by Ian Buruma
• • •
ONE THING TO BE SAID about the twenty-one defendants at Nuremberg is that they did not look like beasts. Observers remarked how utterly ordinary they appeared, these pale, tired figures in their ragged suits: Joachim von Ribbentrop, chin raised and eyes shut in a show of wounded dignity; Hermann Goering slumped in his chair, using his handkerchief to wipe spittle from his smirking lips; Hans Frank hiding his eyes behind dark glasses; Fritz Sauckel, the slave labor chief, looking like a timid concierge; Hjalmar Schacht turning away from the others as though in fear of contamination; and Julius Streicher twitching and fidgeting. Rudolf Hess, rocking back and forth, his eyes staring madly under his thick eyebrows, did look rather strange, but he was quite possibly demented.
There was only one man in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, apart from some of the witnesses, who had felt the full force of what these men had engineered. Few would have known his name, or even noticed his presence among the hundreds of lawyers, translators, court clerks, judges, military policemen, and journalists. Ernst Michel was a junior reporter for a German press agency. Next to his byline it said 104995, his number as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Michel was still a schoolboy when he was arrested in his hometown of Mannheim, Germany, in 1939 simply for being a Jew.
Just before the Soviet troops arrived at the Auschwitz camp, Michel was forced to go on a deadly march across the icy borderlands of Poland and Germany to Buchenwald. When the U.S. Army approached Buchenwald, he was marched off again, weighing eighty pounds. Somehow, he found the strength to make a dash for the woods, and survived for some time in the Soviet zone, covering his concentration camp garb for fear that people might find out that he was a Jew. Back in Mannheim at long last, he discovered that his parents had been murdered. All his relatives had disappeared as well. Since he had some high school English, he was given a job by American war crime investigators as an interpreter. He told me in New York City, “Germans always said they had helped the Jews. The hell they had! I even knew one of the people who said this, and he was a real Nazi.”
Michel’s next job was as a reporter at the Nuremberg trial. Anxious about his lack of professional qualifications, he was told just to write down what he saw. So there he was, six months after escaping a death march from Buchenwald, Auschwitz prisoner no. 104995, in the same room as Goering. He recalled in New York, more than six decades later: “I knew all their faces. And I was a free man, the only survivor to attend the trial. They were talking about me.”
This is what Ernst Michel wrote in his first dispatch for the German news agency, the Deutsche Allgemeine Nachrichtenagentur:
Often in those difficult hours in the camp I had been sustained by the faith that there would be a day when those responsible for this regime would be called before the bar. This faith gave me strength to keep going. Today this day is here. Today, only a few feet away from me, are the men who for all prisoners in the camps were symbols of destruction and who are now being tried for their deeds.48
No matter how flawed the Allied war crimes tribunals may have been—and flawed they certainly were, in Tokyo even more than in Nuremberg—Michel’s statement could serve as an argument why they were just nonetheless. The other thing to be said in Nuremberg’s favor is that the trial was, for the most part, extraordinarily boring. Rebecca West, who was there for the last few weeks before the verdicts, described the Palace of Justice as “a citadel of boredom.” Everybody, she wrote, “within its walk was in the grip of extreme tedium . . . this was boredom on a huge historic scale. A machine was running down, a great machine, by which mankind, in spite of its infirmity of purpose and its frequent desire for death, has defended its life.”49
At least, in Nuremberg, the law was taken seriously. This was not a quick trial driven by popular rage. Everything had to take its course, and so it went on, and on, and on, turning boredom into a sign of probity. Later trials, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, would be molded in Nuremberg’s image, in this respect above all. Tedium spiked the guns of vengeance. That was the whole point. Already in 1942, the Inter-Allied Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes was established by nine governments-in-exile in London. The Declaration of St. James’s, named after the palace where they met, was written with the danger in mind of “acts of vengeance on the part of the general public.” Which was why “the sense of justice of the civilized world” demanded that the free governments “place among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes.”50
Awareness of the Nazi genocide of the Jews may still have been low at the time of the Nuremberg trials. But it was certainly not absent. In December 1942, just months after the gas chambers in the death camps began their operations, the German government was accused by the U.S. and European Allies of “a bestial policy of extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.” That this didn’t yet resonate fully with the public had the following reasons: what was happening was still unimaginable, and neither the U.S. nor British governments saw fit to give it much publicity; they did not want people to think that the war was fought to save the Jews.51
Although the Soviet Union had not joined the Western Allies in their condemnation of the Jewish genocide in 1942, and long after the war still chose to speak of victims of fascism without specific reference to the Jews, the Soviet prosecutors did mention it during the Nuremberg trials. General Roman A. Rudenko, one of five chief prosecutors at Nuremberg, had carried out bloody show trials himself, and was not above spreading mendacious propaganda at Nuremberg, such as blaming the Germans for murdering more than twenty thousand Polish officers in the woods of Katyn in 1940, knowing full well that the massacre had, in fact, been perpetrated by the Soviet secret police. But about the nature of the Jewish genocide, he left no doubt. Ernst Michel quoted Rudenko’s speech in one of his dispatches: “The fascist conspirators planned the extermination to the last man of the Jewish population of the world and carried out the extermination throughout the whole of their activity from 1933 onwards. The bestial destruction of the Jewish people took place in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.”52
This was in fact a slight exaggeration; the extermination began in 1941, not 1933. Rudenko probably used the earlier date to stress the notion of a Nazi conspiracy, not just to kill the Jews, but to wage an aggressive war against the Soviet Union.
Since existing war crime laws, as already noted in the Belsen trial, applied only to acts of war, new ones had to be devised to cover the Third Reich before 1939, and for the systematic extermination of a people. That laws against killing Jews, or other innocent civilians, had not existed in Nazi Germany could not be allowed as an excuse. Nor were superior orders accepted as a valid reason for taking part in mass murder. The new legal category, “crimes against humanity,” laid down in the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal of August 1945, broadened the concept of war crimes. Another legal novelty was “crimes against peace,” meaning the planning and execution of an aggressive war. The planning preceded the actual warfare. This is where the idea of conspiracy came in. In Anglo-American law, people can be found guilty of conspiring to commit crimes. This law was applied to the Nazis (and later, on far more dubious grounds, to the Japanese military and government as well).
Sentencing people for breaking laws that were made after the crimes were actually committed is legally questionable. Submitting defendants from a defeated nation to the judgment of the victors is also vulnerable to criticism. Conducting the Tokyo Trials in 1946, as though wartime Japan had been the Asian mirror image of Nazi Germany, led to great distortions as well. Ernst Jünger, the right-wing nationalist writer, saw a great moral danger in making scoundrels into the victims of injustice. He described the Nuremberg court as one “consisting of murderers and puritans, their butcher’s knives held by moral handles.”53
But then Jünger, as an unreconstructed German nationalist whose con
tempt for the Americans more than matched his hatred of Soviet bolshevism, would say that. On balance, it was better to have held the trials, even if presided over by bloodstained or puritanical judges, than to have done what Churchill, Hull, and Kennan had suggested. Summary executions would have put the Allied victors on the same moral plane as the vanquished Nazis. Even though most Germans recognized the merits of the Nuremberg trials only later, when the bitterness of defeat had subsided and life was more secure, the trials provided a model for Germans to try Nazi war criminals themselves. That the Japanese didn’t follow suit had many reasons: victors’ justice was more blatant in Tokyo, more mistakes were made, the war itself was not perceived in the same manner, and there was no Nazi regime, no Holocaust, no Hitler.
So was justice done? Were the purges and trials enough to ensure that justice was seen to be done? The answer has to be no; too many criminals walked free, some to have flourishing careers, while others with far less guilt were punished as scapegoats. But total justice, even in the most favorable circumstances, is a utopian ideal. It would have been impossible to carry out, for both practical and political reasons. You cannot try millions of people. Punishment of the guilty had to be balanced by other interests. Too much zeal would have made the rebuilding of societies impossible. Too little effort to call the worst criminals to account would undermine any sense of decency. It was a delicate calibration that would inevitably be flawed. To grow up in Germany after the war, with ex-Nazis as teachers, doctors, university professors, diplomats, industrialists, and politicians, must have been galling. And not just in Germany or Japan. In many countries that had suffered German occupation, the old elites who came to terms with the Third Reich rarely fell very far from their high perches after the Nazis had left.
But perhaps the opportunism of man is sometimes his most useful quality. In June 1945, the former resistance fighter in Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, discussed this very matter with a close friend, another brave resister. Her friend, Frank, said:
The Führer is dead. If you want to live you must eat. If you want to eat, and eat well, you’d better not be a Nazi. So they aren’t Nazis. Therefore they weren’t Nazis and they swear by all that’s holy that they’ve never been . . . Denouncing and condemning don’t help in the perfection of men. Help them get up when they’ve fallen. Give them a chance to atone for their sins. And then no more reprisals. Once and for all.54
That these words came from a man who had risked his life to resist the Nazis gives them moral weight. The same opportunism that made the banker accommodate himself to a murderous regime, financing companies that exploited slaves and set up factories near the death camps, could make him a loyal citizen of the postwar German democracy and an agent of its reconstruction. This may be unjust, even morally repellent. And Germany, as well as Japan, and even Italy, eventually paid a price. All three nations were plagued in the 1970s by revolutionary extremists whose acts of violence were inspired by a zealous conviction that their countries had never changed, that fascism was still alive in a different guise, carried on by some of the same people who had waged war in the 1940s. They believed it was their duty to resist, precisely because their parents had once failed to do so.
Robert H. Jackson, another of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg (and a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), was far from a revolutionary extremist. But he was convinced that the trial was more than an exercise in establishing guilt and punishing the guilty. He believed that he was speaking for civilization. The world would be a better place after Nuremberg. In his opening statement, he proudly claimed: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.” But it was of the future that he was thinking when he added: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well.”55
Jackson was an idealist. The trials were part of an effort to build a better world, where the horrors of the past would never be repeated. After the trial was finally over, Jackson, accompanied by the British barrister Peter Calvocoressi, took a trip to Salzburg to attend the first music festival held there since 1939. They heard Der Rosenkavalier, and were particularly impressed by a young German singer named Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who sang beautifully.
The great soprano actually had a small cloud hovering over her head; she had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1940, had performed recitals for SS officers on the eastern front, and had been romantically linked to an SS general and Nazi governor of Lower Austria. Perhaps she had done all these things out of conviction. Perhaps she was an opportunist. But her reputation soon recovered after the war. The person who was most responsible for this revival was the man she married in 1953, the British music impresario Walter Legge, a Jew.
PART 3
NEVER AGAIN
CHAPTER 7
BRIGHT CONFIDENT MORNING
Ernst Michel, the Nuremberg trial reporter, was one of thousands of men forced to leave Buchenwald on a cold and very often deadly march on April 8, 1945. Others left behind with a reduced number of SS guards knew that, if the Americans didn’t arrive soon, they would surely be forced to follow the same hideous route, or be killed on the spot. Buchenwald, built on the crest of the lovely Ettersberg, was among the worst German concentration camps. One of the many tortures devised by the SS was to suspend men from trees with their elbows tied behind their backs. The screams of pain gave the name “singing forest” to this gruesome place where Goethe once contemplated the beauty of nature and conversed with a young poet friend who made notes of the great writer’s observations.
There was a small underground organization in the camp, led by communists, who had hidden some guns in the barracks, as well as a shortwave radio transmitter built by a Polish engineer. A desperate message went out on April 8: “To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.” Three minutes later the answer came back: “KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.”1
Few of the inmates had enough strength left to attack the SS guards, or even to celebrate when the Americans finally came. But the fitter members of the camp resistance had decided not to wait for the Third Army’s arrival. The knowledge that deliverance was at hand was encouragement enough. So they stormed the watchtowers and used the guns they had hidden for just such an occasion to kill the remaining guards.
While the U.S. soldiers tried to get water and food to the desperately ill and dying, the communist resistance leaders were already turning their minds to the future. Almost immediately the gate of Buchenwald, with its cast iron words Jedem das Seine (“To each his own”), was plastered with signs that read: “Never Again!”
Never Again was a sentiment that all people who had suffered in history’s worst human conflict would have shared. But it was, for many, more than a sentiment; it was an ideal, perhaps a utopian ideal, a belief that a new and better world could be created from the ashes. Even as many people, including my father, pined for normal life to resume, others knew that this could never be. The world would not simply revert to what it had been before. The destruction of much of Europe and many parts of Asia, the moral bankruptcy of old regimes, not least the colonial ones, the collapse of Nazism and fascism, all these things encouraged the belief that there would be a completely new start. The year 1945 would be a blank slate; history would be happily discarded; anything was possible. Hence such phrases as “Germany, Year Zero” (Deutschland, Stunde Null), adopted by Roberto Rossellini as the title of his film about life in the ruins of Berlin, or the Gruppe Neubeginnen (Group Starting Afresh), formed by German social democrats exiled in London.
Of c
ourse, anything was not possible. There is no such thing as a blank slate in human affairs. History cannot be wished away. Besides, even though almost everyone agreed that past horrors should never recur, there was less agreement on just how to make sure of this. Utopian ideals, or even the more modest ambitions for political change, come in many different shapes.
We know what kind of revolutions the Soviet and Chinese communists had in mind. It is also clear what Asian nationalists in European colonies were hoping for. The goals of communist parties in western Europe, held in check by Stalin for his own geopolitical reasons, were more complicated. In any case, significant power—all the bravery of French or Italian partisans notwithstanding—would remain beyond their grasp. And yet a remarkable change did take place in western Europe, instigated by social democrats who had been planning for peace long before the war was over. The most radical change came not in formerly occupied countries, but in that conservative island country, that fortress of tradition whose heroic defiance had kept European hopes alive in the bleakest days of the war, when the Nazis appeared to be invincible: Great Britain.
• • •
MY BRITISH GRANDMOTHER, rising to the patriotic fervor of a typical immigrants’ daughter, was outraged when, in July 1945, her compatriots had the gall to vote against Winston Churchill’s Conservatives: Winston out, Clement “Little Clemmie” Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, in, with a landslide. In a letter to my grandfather, still waiting to be released from army duty in India, she lamented the “black ingratitude” shown by the British towards “that great man to whom we owe everything.” My grandfather, who was also born in a family of Jewish immigrants, was less vehement, but then he was in the army, and had been exposed to other views.
