The Bitter Taste of Victory (29 page)

While painting her picture, Knight had been determined to convey ‘the sensation that not only I, but everyone here appears to feel’, which she found difficult to describe except to say that it contained a significant element of pity: ‘pity perhaps that the human creature could sink to such baseness as some of these poor creatures have done’. This pity seems to infuse the picture, enabling her to endow each of the defendants with individuality. But at the same time she reminds us of the devastation that these ordinary men have wreaked. The burning buildings and the sea of bones seem both to grow out of and to invade the edges of the courtroom; the defendants are more frightening because they can look so mundane but cause so much destruction.
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This is Knight as engaged in a painterly act of benign judgement, looking squarely at the crimes of the defendants while also remembering their humanity. But perhaps she was also gesturing towards the potential significance of the trial through her composition. Arguably, by placing the burning city at the top rather than the bottom of the picture, she leaves the viewer with the sensation that the defendants and their lawyers are encroaching into the city. This is a city in which some buildings are still standing. With its pastel-coloured towers, it is more a vision of romantic ruin than of flattened debris. Perhaps the act of justice portrayed in the foreground will spill upwards into the city, pointing the way forward for reconstruction.
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Evelyn Waugh’s encounter with Laura Knight took place during a three-day visit to Nuremberg as a VIP guest. He was pleased to have a chance to escape the ‘accursed soil’ of postwar Labour England but did not take the proceedings very seriously. Like Knight, he was struck by the anomaly of the luxury hotel and law courts presiding over acres of corpse-scented rubble, but unlike her he found it a ‘surrealist spectacle’. For Waugh the trial bore a comical resemblance to the schoolroom. Göring had Tito’s matronly appeal; Ribbentrop, now in the witness stand, was like a seedy schoolmaster being ragged: ‘He knows he doesn’t know the lesson and he knows the boys know. He has just worked out the sum wrong on the blackboard and is being heckled. He has lost his job but has the pathetic hope that if he can hold out to the end of term he may get a ‘character’ to another worse school. He lies quite
instinctively and without motive on quite important points.’ Waugh enjoyed dining with Lawrence whom he found ‘a most agreeable man interested in cattle breeding’, and he returned to England less sure than he had been beforehand that the trials were an ‘injudicious travesty’.
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Waugh’s sense that everyone in Britain was dismissive of the trials was not wholly accurate, but it was true that they were taken less seriously at home. Just before the proceedings began, George Orwell had published an essay entitled ‘Revenge is Sour’, complaining that the whole idea of revenge and punishment was ‘a childish daydream’. As soon as you were no longer powerless the desire for revenge evaporated, becoming pathetic and disgusting. In Orwell’s view (and he was motivated, of course, by his own German experiences), this was now the case in Britain. ‘In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the monstrous peace settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of a failure to see in advance that punishing an enemy brings no satisfaction.’ Orwell was sure that the average man in Britain was unaware what crime Göring or Ribbentrop were being charged with. This was both because the punishment of these monsters was less attractive now that it was possible, and because under lock and key they had almost ceased to be monsters.
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Orwell’s argument was somewhat spurious. The Allies were not primarily seeking revenge and he had no alternative to offer; like Arendt he had turned the trials into a metaphysical rather than a practical matter. But for Orwell, it was more crucial to feed the starving Germans than to punish the defeated Nazis. At the start of 1946 he began publicly to back a new ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign which had begun in Britain aiming to increase the supply of food to Europe. The movement had been initiated in September by Victor Gollancz, who was a frenetic supporter of unpopular causes and had decided to concentrate his energy on Germany. In the early 1930s, Gollancz and the Left Book Club he founded in 1936 had concentrated on supporting communism. Disillusioned with the Communist Party in 1938, he had then made it his mission to unmask the reality behind Communist Party propaganda at the same time as broadcasting the virtues of the Soviet Union, advocating an Anglo-Russian alliance. Since 1940 he had been
battling against the broadcasts by Vansittart about the collective militarism of the Germans at the same time as he had been crusading on behalf of the European Jews.

Gollancz’s politics were always personal and his sympathy for the plight of the Jews brought with it guilt about his adolescent rejection of his own Jewish heritage. Disliking the petty constraints of Orthodox Judaism, he had shifted his allegiance to the teachings of Christianity and had been dismissive of the Jews he met in London (though he did marry a Jew himself) until in 1942 he realised the extent of the threat posed to the Jews by Nazism and began to campaign against anti-Semitism. He forced himself to remain passionate about the cause by taking half an hour before each lecture to ‘feel’ himself into the situation of people at Dachau or Buchenwald: ‘One night I was being gassed in a gas-chamber: the next, I was helping others dig our own mass grave, and then waiting for the splutter of a machine-gun.’ This oddly obsessive and masochistic process eventually led to a nervous breakdown in June 1945. He had three weeks without sleep and his body erupted with a series of physical symptoms. But he recovered sufficiently to write pamphlets in favour of Zionism in the later stages of the war, to stage a battle against the Conservatives in the wake of the July general election and to start campaigning on behalf of the starving Germans in the spring of 1945.
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In a pamphlet entitled ‘What Buchenwald Really Means’, written in April 1945, Gollancz explained that not all Germans had been guilty of the atrocities discovered at Buchenwald. Hundreds of thousands of heroic gentiles had been persecuted for resisting the Nazis and millions of Germans had been terrorised into acquiescence. Gollancz saw the theory of collective guilt as barbaric. Ezekiel had spoken out against it in the Old Testament (‘the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’); Christ had insisted that each man bore responsibility for his own soul. Convinced that Attlee’s Labour government lacked the will to tighten rations at home in order to increase supplies to Germany, Gollancz wrote an appeal to a series of newspapers in September 1945, signed by prestigious figures including the pacifist bishop George Bell, the MP Eleanor Rathbone and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He described
the conditions in Berlin and the situation of the displaced Germans wandering across the country, and insisted that ‘if we call attention to this vast tragedy, it is certainly not because we fail to realise how grievously our allies are suffering’ but because they saw the European problem as a communal one. He was hopeful that the majority of British people would be prepared to sacrifice some of their own rations for the sake of the Germans and asked anyone prepared to do so to send a postcard to ‘Save Europe Now’.
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A January 1946 ‘Save Europe Now’ (SEN) booklet included an extract from an article by Peter de Mendelssohn in the
Observer
the previous month describing the black and sinister mood in Germany: ‘With the sudden arrival of bitterly cold winter weather, minds and tempers have hardened.’ Many politicians were frightened to support this, worrying that they would be seen as taking food from British housewives to feed German war criminals. But there was a growing number of people in Britain who took Churchill’s line that a starving Germany would be not only a humanitarian disaster but a dangerous moral pestilence. This was the view of the 100,000-or-so people who had sent postcards to ‘Save Europe Now’ by the spring of 1946. It was also the view put forward by Humphrey Jennnings’s
A Defeated People
, which was screened in March and commended in the
Daily Telegraph
for portraying life in the British zone with sympathetic restraint: ‘The tone is agreeably free from gloating, and it would need a much more vindictive race than ours to see without sympathy women cooking amid the ruins and crowds studying huge boards covered with the names of missing persons.’ Jennings’s film displayed compassion that was also evident in a ‘Germany Under Control’ exhibition currently being mounted to open in London in the summer, which aimed to convince the British public of the need to continue to pay for the Occupation of Germany.
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The film and the exhibition were necessary. Many British people were disgruntled when the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in April that the cost of the Occupation of Germany for the forthcoming year would be £80 million. But the messages the public was receiving were mixed. On 4 April 1946 the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin signed a
certificate stating that ‘His Majesty is still in a state of war with Germany’. Questioned by a surprised Control Commission legal advisor, Bevin replied that, ‘no treaty of peace or declaration by the Allied Powers having been made terminating the state of war with Germany, His Majesty is still in a state of war with Germany, although, as provided in the declaration of surrender, all active hostilities have ceased’.

This put the Control Commission in a strange position: apparently the Allies were the supreme governing authority in a country with which they were technically at war. Gollancz continued to campaign on behalf of Germany, urging especially that the British should be allowed to send personal food parcels to help the Germans and that bread rationing should be introduced in Britain. The Labour MP John Strachey, who was appointed Minister of Food in May, agreed in principle about the possibility of food parcels but faced opposition in the Cabinet.
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The American public was generally more prepared than the British to fund the Occupation of Germany. The US had not suffered from a war on the home front; its economy was more stable than Britain’s. And there was more urgent fear in the US that a weak Germany would play into the hands of the Soviet Union. It was this fear that motivated the US secretary of state James Byrnes when the Council of Foreign Ministers established at Potsdam met in Paris in April. Byrnes insisted that the Allies should stop stripping Germany of its assets and instead use German resources on behalf of the country as a whole. The US military governor, General Lucius D. Clay, immediately suspended all reparation seizures in the US zone but none of the other governors followed his lead. Bevin told Clay that the British could not openly emulate the Americans because they did not want to be seen as conniving with the Americans against the Russians. In fact many British officials were not yet ready to suspend reparations; there were still shipyards and dockyards needing to be destroyed if Germany was no longer to present problematic competition in this area.

With the whole question of Germany’s future now a matter for urgent debate, many influential British figures were keen to come to see Germany for themselves. The writer and former MP Harold Nicolson
(husband of the novelist Vita Sackville-West) arrived in Nuremberg on 30 April just as the defence case for Hitler’s minister of economics Hjalmar Schacht began. Nicolson took the trial more seriously than Waugh did, although he felt squeamish at the prospect of comfortably observing the spectacle of men ‘caught like rats in a trap’. As counsellor of the British embassy in Berlin in the 1920s, Nicolson had known some of the senior Nazis personally. Although he had disliked Ribbentrop, he was still unhappy to see him humiliated, while Schacht had been a personal friend. Now like so many other visitors, Nicolson was shocked by the drabness of the defendants: ‘they have the appearance of people who have travelled in a third-class railway carriage for three successive nights’.
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Staying with Birkett in his villa, Nicolson ate trout for breakfast. On his second afternoon he wandered through the Nuremberg ruins which he found were jagged like the old jawbone of a camel in the desert. Glared at by the local inhabitants, Nicolson was aware that if he were a Nuremberger he too would feel ‘nothing but undying hatred for those who had destroyed my lovely city’. At dinner with Biddle (‘an agreeable, social type of American’) he learnt that Birkett and Biddle were hoping that he would write a book about the tribunal. Nicolson was unwilling to do so, but did write an article that was published in the
Spectator
in May stating that his preconceptions of this ‘stupendous trial’ had been incorrect. He had formed a false idea of the atmosphere, underestimating the silences. He had not guessed that the most impressive element of the courtroom would be the pervading sense of calm. While he had expected to find the trial punitive, it had transpired that it was ‘the calm assessment and affirmation of profound human values’. And he was convinced that the tribunal was valuable in setting a judicial precedent and recording the history of National Socialism: ‘In the courtroom at Nuremberg something more important is happening than the trial of a few captured prisoners. The inhuman is being confronted with the humane, ruthlessness with equity, lawlessness with patient justice, and barbarism with civilisation.’
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Nicolson’s piece became part of a conversation about the efficacy of the British intervention in Germany. In June the
New Statesman
published
a letter from Evelyn Waugh deploring ‘the policy of starving the Germans’ and the banning of food parcels. Waugh did not have much time for Gollancz, whom he saw as a hypocritical socialist who had helped create a government that made private charity impossible by nationalising conscience, but he did support the ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign, encouraged by the scenes he had witnessed in Nuremberg. That month competing voices in the press and Parliament called for more or less aid to be given to the defeated nation, while the British in Germany carried out orders by smashing up a series of shipyards and dockyard installations in Hamburg in June and July. Alarmed, the city’s inhabitants complained that this was the Morgenthau Plan in action at last.
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