The Bitter Taste of Victory (33 page)

In fact it transpired that Katherine planned to stay at home in the US, leaving West free to join Biddle as his lover. She set out at dawn on 24 September and found that transport to Nuremberg was typically inefficient. This time West and Joseph Laitin, an American correspondent assigned to Reuters, were deposited by plane in Berlin, where they were told they would have to return to London because the British authorities had no idea how to send them to Nuremberg. West was adept at disobeying orders; she commandeered a car that had been sent
to fetch another correspondent and directed it to take them to the Allied press camp in the Kufürstendamm. Here she arranged a seat on a plane from Berlin to Nuremberg and then set out to survey Berlin.

Like previous visitors, West was struck by the difference between the ruins here and the ones she had seen in Nuremberg. Instead of flattened rubble, there was ‘mile after mile of purged houses scoured by the wind and rain’. She felt no more sympathy for the inhabitants than she had visiting Berlin in the 1930s, complaining to her husband that there was ‘not a smile anywhere’. In her report on the trip for the
New Yorker
, West wrote that she could not weep for the citizens of Berlin because they had brought the situation on themselves. She wept instead for the statues, which could not be expected to know when to come out of the rain, even when it turned into blood. She had admired the statues when they had stood proudly surveying the Tiergarten in the 1930s. Now they were surrounded by barren mud instead of trees and the bellies of the women were scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers; the Empress Victoria had lost her marble veil, hat and head.
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Finally arriving in Nuremberg, West went straight to the Villa Conradti where Biddle was waiting for her. Finding that she was unexpectedly shy in his presence after the intensity of their letters, she explained her awkwardness with tiredness. The next few days were passed waiting for the judges to decide on their verdicts; in the evenings there was the usual round of dinners. On Sunday 29 September, the day before the final judgements, she, Biddle and two colleagues spent the day in Bamberg, a pretty town with a cathedral where they picnicked on a hillside.
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West was now reporting both for the
New Yorker
and for the London
Daily Telegraph.
In an article in the
Telegraph
written to set the scene before the trial resumed, she wrote that the judgement that was about to be delivered had to prove that victors could rise above ordinary human limitations and fairly try the vanquished foes. If successful, the judgement would warn future war-mongers that the law could pursue them into peace. The judgement of the tribunal had the potential to be ‘one of the most important events in the history of civilisation’.
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She told the readers of the
New Yorker
that she had returned to Nuremberg because ‘it was necessary, and really necessary, that a large number of important persons . . . should go to Nuremberg and hear the reading of the judgement’. British public opinion had ‘gone silly about it’ and so there was a need for the influential ‘to talk some sense on the subject’. Certainly, she was one of hundreds to descend on Nuremberg, turning it into a busy international city once again. Most of them were politicians and civil servants but among the other influential journalists was Martha Gellhorn, returning to Germany for the first time in almost a year.
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Since leaving Germany the previous winter, Gellhorn had been wandering between England, Spain, Portugal, Java and the US. She was distracting herself from loneliness by writing a novel, socialising frantically, visiting war zones and buying and doing up a small house in London. Gellhorn had written intermittently to James Gavin who was now stationed at his army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and was desperately missing the excitement of the war. They had met briefly in May, but the visit was a coda to a relationship that had ended in Berlin. Gellhorn made no promises any more and although Gavin’s letters remained insistent and passionate, he was still writing and speaking just as frequently to Marlene Dietrich.

It would be some years before Gellhorn fell in love again. She was now more interested in literature than love; she could rely more steadily on writing than on men. Her German novel, provisionally entitled ‘Point of No Return’, expressed her own mood of disillusionment with both war and love. Writing the book, she had in a sense never left Germany. Throughout the duration of the Nuremberg trial, she had been engaged in forming her own private judgement both on the Nazis and on the soldiers who had fought them. She now wished to return to witness the public judgement as well.

The final stage of the tribunal began on Monday 30 September 1946. West breakfasted early and drove with Biddle to the court. It was a sharp, sunny day which West described in the
Telegraph
as ‘one of those
autumn days which are heavy and golden with the passing of the year, and yet are fresh as if the world had been made that dawn’. As they drove through Nuremberg there were more tanks stationed in the town than usual, but the Germans went by looking at the ground, uninterested in the events playing out in the courtroom. In the Palace of Justice, security measures had increased and women journalists were sent to deposit their handbags in the cloakroom and then left to carry their fountain pens and notebooks around with them, although West (now equipped with a full set of underwear) managed to stow hers in her stockings.
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Sir Geoffrey Lawrence began the morning session by summarising the work of the tribunal and its indictments. Watching the British judge, Gellhorn thought that he looked tired and old but that ‘his voice was a symbol of what all civilised people want and mean by justice – something serene and unafraid and stronger than time’. Lawrence and Birkett went on to list once more the trajectory of Nazi crimes. During the two-hour lunch break, Gellhorn wandered around the ruins of Nuremberg. Once again, she was shocked by the scale of destruction that she encountered. She would describe the bombed old town as a ‘vast rubbish heap’ in
Point of No Return
, where she depicts the bombing of the city from the jaunty perspective of the seasoned soldier: ‘There was nothing small and clinchy about the bombs we were using. The airforce was running a regular bus service over Nürnberg; the noise of the planes was so constant you stopped hearing it.’
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Biddle opened the afternoon session with a recapitulation of the German violation of international treaties and then summarised the tribunal’s understanding of the first charge of the ‘Common Plan or Conspiracy’. Gellhorn observed that Biddle looked away from the defendants when he spoke, not wanting to catch their eyes. This was her first time in the court and she was struck by the general air of pallid exhaustion, patience and determination. She, like all her predecessors, watched the defendants, though she was not as charmed as other correspondents by Göring, who was showing off less cheerfully now that the judgement was approaching. ‘Göring has the ugliest thumbs I have ever seen – possibly also the ugliest mouth,’ Gellhorn wrote in her
notebook. His smile was disassociated from the rest of his face, suggesting that it was merely a habit his lips had acquired. The air-conditioning was on high and she felt permanently frozen, which seemed in keeping with the tone of the judges: ‘it is a cold court – no pity is possible’. But Gellhorn did not want or expect pity. The pitilessness of the Nazis themselves could only be answered by coldness.
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That evening, West and Biddle dined with lawyers and visiting dignitaries while Gellhorn and a group of other correspondents staying in the Faber villa drove into the countryside to find a village pub for a meal. They went to Ansbach where they spoke to a local boy who had been a soldier since he was sixteen. The conversation exacerbated Gellhorn’s fury with the Germans. The boy claimed that the stories of concentration camps were exaggerated propaganda; he had seen people returning from them fat and suntanned. He maintained that the war had been essential because Britain would have attacked them and that the killing of the Jews had been merely a ‘mistake’.

The first of October was the final day of the Nuremberg trial. It was a foggy morning, which made the broken towers and walls of the old town look even more like the scene of a disturbing fairy tale than usual. The day began with the tribunal’s judgements on the individual defendants. This was what the audience was there to hear and Lawrence rose to the occasion with the slow, clear indictment of Göring that began the day. Göring was found guilty on all four charges and Lawrence stated that he was ‘often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader’. The four judges then proceeded to take turns pronouncing judgement on each of the defendants. It was obvious from the verdicts who would be hanged and who might face a more lenient sentence (several were indicted under only two or three counts). However, the defendants had to wait until the afternoon to learn their fate.
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At 14.50 the court reconvened after lunch. The courtroom lights were now dim; the defendants entered through a panel behind the dock and came forward one by one to hear their sentences. Göring was first: for West he had the surprised look of a man in pyjamas who opens the door of his hotel room thinking he is entering a bathroom only to find
himself in a public room. Just as Lawrence began to read out the sentence, it transpired that Göring’s headphones were not working. There was considerable fuss as new ones were found to replace them and then all eyes were on Göring as Lawrence read out: ‘Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring, on the Counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.’

Göring dropped his headphones and walked out of the court, leaving his former conspirators to hear their sentences. Eleven of the accused were condemned to death, seven including Hess and Speer received prison sentences and von Papen, Fritzsche and Schacht were acquitted. The afternoon session lasted forty-seven minutes and was followed by what Gellhorn described as ‘an empty, stunned feeling in the courtroom’. The judges filed out; the trial was over. Justice had been done at last, though Gellhorn found that justice itself now seemed suddenly very small.
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For those present at the tribunal, the verdict was inevitably anti-climactic because no punishment could measure up to the crimes themselves. None the less, the implications for international law were momentous. Fifteen of the twenty-one defendants were found guilty of committing ‘crimes against humanity’ and all of these were sentenced to death or imprisonment. The best legal minds in the world were agreed that there was credible evidence that crimes against humanity as defined in the charter had been committed and could be punished by law. This marked the establishment of the principle that human rights were legally enforceable and that the civilised nations of the world had the duty to bring to justice state agents who authorised the torture and genocide of their own citizens and those of other states.
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The implications for Germany were also significant. By punishing the Nazi leaders and making clear what they were being punished for, the Allies had demonstrated exactly why the Germans needed to feel remorse for their crimes and how they were required to change. The trial had been an exercise in looking backwards, aimed at making it possible to look forwards. It would now be easier for all four Allies to reconceive the Germans as subjects rather than prisoners.

West’s
Telegraph
articles reporting on the final stages of the trial were published immediately on 1 and 2 October. She wrote enthusiastically about the future implications of the proceedings and about the judges themselves. She portrayed Biddle as ‘a recognisable product of the Eastern seaboard, the stock that gave us so many Americans like Henry James and William James, that took English subtlety abroad and gave it the support of new vigour’. Describing each of the defendants, West found that there was not a coward among them. A mercy had been conferred upon Göring who, partly because of the broken headphones, had appeared in the end not so much ‘the most evil of men’ as simply a man bravely sustaining the burden of fear. She was dismissive of anyone in England who criticised the tribunal, suggesting that it had made the law to suit itself. ‘Let us not discount our own achievements. The law tries to keep up with life. It never quite succeeds but it is never very far behind.’
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The German newspapers too reported respectfully on the judgement. ‘The judges have spoken – the world breathes a sigh of relief’ announced the caption of a cartoon in the British-licensed
Telegraf
, depicting Siegfried standing over a slain dragon with swastikas for teeth. The
Telegraf
’s reporter Arno Scholtz was impressed that the Allies had decided to acquit some of the defendants but found none the less that the German people had a different view of these men ‘who had led them through a sea of suffering and tears into chaos’. Scholz suggested that the German people should demand to be allowed to try these men themselves, as did the reporter in the US-licensed
Tagesspiegel
.
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