The Bitter Taste of Victory (32 page)

Shawcross went on to quote Goethe, who had prophesised that one day fate would strike the German people, ‘because they betrayed themselves and did not want to be what they are. It is sad that they do not know the charm of truth, that mist, smoke and berserk immoderation are so dear to them, pathetic that they ingenuously submit to any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationalism as isolation and brutality.’ Goethe had spoken prophetically; the ‘mad scoundrels’ in the dock had done these very things and now the hope of future international co-operation depended on bringing retribution to these guilty men.
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Shawcross should have checked his sources more carefully. Within a few days, the press was commenting that these were not in fact Goethe’s words but were attributed to him by Thomas Mann in his 1939 novel
Lotte in Weimar
. If Erika Mann had still been at the trial she could have lectured the British lawyers on questions of German literature. Instead the British Foreign Office cabled Washington asking the embassy to contact Thomas Mann in California and find out the source of the quote. Amused and flattered, Mann replied that ‘the quoted words do not appear literally in Goethe’s writings or conversations’ but were written in his spirit: ‘although he never spoke them, he might well have done so’. It is appropriate that Mann should be quoted indirectly at the tribunal; writing
Doctor Faustus
in California he was busy indicting his countrymen as forcefully as the Nuremberg prosecutors.
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On 6 August, Rebecca West returned home to Ibstone. Biddle wrote to his wife that he missed his new companion, who had been a ‘gay and amusing wench’. West was pleased about her own renewal but also saddened by the rediscovery of embodiment. ‘I’m fifty-three and I might as well put the shutters up,’ she wrote to her friend Emanie Arling. ‘I had, but he made me take them down.’ Home-returned-to seemed dreary and monotonous. Her sadness was compounded by the
death of H. G. Wells on 13 August. Wells had been one of the two central men in West’s life. She had lost her virginity to him, borne his child and loved him for the twenty years of their affair. Arguably Wells had both discovered and formed her. He had not always been strong enough for her; he was the first of many lovers who had pursued her urgently only to flee once she had succumbed, frightened by the intensity of her love. But he had recognised her as passionate, brilliant and unique. ‘I had never met anything like her before, and I doubt if there was anything like her before,’ he once wrote. She now found that their troubled past took on the quality of a story she had learnt from a book; what remained was her affection:

Dear HG, he was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for thirty-four years, we should never have met, I was the one person he cared to see to the end, I feel desolate because he has gone.
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Now, reliving those years, West aligned Wells with her new lover in her mind. Both were ultimately loyal to wives on whose day-to-day comfort they depended while passionately desiring West. Katherine seemed as conniving as Wells’s wife Jane and West was furious about the indulgence with which Biddle had treated his wife’s denial of sex. It was all the more galling that West herself should have ended up with a husband who gave her loyalty without desire. She had in effect become one of the entitled but betrayed wives she despised, while also remaining the mistress who had nothing. She wondered if her husband’s rejection of her as a woman had done more to destroy her life than Wells’s rejection of her as a potential wife. ‘Oh God, what a world!’ she cried out, pacing the house, thinking of Nuremberg, pausing between paces to cry out ‘Francis!’
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Meanwhile Biddle was writing West loving letters, describing his villa as haunted by her absence. He was trying to hear her laugh but could no longer recall the way she said ‘lovely, Francis, lovely!’ Missing her and wanting her, he realised what a joy it had been to be involved with a woman who liked doing exactly what he wished but never quite
surrendered. Between court sessions he was writing a memoir of their love. Biddle urged West to return to Nuremberg, assuring her that his feelings for her were growing and were no mere manifestation of nerves. He dreamt continually of her appearing before him in bare feet. West’s letters too were direct and passionate. ‘I come to breakfast, full of you, in my body and your stars in my eyes,’ she wrote, offering that she could be ‘anywhere that anybody who wanted to see me wanted me to be’.
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Biddle was sent West’s draft report for the
New Yorker
for his comments. ‘It is awfully good, I think,’ he responded; ‘digs deep, catches the quality and essential, says good things inevitably.’ While composing the report, West had told Emanie Arling that she found it impossible to formulate anything that did not give her away. ‘I want to write nothing. I want to live and I have left it too long’.

The resulting article does indeed give West away, obliquely and brilliantly. Her description of the judges’ bench begins with Biddle, whom she portrays as ‘a highly intelligent swan, occasionally flexing down to commune with a smaller waterfowl’, Lawrence. West describes the trial as creating a climate where love can flourish amid the tedium. ‘Doubtless the life of the heart is lived in Nuremberg as well as anywhere else,’ she states disingenuously, before describing the corridors of the Palace of Justice as paced by ‘an image of Eros’. This is a dog marbled in black and white who waits for its master in a posture of ‘inconsolable widowhood’; when his beloved returns the dog lurches after him, repeating with its ears and tail lines from Euripides: ‘Oh, Love, Love, thou that from thine eyes diffusest yearning and on the soul sweet grace induces.’
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West explained to her editor that she had brought in the dog because she could think of no other way of politely expressing the emotional state of Nuremberg. In her letter she added that in fact everybody in Nuremberg was ‘either in love with someone who isn’t there or is in love with someone who is there but finds it difficult to do anything about it, for housing reasons’. Biddle had told West that he wondered if ‘the dog hung a little out of your frame, even if it led to the corridor of sex. You would know better.’ He was more moved by a subtler
reference to their time together. At the end of the article West describes the landscape in which she and her lover wandered and kissed. She portrays it as disconcerting in its loveliness, suggesting that it acts as a kind of protestation of innocence for the German people as a whole: ‘Where the pine trees rise from the soft, reddish bed of scented pine needles, and dragonflies draw patterns of iridescence above the cloudy green trout stream, and the miller’s little blond son plays with the gray kitten among the meadowsweet by the edges of the millpond, there can surely be no harm.’ These were the fields and woods in which Biddle still walked daily, imagining West alongside him, remembering their times together. ‘The dragonflies made me catch my breath,’ he told her.
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West’s article is perhaps most compelling in its description of the defendants themselves, who emerge from her account with a physicality that makes them at once more human and more frightening than they seem in previous reports. She evokes the greyness that Laura Knight depicted in her painting: they are ‘neither dark nor fair’, there is ‘no leanness that does not sag and no plumpness that seems more than inflation by some thin gas’. Streicher she sees as ‘a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks’; Speer is likeable but has a baboonish quality in his sharp, dark face that seems to explain how he forgot himself and used his art to serve the Nazis. Göring is the most vivid figure in the piece, emerging as far more colourful a character than the frighteningly gloomy figure in Knight’s painting. His primary quality, West finds, is softness. His loose-hanging clothes give him an air of pregnancy; the coarse, bright skin of an actor who has used greasepaint for decades combined with the deep wrinkles of the drug addict give him the head of a ventriloquists’s dummy. Because over the years the public has heard so much about Göring’s love affairs, his appearance seems to make ‘a pointed but obscure reference to sex’. But he looks neither like a womaniser nor a homosexual; instead he appears more like the madam of a brothel. And his wide and wooden lips sometimes smack together in smiling appetite: ‘If he were given the chance, he would walk out of the Palace of Justice, take over Germany again, and turn it into a stage for the enactment of his governing fantasy, which is
so strong that it fills the air around him with its images, so madly private that those images are beyond the power of those who see them to interpret them.’

West’s report, like Knight’s painting, bears witness to a moment of transition. The defendants in the dock have lost all authority and are wreathed in death. As in George Orwell’s account, they have ceased to be monsters now that they are captured under lock and key. This was a peculiar juncture in the history of Nazism. Lee Miller could bathe in Hitler’s bath; Göring could try to persuade Hess to share his biscuit during the trial. Most of the accounts from this time testify to the strangeness of witnessing the human frailty of the former leaders. Yet the horror of the camps was already almost mythological in its gruesome details, meaning that the Nazis were evolving from human politicians to evil fairy-tale figures. Even as she made notes on their physical characteristics, West was aware that these men were soon to become historical names. And they seemed to her to be visibly receding from the field of existence, praying no longer for life, just for the proceedings at Nuremberg to continue in all their tedium: ‘Let this trial never finish, let it go on forever and ever, without end.’

10

‘The law tries to keep up with life’

Judgement: September–October 1946

The trial did not in fact go on forever, though it seemed to many onlookers as though it might. On 31 August 1946 the court adjourned for three weeks to give the judges time to make their decisions. It was apparent from the outset that this was going to be an acrimonious process, primarily because the French wished the term ‘conspiracy’ to be taken out of the final judgement and the Russians, who were more concerned with vengeance than justice, did not think that any of the defendants should be acquitted.

Originally, the judges intended to reach a decision by 23 September but on the seventeenth they decided to postpone the verdict for a week. Although the four judges remained largely intransigent in their opinions, there were occasional minor concessions. Biddle had begun by demanding the death sentence for Speer but he now changed his mind, accepting twenty years of imprisonment. By the end of September the judges had agreed their verdicts on all except Franz von Papen (Ambassador to Austria at the time of the
Anschluss
), Hans Fritzsche (
Ministerialdirektor
in the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda) and Schacht, whom the British, Americans and French agreed should be acquitted on the grounds that their crimes were domestic rather than international and therefore fell outside the court’s jurisdiction, making it impossible for their guilt to be proven beyond
reasonable doubt. On 29 September, Nikitchenko confessed to Biddle that he had been instructed by Moscow publicly to dissent from these verdicts. After more debate, Lawrence agreed that he would refer to the Soviet opposition in his final summing up.

By now, Rebecca West was back in Nuremberg, where she had arrived on 26 September. Biddle had been attempting to arrange her return for the previous two months. Initially he was unsure whether his wife Katherine was planning to join him but wanted West to come anyway and stay in the Villa Conradti as their guest. West was unhappy about this idea; she had done her time as the supposed family friend during her relationship with Wells. She also found the elaborate precautions Biddle took to avoid discovery tedious and insulting. West was instructed to write additional, politely friendly letters to her lover so that he had something to show his wife as a subterfuge and a complex code was developed for their telegrams. It was hard not to see his carefulness as a form of rejection. He did not want her enough to take any risks. They quarrelled about this and Biddle attempted to reassure her of his love. ‘I think we complicate things,’ he told her, though surely the complication was largely on his side; ‘our relationship is so simple – and so sweet.’ More movingly he listed his imaginings of a shared life yet to be lived – ‘we have never except once listened to music together, or walked on an unending beach, or seen the sun set over the painted desert, or New York at night, or read aloud, or punted on the Thames, or danced or tried to quarrel’ – and wrote with sadness of the narrowing of his life in her absence. ‘I said to you once before that you opened vistas. I don’t want them to close. I do not want to go back to a smaller life.’
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