by Ian Buruma
China was neither exotic nor unusual in this respect. Similar people’s courts sprung up wherever communists took control. The Hungarian writer Sándor Márai was in Budapest when the Hungarian “antifascists” appointed by the Soviet Red Army came to power in 1945. This was not yet a communist regime. Stalin decided that a gradual takeover would be better; he didn’t wish to startle the Western Allies too soon. Elections were held in November in which the communists did not do well. But the Soviets decided who would serve in the government anyway, and the communists, in the words of their leader Mátyás Rákosi, cut off their rivals “like slices of salami” until 1949, when the People’s Republic of Hungary finally came into being.
Budapest in 1945 had been badly damaged in the siege by Soviet and Romanian troops which had lasted for several months. The Royal Palace was a wreck, electricity was down, telephones didn’t work, bridges had collapsed into the Danube like wounded steel monsters. Food was scarce. Strangers would walk into people’s houses, expecting to be fed, or just to make trouble (to express their “hatred,” wrote Márai). Rich bourgeois homes were popular targets for popular anger. A new set of authorities had taken over the old torture chambers of the fascist Arrow Cross, and gangsters raced through the potholed streets in imported American cars. Márai noted a strangely feverish activity in town, which only later changed into a sullen listlessness. He wrote in his memoir that “dishonesty spread like the bubonic plague.” Law and justice, he said, “did not exist anywhere, but People’s Tribunals were already operating, and political executions afforded daily entertainment to the unemployed rabble, as in the time of Caligula in Rome.”2
Since 1920, in the absence of the king, Hungary had been under the reign of Admiral Miklós Horthy, officially His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary. This peculiar arrangement followed one year of Communist Party rule in 1919, under Béla Kun. White Terror followed Red Terror. Horthy, a very reactionary figure, though not exactly a fascist, had a lifelong horror of communism, which he, like many others, tended to associate with Jews, whom he disliked but not to the extent of wishing them all dead. He foolishly formed an alliance with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, but balked when Hitler asked for his assistance in the Holocaust. Hungarian Jews were harassed but were shielded from mass murder until 1944, when the Germans decided to take things in hand and invaded the country. German armies were being decimated in the Soviet Union, with supply lines overstretched, materiel in short supply, and transportation routes cut off by enemy forces. But in a show of where true Nazi priorities lay, more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were deported with ruthless efficiency. Most were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Horthy was forced to step down and the fiercely anti-Semitic Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi ruled for 163 days with great brutality, offering Adolf Eichmann, officially in charge of the Final Solution in Budapest, all the help he needed.
The antifascist regime in 1945 made it clear that the entire Arrow Cross government would have to be tried, and execution was a foregone conclusion. A common factor in people’s justice was that the outcome of the trials was rarely in doubt. This was not just a matter for the people’s tribunal itself. The press too had to play its part. Béla Imrédy, a former banker turned Jew-baiter and prime minister in 1938, was described during his trial by a well-known journalist as “a spindly gnome, fumbling about in terror,” “a pitifully despicable figure,” “wriggling like a grey lizard under the weight of evidence.”3 It should be said that the Western press was often no less lurid when it came to prosecuting Nazis.
A Hungarian legal expert made it clear what the real purpose of the people’s trials was. It was not to try and punish the war criminals for “simple breaches of the law,” but “to retaliate against them for the political mistakes they made . . .”4 The courts consisted of Party people and trade unionists, led by professional judges. Sometimes the professionals, especially in the court of appeal, called the National Council of People’s Courts, were criticized for being too lenient. The communist paper Szabad Nép cried out that “the professional judges sitting in the Council have completely forgotten that they are the people’s judges. The people do not play around with documents; they do not look for mitigating circumstances in the case of war criminals but demand merciless retaliation against those who are responsible for their misery, suffering, and humiliation.”5
The past, too, was placed firmly under control of the new order, which, to repeat, was Soviet-controlled but not yet a communist regime. Judges held some of the defendants, such as László Bárdossy, prime minister in 1941, responsible for crushing “democracy” in 1919. What had been crushed was, in fact, Béla Kun’s communist dictatorship of the proletariat, which had its own forms of thuggishness and summary justice. It wasn’t just men, however, who were on trial, but the system they represented. László Budinszky, the minister of justice in the Arrow Cross government, was sentenced to death because, according to the National Council, “twenty-five years of an oppressive ruling system” had “brought the country to the brink of destruction.”6
In terms of numbers, Hungary was actually not among the harshest nations. More than 57,000 people were prosecuted for collaboration in Belgium.7 In the Netherlands 50,000 collaborators were sentenced.8 In Hungary it was closer to 27,000. In Greece, 48,956 people were held in prison by the end of 1945. But they were all leftists.
Greece is the best example of a country where both communists and anticommunists abused trials for political ends, occasionally even at the same time. People’s Courts were set up already in 1943, in areas liberated by the left-wing National People’s Liberation Army, the military arm of the National Liberation Front, controlled by communists. The courts were part of the effort to set up a socialist state in occupied Greece. People’s Courts, consisting of ELAS fighters and other “comrades”—farmers, truck drivers, and the like—dealt with criminals, war criminals, and collaborators.9 Sentences tended to be severe. Many people were executed, after a quick trial, or sometimes without any trial, by the guerrillas.
The most common crime in rural Greece appears to have been cattle thieving. In the village of Deskati, in central Greece, the guerrillas were too busy to deal with cattle thieves, however. Villagers were simply told that cattle thieving had to stop, since “we have no prisons or exiles to detain thieves. If one of you is caught stealing, he will just tell us what he prefers that we cut, his head or his feet. The decision is yours.”10 Apparently this was effective. The thieving, in Deskati at any rate, stopped. The People’s Court did deal with the curious case of a young man, who declared his love to one girl, but then proposed to marry another. The court gave him a stark choice, marry the first girl or be executed. He hesitated until the very last minute before deciding that he would rather live.
People’s Courts were merciless to collaborators. This meant policemen and gendarmes who worked for the Germans, promoters of fascism, Slavic-speakers in Macedonia who cooperated with the Bulgarian efforts to slice off a chunk of Greek territory, or class enemies who stood in the way of the revolution. When Greece was liberated from the Germans in the spring of 1944, there was a short period when it was run by a Government of National Unity, but even after that government established official courts to prosecute collaborators, People’s Courts continued to function in certain areas well into 1945. That Greece had two distinct legal systems, one official one with only limited authority, the other unofficial but with more territory under its control, shows how little consensus there was about political legitimacy. There was no Greek General de Gaulle to patch things over between communists and conservatives, between royalists and liberals. The scars of war were too raw, the rifts ran too deep.
Some efforts were made by the official government courts to try top wartime collaborators, such as the Greek prime ministers under the Germans, but the trials were slow, and frequently awkward. The quisling prime ministers claimed patriotism, as quislings always do, as their reason f
or staying in office. Indeed, they said, with some evidence, they had been told to stay in their posts to make the best of an appalling situation by the Greek government in exile. The head of the exiled government was none other than the first post-Liberation prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, whose son and grandson would later serve as prime ministers too.
More violent collaborators, such as the vicious Security Battalions, were hardly prosecuted at all. In fact, after the so-called Varkiza Agreement was signed in February 1945, compelling the left to lay down its arms in anticipation of a national referendum about the future government, the Greek world turned topsy-turvy. Former right-wing collaborators, who refused to hand in their weapons, terrorized everyone they suspected of left-wing sympathies. People were arrested, and sometimes shot, just for having been part of a People’s Court. This time the state within the state was run by rightist militias beyond the government’s control. Since the police were mostly on the side of the right, courts could not rely on them to arrest former collaborators. Instead, old partisans and their supporters were beaten up, tortured, and jailed by armed men who had worked for the Germans. For every former collaborator in prison in 1945, there were ten supporters of ELAS.
An ex-partisan named Panayiotis gave up his gun in February 1945. A few weeks later he was picked up by former members of a Security Battalion, taken to a nearby school, suspended upside down, beaten with rifle butts. They then whipped his bare feet to a pulp so that he had to crawl all the way to his house. Still, he mused from his later home in Australia, he had been lucky “to be the victim only of the first flood of Fascist revenge,” for he “missed the second flood when the Fascists sentenced thousands to death in their courts.”11 Liberation in Greece, then, was not the end of civil strife and the seemingly endless cycles of vengeance, but the beginning of much worse to come.
• • •
ALMOST TWO AND A HALF thousand years before, Athens was the setting for Aeschylus’s great tragedy the Eumenides. It is all about a murder case. Orestes had killed his mother to avenge her slaying of his father. These foul deeds set off the furies of vengeance, the agents of an eye for an eye to see that justice was done. Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and the city’s patroness, convinced Orestes to submit to a trial. Only through rational argument in a court of law, she told him, could the furies of vengeance be pacified. But even rational argument in court does not always lead to a clear conclusion; the jury was tied, and so it was up to Athena’s divine judgment to let Orestes go. But the furies were indeed calmed by her decision:
And never more these walls within
Shall echo fierce sedition’s din,
Unslaked with blood and crime;
The thirsty dust shall never more
Suck up the darkly streaming gore
Of civic broils, shed out in wrath
And vengeance, crying death for death!12
Not much has changed since Athena watched over her great city. Ending the cycle of vengeance is still the best reason for conducting trials. But one problem with trials after a war, or the fall of a dictatorship, is that there are too many potential defendants. Stalin was perhaps indulging in one of his dark little jokes when he told Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 that fifty thousand German officers should be shot out of hand. Churchill, apparently, was not amused and stomped out of the room in a fury. But Stalin had a point. Even if there is no such thing as collective guilt, there are far more guilty people than can possibly be tried. Yet justice must be seen to be done. This does not mean that individuals put on trial for crimes committed by thousands, and abetted by millions, are scapegoats. But there are cases where people are tried symbolically, as it were, because others cannot be put on trial, because they are too numerous, or out of reach, or protected for political reasons.
One of the worst Japanese war criminals was a medical doctor named Ishii Shiro, an arrogant loner who first made a name for himself as the inventor of a water filtering system. He once startled the Japanese emperor at a demonstration of his device by urinating into his filtered water and inviting His Majesty to take a sip. The emperor politely declined. Ishii was also an early and rather obsessive promoter of bacteriological and chemical warfare. In 1936 the Imperial Army gave him permission to build a vast secret facility near Harbin in Manchukuo, where he could experiment to his heart’s content. Not only did Ishii, and his able staff of Unit 731, including a microbiologist named Kitano Masaji, experiment with bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases, but thousands of prisoners were used for anything that took the doctors’ fancy. The human guinea pigs, mostly Chinese, but also Russians and even a few American POWs, were known as “logs,” or “monkeys.” Some were exposed to freezing experiments, some were hung upside down to see how long it would take before they choked, some were cut open without anesthesia and had organs removed, and some were injected with lethal germs. Another specialty of Unit 731 was to infect large numbers of rats with deadly bacteria and drop them over Chinese cities together with thousands of fleas in porcelain bombs suspended from little parachutes.
The “water filtering facility” near Harbin was destroyed by the retreating Japanese, along with the remaining prisoners in the summer of 1945, just before the Soviet Red Army arrived. The ruins now contain a “patriotic museum” with waxworks of Ishii and his colleagues conducting live vivisections. Ishii, Kitano, and some others actually made it back to Japan. More junior doctors were captured by the Soviets, who put them on trial for war crimes. Even as General MacArthur promised to try Japanese war criminals (always excepting the emperor himself), Ishii quickly disappeared from sight. He managed to convince his interrogators, led by Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s “pet fascist,” that the data culled from his experiments in China would be of great interest to the U.S. Army. Willoughby was convinced that the human experiments, not as readily available to U.S. doctors, had produced vital information. There was considerable worry that the Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. in this type of research, and, as a U.S. Army medical specialist later wrote in a memo to State Department officials, human experiments were better than animal experiments, and since “any war crimes trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interest of defense and national security of the US.”13
Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro died peacefully in Tokyo in 1959. The commissioner of his funeral was his deputy and later successor at Unit 731, Lieutenant General Kitano Masaji. Kitano, an expert in blood experiments, went on to head Green Cross Corporation, the first commercial blood bank in Japan. There are few traces left by these men, except for the ruins of the prison labs near Harbin, and one curious monument found in a disused rat cellar in China, erected by Kitano in honor of the rodents he dissected for research purposes.
• • •
THE FIRST WAR CRIME TRIAL in the Pacific War theater was that of General Yamashita Tomoyuki, also known (respectfully in Japan, fearfully elsewhere) as “the Tiger of Malaya.” General Yamashita actually spent very little time in Malaya, but he had earned his sobriquet by taking Singapore in February 1942 against a much superior force; thirty thousand Japanese against more than one hundred thousand British and Commonwealth troops. The humiliating scene of Yamashita facing Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with the Japanese general demanding an immediate answer to his question whether Percival would surrender, “yes or no!”, can still be seen as a waxwork tableau in the amusement park on Singapore’s Sentosa Island.
The wartime prime minister, General Tojo, who disliked and distrusted Yamashita, perhaps because of the latter’s superior military skills, or perhaps because of Yamashita’s skepticism about Japan’s war with the Western powers, whisked him away from Southeast Asia and sidelined him in Manchukuo, where he had no chance to shine on any battlefield. Yamashita was dispatched back to the region only after Tojo lost power in 1944. He was handed the thankless task of defending t
he Philippines after it had become indefensible.
At his trial during the fall of 1945, Yamashita was accused of permitting one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II: the Massacre of Manila.
There was no dispute about the events. Trapped in Manila by advancing U.S. forces in February 1945, more than twenty thousand Japanese, mostly from the Imperial Japanese Navy, were ordered to fight to the death and to lay as much of the Philippine capital to waste as they could while they were at it. After plunging into the ample supplies of beer and rice wine put at their disposal, the troops went on an orgy of violence. Women of all ages were raped and murdered. Babies and children were smashed against walls or ripped apart with bayonets. Men were mutilated for sport and massacred. Hospitals were raided and patients burned alive. Houses and buildings were torched. And all the while, the city was being bombarded and shelled by U.S. tanks and howitzers while Japanese fought off American attacks using flamethrowers and bazookas. After one month of mayhem, Manila was a flaming ruin. The devastation was on a par with that of Warsaw, and up to one hundred thousand Filipinos were murdered in this extended bloody spree.
Manila had been General Douglas MacArthur’s stamping grounds before the war. His rooms at the Manila Hotel had been badly damaged in the carnage. He recorded his state of shock as he watched the attack on the hotel from a distance: “Suddenly the penthouse blazed into flame. They had fired it. I watched, with indescribable feelings, the destruction of my fine military library, my souvenirs, my personal belongings of a lifetime . . . I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”14
