After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Between December 1941 and February 1942, Japan brought off two victories of audacious brilliance. First, five minutes before eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941, Hawaii time, 184 Japanese bombers attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. A second wave arrived an hour later. Four American battleships were sunk or blown up; four were damaged; eleven other warships were sunk or disabled. The Japanese pilots also destroyed 188 American aircraft on the ground. A total of 2,330 Americans were dead or dying, with 1,177 killed on the battleship Arizona. It was a major traumatizing event for the Americans. Both the leaders in the European conflict rejoiced, and for the same reason. ‘Now it is impossible for us to lose the war,’ Hitler said. ‘We now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.’6 Churchill felt the same. What months of cajoling, and speaking to the president on the telephone, had failed quite to achieve, was brought to pass by one bombing raid. The United States had entered the war. ‘We are no longer alone,’ said Churchill. Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December. The war was now truly global, and Japan would ultimately pay the most terrible price for its boldness.

  Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers and torpedo planes sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse off the coast of Malaya, with heavy loss of life (840 officers and men were drowned). The British position in Malaya now had no defence. By colossal oversight, the British had supposed that they could hold Singapore by the sea alone, so that when, on 8–9 February 1942, the Japanese army crossed the Johore Strait to land on Singapore Island, the British and Commonwealth defenders had no hope. They surrendered on 15 February; 32,000 Indians, 16,000 British and 14,000 Australian soldiers were taken prisoner.

  It was less than a century since Japan’s forced opening to the West. By the code of bushido, the Japanese warrior tradition, to be taken prisoner was shameful even for a civilian, but for a soldier it was ultimately disgraceful, a denial of what he was called to be, namely a fearless fighter, happy to wage war for his emperor, and to sacrifice his spirit on behalf of his ancestors. That British soldiers did not do this on behalf of their king and their ancestors filled the Japanese with a bewildered contempt. Another factor, understandable to all the peoples of the East, even those who viewed the Japanese victories with dread, was a desire to crush the face of European imperialism in Asia.

  There were so many taken prisoner in Singapore that no pre-existent camp or prison could hold them. They were herded into Changi barracks on Singapore Island, and it was from here that many British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and other prisoners of war were taken as slave labour to work on the Burma–Thailand railway and other projects. They were beaten, starved, tortured. The brutality was something which no cultural conditioning or difference, even when mentioned and taken into account, can excuse or explain.7 While they endured terrible suffering, such experiences – brutal prison guards, physical and psychological degradation of all kinds, the killing of innocent prisoners either by calculated acts of violence or by maltreatment, failure to treat disease or starvation – was being replicated in Europe.

  At the heart of the National Socialist experiment was the Concentration Camp. That was its defining institution, the ultimate expression of contempt for individuals. On 21 March 1933, in his capacity as police chief of Munich, Heinrich Himmler had announced the opening of the prototype camp at Dachau, 15 kilometres northwest of Munich on the road to Ingolstadt. The Nazis advertised the fact that the concentration camps were needed to restore law and order and to re-educate Communists and other subversives. On 23 May 1933 a local newspaper boasted that the ‘model concentration camp … makes Dachau known well beyond the borders of the Fatherland’,8 a grisly accolade which was to be truer than the sycophantic journalist could have guessed. In the face of protests by the Church, and with the 1936 Olympics in prospect, Dachau and other camps did release very many prisoners. By 1937 the SS had ordered a vast complex of buildings to expand Dachau so that the camp became in effect a small town with its own Lagerstrasse, camp streets, a large gravel area called the Appellplatz, where roll-calls and punishment parades could take place, a canteen, a library, day-rooms, workshops, stores … By 1943, to discourage homosexuality, Himmler ordered the setting up of brothels in the Sonderbau (Special Building). The ‘staff’ came from the all-female Ravensbrück camp, and were promised their freedom after working six months in Dachau.9 By the time it had expanded, Dachau, this camp which had begun with the supposed aim of re-educating a few hundred Communists, contained some forty to fifty thousand men: ‘politicals’ – Communists to start with, but soon all manner of social democrats, liberals and persons of whom the regime disapproved; ‘racials’, including Jews of all ages from children to old men of over eighty, and gypsies; criminals, who included those who had done time in regular prisons and yet were still considered dangerous and professional criminals, the Berufsverbrecher. Then there were the ‘antisocials’ – beggars, hawkers, tramps; the Bibelforscher, Jehovah’s Witnesses; and the homosexuals, forced to wear special pink stars, and whose numbers included men who were not homosexuals but had been denounced as such by vindictive neighbours or colleagues. It has been calculated that 228,300 people passed through Dachau.10

  Tortures included such as the Baum (tree) and the Pfahl (pole). To inflict the latter, the victim was tied to the eight-foot pole with his hands behind his back, attached to the pole by the wrists. After climbing on to a stool which was then kicked away, the man remained suspended with his feet off the ground for anything up to two hours. Victims could often not use their arms for weeks afterwards. Beatings were frequent. Work was unrelenting – the hardest of it in the nearby sand quarry. The guards were brutes, selected SS thugs. Executions were frequent. Medical experiments conducted by such figures as Professor Klaus Schilling included deliberately infecting over a thousand prisoners (the largest group Polish clergy) with tropical diseases. Others were locked in pressurized cabins to simulate high altitude, often dying horribly as pressure and oxygen were reduced. Other crazy acts of cruelty worthy of an H. G. Wells fantasy included ‘super-cooling’ in which human beings were in effect frozen; others who had to be killed were given blood coagulants to test their efficacy; others suffered bone transplants. Overcrowding and disease were endemic. With the Allied advance on Dachau, it did not prove practicable for the SS to gas all their prisoners and so prevent them from telling their story, but there were attempts at mass poisoning, shooting, and extermination by the oldest and cheapest method of all: starvation. The mass graves and crematoria did their work, but when the Americans arrived to liberate the camp, they still found a grisly sight, with thousands of half-starved inmates and corpses piled high.11

  Dachau was technically a Konzentrationslager, concentration camp, and not what historians now designate a Vernichtungslager, extermination camp. The first such camp, where Jews could be eliminated by carbon monoxide gas, was established near the Polish village of Chelmno about 45 miles from the Lodz ghetto. It began operating in December 1941. Death factories established in Belzec and Sobibor, with stationary gas chambers fuelled by diesel exhaust, started work in March 1942. Three months later Treblinka, a murder factory near Warsaw, was established. Cyanide gas, Zyklon B, was widely used at Auschwitz, near Cracow, and at Maidanek, on the outskirts of Lublin in eastern Poland. The mass gassings were fully under way by 1942, and by 1943 the majority of Polish Jews had been killed. In Dachau the death toll was smaller than in the extermination camps but the increase is striking. In 1940–3 it was between 1,000 and 3,000 prisoners. In 1944, it had risen to 403 in one month, 997 in the next, 1,915 in December. In the first months of 1945 it ranged from 2,625 to 3,977 per month.12 By the last year of the war, the numbers become unthinkable; Chelmno, 150,000; Belzec, 600,000; Treblinka, 700,000, Auschwitz perhaps a million and a half.

  As the Allies advanced, and entered the camps, there came the war correspondents. In April 1945, from Belsen, Richard Dimbleby g
ave one of the most memorable of early pictures of what the Third Reich in its dying fall had accomplished.

  One woman, distraught to the point of madness, flung herself at a British soldier who was on guard at the camp on the night that it was reached by the Eleventh Armoured Division; she begged him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she held in her arms. She laid the mite on the ground and threw herself at the sentry’s feet and kissed his boots. And when in his distress, he asked her to get up, she put the baby in his arms and ran off crying that it would find milk because there was no milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child, he found that it had been dead for days.

  Here in Belsen we are seeing people, many of them lawyers and doctors and chemists, musicians, authors, who’d long since ceased to care about the conventions and customs of normal life. There had been no privacy of any kind. Women stood naked at the side of the track, washing in cupfuls of water from British army water trucks. Others squatted while they searched themselves for lice, and examined each other’s hair … Just a few held out their withered hands to us as we passed by, and blessed the doctor whom they knew had become the camp commander in place of the brutal Kramer.

  We were on our way down to the crematorium where the Germans had burned thousands of men and women in a single fire. The furnace was in a hut about the size of a single garage. A little Pole whose prison number was tattooed on the inside of his forearm, as it was on all the others, told me how they burned the people. They brought them into the stockade, led them in, and then an SS guard hit them on the back of the neck with a club and stunned them. And then they were fed straight into the fire, three at a time, two men, one woman. The opening was not big enough for three men and that I verified by measuring it.

  Those officers and men who have seen these things have gone back to the Second Army moved to an anger such as I have never seen before.13

  The anger was purgative, but useless. It all came too late. All over Europe, as the war came to an end, men and women waited behind bars and barbed wire, some prisoners of war, some in refugee camps. Some would be released from these prisons but none would be released from their memories and mental scars.

  In the Age of Faith, men and women had sustained themselves by contemplating the composure and courage of the martyrs as they endured torture, imprisonment and death. The twentieth century made martyrs of millions, and if martyr is a Greek word meaning witness, then they were witnesses to the sheer wickedness to which politicians will put the use of unbridled power, the murderous savagery of human beings driven by fear and hate.

  The Germans who resisted Hitler also did so too late and in too disorganized a way to make any appreciable difference. Not only was Hitler quite extraordinarily lucky in escaping assassination attempts, but also, his enemies within the Germany army, Church and liberal political circles failed signally to group themselves together in such a way as to convince the British Prime Minister or the American President that they were in a position to negotiate with the free world on behalf of a non-Nazi Germany.

  The last serious attempt on Hitler’s life had been that of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a South German aristocrat who collected around himself a substantial number of disaffected and well-intentioned Germans. As chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, he was able to get near Hitler and offered himself as the assassin. He did so by planting a bomb under a conference table at Rastenburg. The Führer was leaning over the table looking at a map when the blast occurred. There was a deafening crash, and it blew the great leader’s trousers off in a manner which, had it occurred in a Laurel and Hardy film, would have been farcical. Hitler displayed the tattered trousers as emblems of his ‘miraculous rescue’.

  The first retaliatory executions, including that of Stauffenberg himself, were by shooting, at Fromm’s orders, on the evening the coup failed. The remaining conspirators were put on trial. Ghoulishly anxious to make the punishment fit the crime, Hitler ordered that the first batch should be executed in Plötzensee prison. They were led into a room where butcher’s hooks were suspended from the ceiling. A rope was passed round their necks, and their bodies bared to the hips. They were then hoisted to the hooks and slowly strangled while a guard removed their trousers. Hitler had film made of the proceedings, and enjoyed watching them.14

  Thousands of Germans were arrested after the Stauffenberg bomb plot, among them the young pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This serene young man had evolved in his prison cell the concept of ‘religionless Christianity’. ‘It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world.’15

  In his death, as in his luminous writings and his innocent but unpriggish life, Bonhoeffer embodied the decency and goodness for which civilized Christian Germany (and Europe) had always stood, and which the twelve-year nightmare of Nazi rule, both clownish and bestial to the extremest degree, was unable completely to extinguish. Taken to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg to be executed, Bonhoeffer had found a freedom which Hitler, imprisoned in his own ego and in his Berlin bunker, could not dream of. The camp doctor described that morning, towards the very end of the war, the grey dawn of 9 April 1945.

  On the morning of that day between five and six o’clock the prisoners, among them Admiral Canaris, General Oster … and Reichsgerichtsarzt (barrister) Sack were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half open door in one of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout, and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.16

  Reck-Malleczewen says: ‘A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and tears the mask off his face.’17 The man who had preserved his early authority by sending his political opponents to prison; whose armies had taken millions of prisoners of war; whose concentration camps had exploited slave labour and killed millions of his supposed enemies through the processes of disease and hard labour, while extermination camps ensured sheer coldly devised massacres by means of gas, was to end his days as a prisoner of his own making.

  As the tide of war turned, and the Allies advanced upon Berlin, Adolf Hitler grandly opined: ‘I am beginning to doubt whether the German people is worthy of my great ideals.’18

  At fifty-five, Hitler was now too sick to speak in anything louder than a whisper. His limbs shook. He was ashen-pale, and feeble. Since the rounding up of the plotters, and the killing of Stauffenberg and the others, Hitler trusted almost no one except Blondi, his dog, and Eva Braun, who became his wife in a short private ceremony held in the bunker the day before he died. For months he had been both too afraid and too ill to emerge from the six rooms in the Führerbunker, from which he still believed himself to be directing the Reich. Hitler was described now by one of his entourage as ‘a cake-gobbling human wreck’.19 Another visitor, an elderly General Staff officer, said: ‘he presented a dreadful sight. He dragged himself about painfully and clumsily, throwing his torso forward and dragging his legs after him from his living-room to the conference room of his bunker. He had lost his sense of balance; if he were detained on the brief journey (seventy-five to a hundred feet) he had to sit down on one of the benches that had been placed along either wall for the purpose or even cling to the person he was talking to.’ Most of the time he was completely torpid, talking only of his need for chocolate and cake. The great imprisoner was himself imprisoned. The man who had taken Germany into the most reckless war in its history
for Living Space could hardly stagger around his own air-raid shelter. He shot the body in which he had become a prisoner in the afternoon of 30 April, giving instructions that his underlings should incinerate it with petrol. In the same afternoon, two Soviet sergeants hoisted the Red Flag on the dome of the Reichstag.20

  With Allied victory in Europe, many of those who had been prisoners of the Third Reich simply became automatically prisoners of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s Empire now stretched from Prussia to Siberia, taking in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and, effectively, Yugoslavia. The Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, Main Camp Administration or Gulag, now had more inmates than ever in its history. ‘According to the official statistics, on 1 January 1950, the Gulag contained 2,561,351 prisoners in the camps and colonies of its system – a million more than there had been five years earlier, in 1945.’21

  One of the great transformations effected by the English political reformers of the early nineteenth century had been the move from systems of corporal and capital punishment to ones of control. Jeremy Bentham, the father of Philosophic Radicalism, built a model of a prison in his house, a construction of circular device, with a central Panopticon, that is a device which could see everything. Pitt the Younger and Dundas came to see Bentham in his house to inspect the Panopticon in 1793.22 Victorian liberals looked back to this moment as a humane advance, away from the culture in which there were over 200 crimes on the statute book for which a man could be hanged to one in which criminals, having paid their debt to society, could return, sobered and righteous, to useful work.