated by the reading of the lengthy and tediously repetitive indictment. Dos Passos found that the separate charges began to merge. ‘Shooting, starvation and torture . . . tortured and killed . . . Shooting, beating and hanging . . . shooting, starvation and torture’. His attention shifted back to the prisoners, listening to the accounts of their misdeeds. He thought that
Göring had the ‘spoiled, genial, outgoing, shrewdly self-satisfied’ face of an actor, which sometimes bore the ‘naughty-boy expression of a repentant drunkard’. As the morning progressed, Göring acquired a kind of grandeur, taking on the aspect of a ‘master of ceremonies’. He was chastened by some of the revelations in the indictment, hiding his face during the passages describing the concentration camps, but he gazed round the room expectantly demanding a laugh when the prosecutors mentioned the 87 million bottles of champagne he had plundered from France. Hess spent his time reading, except when Hitler’s name was first mentioned and he sat up and smiled manically. In the afternoon Ribbentrop collapsed and had to be taken out and sedated.
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The second day opened with the defendants’ pleas. Called upon to speak first, Göring started reading from a typewritten speech. ‘Before I answer the question of the Tribunal whether or not I am guilty,’ he began, but was immediately cut off by Lawrence who informed him that he must simply plead guilty or not guilty. ‘I declare myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty,’ Göring replied. Most of the responses were uniform, though Jodl added that ‘for what I have done or had to do I have a pure conscience before God, before History and my people’ and Hess shouted simply ‘Nein’, in keeping with his role as resident madman.
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The pleas were followed by Robert Jackson’s speech opening the prosecution for the Americans. Each of the Allies had taken one set of charges as the focus for their work and the Americans were responsible for the charge of conspiracy. Jackson interpreted this liberally, irritating the British by ranging across the entire case on the grounds that the original conspiracy had developed into the crime of aggressive war. Quoting from the plethora of German documents uncovered by the Allies, Jackson described the history of the Nazi Party, the persecution of the Jews and the early experiments in aggression. He went on to outline the treatment of POWs and occupied civilians, the establishment of the concentration camps and the planning of genocide. ‘The privilege of being the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the World imposes a grave responsibility,’ he stated. ‘The wrongs
which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilisation cannot survive their being repeated.’
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Jackson touched on the charge of ‘crimes against humanity’, describing the conspiracy of the Nazi leaders to annihilate the Jewish race: ‘The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews . . . It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people . . . The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole . . . The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jews was . . . methodically and thoroughly pursued . . . History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.’

According to Jackson, the common sense of mankind demanded that the law should not stop with punishing ‘little people’ for acts of this kind. It had to reach men who possessed themselves of great power and used it to set evils in motion. This was another of the radical innovations of the trial’s charter: to make it possible to punish leaders who did not stain their own hands with blood but were tainted by it none the less. Jackson’s was a notion of conspiratorial rather than collective guilt. The German world too, he said, had ‘accounts to settle with these defendants’; they had tricked and subdued their own citizens.
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The courtroom was impressed both by Jackson’s calmness and rhetorical fervour and by the extent of the evidence amassed. ‘The Nazi defendants are going to be convicted by their own words, their own records, their own foul deeds,’ the American journalist William Shirer observed. ‘The idiots wrote everything down.’ Shirer was not especially captivated by Jackson’s oration; he thought he was too slow and dismissed him as ‘no Cicero’. Dos Passos was much more enamoured: ‘I doubt if there is a man or woman in the courtroom who does not feel that great and courageous words have been spoken,’ he recorded in his diary; ‘We Americans get a little proudly to our feet because it was a countryman of ours who spoke them.’ He wrote home to his wife that Jackson had represented America as he liked to see it represented: ‘reasonable, practical and full of a homey kind of dignity’. Again, he
had spent the day observing the accused and this time he thought that they appeared more uneasy. ‘When the prosecutor reaches the crimes against the Jews, they freeze into an agony of attention.’ They seemed to cringe and shudder as they heard their own words quoted out of secret diaries; Göring’s steps faltered as he left the room.
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Dos Passos departed from Nuremberg two days later, leaving journalists including Mann and de Mendelssohn to observe the case for the prosecution becoming increasingly tedious. The focus was now on the hierarchy of the Nazi Party and their control over state machinery. Some correspondents began skipping sessions but de Mendelssohn was determined to be there for everything. ‘I’m possessed by the feeling that I shall never see anything like this again in my life,’ he told his wife. ‘This is absolutely historic . . . one just cannot afford to miss a single moment of it.’
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Both de Mendelssohn and Mann were present on 26 November when the pace of the drama suddenly quickened. The court was shown a Soviet documentary of extermination camp footage. As in the film that Billy Wilder had been editing in the summer, there were rivers of bodies scattered manically by giant bulldozers, lampshades made of human skin and piles of bones heaped up outside crematoria. The journalists watched the reactions of the defendants. Göring looked on with studied calm throughout but could not help frantically wiping his sweaty palms at the end; Ribbentrop tried to cover his face with his hands but kept peering through his fingers at the screen; Wilhelm Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with his handkerchief.

At the end of the film the judges filed out. One journalist asked: ‘Why can’t we shoot the swine now?’ The defendants remained on their bench, where Hess started to say ‘I don’t believe it’, but was silenced by Göring. In his cell that night Göring complained to the Allied psychiatrist that the film had shifted the sympathies of the audience just when many onlookers had been on his side. Most of the other prisoners denied that they had known the details of the camps. Hess, still claiming amnesia (though a few days later he would admit that his memory loss had been simulated), congratulated the Allies on improving the drama in the courtroom. ‘Here at last is something interesting. Up to
now I have been bored to distraction. I am no longer allowed to take a book into court. Today there was something to see!’
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Erika Mann interviewed the defence lawyers and ridiculed the cowardliness of their arguments. It had turned out, she wrote scathingly, that all of the accused were merely middle men: ‘Like the rest of their countrymen they have done, seen and known nothing. They all say “horrible, horrible, horrible!”, but as far as they are concerned the responsible parties are not in the courtroom.’