The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Now this mansion was punished by the presence of a crowd of correspondents, which on physical grounds alone was an offense to the genius of the mansion. The protocol of its hospitality must once have been stupendous. Only members of certain families would have been invited, and they would have arrived with valets and ladies’ maids, and after a reception by the host and hostess would have been passed along the colossal corridors by clusters of servants to suites where beds banked with superfluous pillows shone with the highlights of fine linen. In the room where I slept, there were nine hospital beds. On one side of me was a French correspondent, a lovely girl the color of cambric tea, with crenellated hair that spoke of North Africa and with the bold and gracious manners of a wild princess. And on the other was another French correspondent, a girl pale and fairish, and eager but always a little tired, as is often the case with those who spent their adolescence in the Resistance movement. Nothing can have been so offensive to the mansion as the French women correspondents. The most conspicuous of them was Madeleine Jacob, with her superb, haggard Jewish face, her long black locks, so oddly springing from a circle of white hair on the center of her scalp, her tumbled white waist and pleated skirt of a tartan that was not only non-Scottish but almost anti-Scottish, her air of contentious intellectual gaiety, as of one who has been dragged backward through a hedge of ideas and has enjoyed every minute of it. She was always the first to catch the eye of the living observer in the crowded dining room; she must have been the first and the worst to any ghostly observer. The women for whom this mansion was built lived inside their corsets as inside towers; their coiffures were almost as architectural; all their contours had to be preserved by an iron poise. They would have refused to believe that these ink-stained gypsies had, in fact, invaded their halls because they had been on the side of order against disorder, stability against incoherence.

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  How much easier would we journalists have found our task at Nuremberg if only the universe had been less fluid, if anything had been absolute, even so simple a thing as the sight we had gone to see—the end of the trial. And we saw it. With observation whetted by practice and our sense of the historic importance of the occasion, we let nothing that happened in the court go by us. We formed opinions about it with edges sharp as honed razors. We knew, when the judges issued a decree that the defendants were not to be photographed while they were being sentenced, that it was a silly and sentimental interference with the rights of the press. Yet about that our opinions were perhaps not so definite as appeared in the talk of the bar. The correspondents who had been at Nuremberg a long time were not so sure about this decree as those who had come for just these last two days. The correspondents who had been in Germany a long time did not appear to like to talk about it very much. It seemed that when one has never seen a man, one does not find anything offensive about the idea of photographing him while he is being sentenced to death, but that if one has seen him often, the idea becomes unattractive. It is not exactly pity that takes one. One would not alter the sentence of death. The future must be protected. The ovens where the innocent were baked alive must remain cold forever; the willing stokers, so oddly numerous, it appears, must be discouraged from lighting them again. But when one sees a man day after day, the knowledge of his approaching death becomes, in the real sense of the word, wonderful. One wonders at it every time one thinks of it. I remembered that I did not care at all the first time I heard William Joyce sentenced to death, but that the second time I was stirred and astonished, and that the third time I knew awe. The day he was hanged, I found myself looking at my hand and thinking in perplexity that someday it would not move because I willed it, and that on that day I would have no will, I would not be there; and Joyce was a kind of partner in my thought, not an object for pity. It is an intensification of the feeling we have in the fall, when the leaves drop. The leaves are nothing to us, but the melancholy, the apprehension grows.

  It was like that in other parts of Nuremberg, where the lawyers lived who had seen every session of the court. They had all been waiting for this day when the judgment would be delivered and the defendants sentenced, for it meant that they would turn their backs on the moldy aftermath of murder and get back to the business of living. But now that this day had come, they were not enjoying it. All automobiles were stopped now on the main roads for search and scrutiny of the occupants by the military police. At one barrier, two automobiles were halted at the same time, and a visitor travelling in one saw that in the other was the engaging wife of one of the English judges, a tall Scandinavian with that awkwardness which is more graceful than grace, that shyness which is more winning than any direct welcome. They exchanged greetings and the visitor said, “I shall be seeing you in court tomorrow.” The other looked as if she had been slapped across the high cheekbones. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no. I shall not be in court tomorrow.” She had attended almost all other sessions of the court. Around the house of another judge, a line of automobiles waited all through the evening of the day before the judgment session, and passersby knew that the judiciary was having its last conference. The judge’s wife came to the window and looked out over the automobiles and the passerby and far into the suburban woods that ring the house. She has kept into maturity the delicate and self-possessed good looks of a spirited girl, and ordinarily she refuses to let her appearance betray what she is thinking or feeling. But as she stared out into the darkening woods, it could be seen that the boredom she was suffering had something ghastly about it, and that she was living through a patch of time comparable to the interval between a death in the house and a funeral.

  There was another house, still further away from Nuremberg, where this aversion to the consequences of the trial which was not disapproval of it could be experienced. This, like the press camp, was a villa an industrialist had built beside his factory, but it was smaller and not so gross and had been the scene of a war of taste in which some of the victories had fallen to the right side. The industrialist who had built it, and furnished it in the style of a Nord-Amerika liner, had had two sons, and one had married a wife who was still in the house and who silently acted as a butler to the conquerors who had requisitioned it. She was, in fact, though she told no one for a very long time, half Lorrainer and half French, and she had a deep love and knowledge of Greek art. So here and there in the rooms, along with the family busts and the whacking great Japanese bronzes, realistically mustachioed, that all German bourgeois households cherished, were torsos and heads that, in the Greek way, presented the whole truth about certain moments of physical existence. There was a torso which showed how it is with a boy’s body, cut clean with training, when the ribs rise to a deep and enjoyed breath. There was the coifed head of a girl who knew she was being looked at by the world and, innocent and proud, let it look. In this room, parties of people concerned with the trial held glasses of good wine in their hands, talked generously of pleasant things and not of the judgment and the sentences, and every now and then looked at these sculptures as if they were earnests of another and better life. About this house, and all the houses where the legal personnel lived, armed guards paced through the night, and searchlights shone into the woods, falling fiercely on the piebald trunks of the birch trees, the compactly contorted pines, the great pottery jars, overflowing with red nasturtiums, that marked the course of the avenues. Down through the strong brightness there slowly drifted the yellow birch leaves, all night long.

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  There came the day of the judgment and the day of the sentences, and I was again aware that I was in a man’s world. Life in Nuremberg was difficult in any case, because of transport. The city is so devastated that the buildings used by the authorities are a vast distance apart, and one cannot walk. Cars are old and rapidly falling to pieces, and the drivers have been out there too long and care about nothing except going home. But when the great day came, there was added a new exasperation in the extreme congestion of the Palace of Justice. It was obv
iously possible that some Nazi sympathizers would try to get into the court and assassinate the counsel and the judges, and it was obvious that the authorities would have to take special care in scrutinizing the passes of the correspondents and the visitors. I had seen myself having to stop at the entrance of the court and show my pass, whereupon a trained scrutineer would examine it under a strong light. Nothing so simple happened. Authority jammed the corridors with a solid mass of military policemen, who again and again demanded passes and peered at them in a half light. These confused male children would have been quite incapable of detecting a forged pass if they had been able to see it, but in this deep shadow it was difficult to read print, much less inspect a watermark. This congestion of pass-demanding military policemen occurred at every point where it was necessary for correspondents to move freely, to look around and find their seats, to get in touch with their colleagues. At the actual entrance to the gallery, there was posted a new official, to whom I took a savage dislike because he infringed on a feminine patent. Although he was male and a colonel, he had the drooping bosom and careworn expression of a nursing mother, and he stared at my quite obviously valid pass minute after minute with the moonish look of a woman trying to memorize the pattern of a baby’s bootee. Was I irritable? Yes. I and all England, all Europe, are irritable because we are controlled by and sick of organization. And perhaps he was slow and awkward because all people in organization not of the scheming and tyrannic sort are sick of exercising control on resentful subjects.

  What did we see in the courtroom? Everybody knows by now. It is no longer worth telling: it was not worth telling if you knew too little; it could not be told if you knew too much. The door at the back of the dock shut on the last of the prisoners, who had worked their final confusion by showing a heroism to which they had no moral right, who had proved that it is not true that the bully is always a coward and that not even in that respect is life simple.

  Then the court rose, rose up into the air, rose as if it were going to fly out of the window. People hurried along the corridors into each other’s offices, saying goodbye—goodbye to each other, goodbye to the trial, goodbye to the feeling that was like fall. That was if they were the great, of course, for only the great could get out of Nuremberg. The lesser would have to wait at the airport or the railway stations for days as the fog took a hand in the congestion and the planes could not leave the ground safely in the mornings, and more and more people tried to go home by train. On the floor of every office there were packing cases: the typewriters had to go home, the stationery had to go home, the files had to go home. The greater bent down to say goodbye to the lesser, on their knees beside the packing cases; the lesser beamed up at the greater. It was a party; it was like going off for a cruise, only instead of leaving home you were going home; it was grand, it was happy, it was as positively good as things seem only in childhood, when nobody doubts that it is good when the school term comes to an end. Yet if one could not leave Nuremberg, this gaiety did not last intact after the sun went down. Then one heard words that brought back what one felt about the end of the trial, when one did not turn one’s mind away from it. A man said, “Damn it all. I have looked at those men for ten months. I know them as I know the furniture in my room. Oh, damn it all.…”

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  That vague, visceral mournfulness, that sympathy felt for the doomed flesh as for the frosted flower, settled on the mind steadily during the days that passed after the return from Nuremberg, as the executions drew nearer. It was dispersed suddenly by the news of Göring’s suicide. A dozen emotions surprised me by their strength. The enormous clown, the sexual quiddity with the smile that was perhaps too wooden for mockery and perhaps not, had kicked the tray out of the hands of the servant who was carrying it; the glasses had flown into the air and splintered, the wine of humiliation we had intended him to drink had spilled on the floor. It was disconcerting to realize that the man’s world in which Nuremberg had had its being had in effect been just as crazy as it had looked. All to no purpose had the military police fallen over my feet and had I fallen over theirs, all to no purpose had the colonel with the bosom brooded pendulously over my pass. The cyanide had freely flowed. I felt fear. Whether this romantic gesture would revive Nazism depended on the degree to which the people in the waterlogged Europe I had seen from the plane were preoccupied with the spoiled harvest and their lack of shoes. If their preoccupation was slight or desperate, they might equally play with the idea of restoring the Nazi regime. I remembered the incidental obscenities of Nuremberg, such as the slight smell that hung round the door of the room that housed the atrocity exhibits—the shrunken head of the Polish prisoner, the soap made from concentration-camp corpses, and the like; I remembered the vigor of some of the defendants, and the passivity of the German people in the streets, blank paper on which anything could be written. But also there came a vague, visceral cheerfulness, applause for the flesh that had not accepted its doom but had changed it to something else that made a last proof of its strength, such as one might have felt for a beast that has been caught in a trap and that, when its captors come, arches its back and makes a last stand. All the people I had seen fleeing from Nuremberg, who would be halfway across the world now, trying to forget the place, would be straightening up from whatever they had been doing and saying with a laugh, before they could check themselves, “Oh, that one! We always knew he would get the better of us yet.”

  FROM

  Janet Flanner

  MARCH 8, 1947 (ON NAZI ART THEFT)

  At the height of its war effort, the United States had almost three million men under arms in the European Theatre of Operations. A dozen men out of these millions were functioning, under G-5, Operations Branch, SHAEF, as a rarissimo group known as Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. Up to almost the end of the war, it was the modest job of these few American Monuments men, and their two or three British colleagues, to try to check on and protect, over an area of thousands of square miles, what was left of the Continent’s art and historic monuments. And when peace came in Europe, it was the aim of this group, then swollen to some twenty-five members (officers, sergeants, and pfc.s, mostly Americans), to collect a few hundred thousand items of displaced art—French, Dutch, Belgian, Czech, Russian, Polish, and even German—to be returned to or held in trust for the proper people in whichever country they had been owned before 1939.

  In 1942, the American Defense–Harvard Group and the Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies, two groups interested in the protection of works of art in the war zones, had drawn President Roosevelt’s attention to the probability that Europe’s beauty would suffer badly if the Allies invaded the Continent. As a result, he created, in 1943, the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, more conveniently known as the Roberts Commission, because Justice Owen J. Roberts, of the Supreme Court, was its chairman. The Roberts body acted as intermediary between the War Department and scholars from Columbia, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick Art Reference Library, and other erudite centers that supplied the Army with information for what was called the Supreme Headquarters Official Lists of Protected Monuments, a vast, military guidebook of historic lay buildings, churches, and museums that were to be saved, if possible; that is, they were not to be targets, or be slept in, or be looted. Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives, operating in the field, took up where the Roberts Commission left off. The optimistic prospectus set forth early in 1944 for the M.F.A. & A. envisaged a bang-up Allied advisory staff, topped by a lieutenant colonel, with sixteen majors, more than half to be American, aided by a number of predominantly American field outfits, each containing a minimum of twelve junior officers; plus an officer attached to the H.Q. G-5 of each Army, and three more officers under him at the front, assisted by six enlisted men. All of them were to be kept scurrying around in trucks and jeeps, with cameras and typewriters, so they could send to the rear “a consta
nt flow of reports and information,” under fifteen subheadings. That, at any rate, was the dream.

  Eleven days before the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower issued a letter to field commanders that began, “Shortly we will be fighting our way across the Continent of Europe.… Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.” On June 6th, however, art preservation must have been the last thing the field commanders thought about as they battled for an invader’s toehold in the Atlantic Wall, blasting Gothic spires and billeting their tired, dirty men in any Norman château, full of art or not, they were lucky enough to find intact. In any case, no Monuments men were present to make suggestions. About a fortnight later, two American Monuments officers, Captain (afterward Major) Bancel LaFarge, A.U.S., and Lieutenant George Stout, U.S. N.R., and one Englishman, Squadron Leader J. E. Dixon-Spain, R.A.F., arrived in Normandy—without typewriters, cameras, or trucks—and were turned loose to hitchhike toward their goal, the salvation of art. The situation the trio found themselves in was novel: they had to explain, practically in the heat of battle, who they were, what they were trying to do, and why. Their task was to give first aid to badly injured art (though they had no supplies to repair with), to prevent improper billeting in historic buildings (though the field commanders were supposed to have the Protected Monuments Lists with them, even if they didn’t read them), and to inspect and report on the state of the monuments to be protected (though they had no machines to inspect in or to type with). Whether the whole Monuments project was to continue or be scrapped—the latter was greatly favored by some brass hats before the scheme was even tried—depended on the kind of show these three (and three other Americans and two other British, who were added before the summer’s end) were able to put up. The amazing accomplishments of these eight men, who at first had to make their way by riding on anything from regimental laundry trucks to liberated bicycles, resulted in the piecemeal arrival of the Allies’ full wartime art group, which—the early ambitious plans forgotten—was maintained at an average strength of fifteen, and which, up to the end of hostilities, scoured France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany and actually inspected 3,145 monuments and archives, or what was left of them.