The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  War administrations in each country turned to atrocity stories, promises of revenge, and inspiring tales about fallen heroes as a means of bolstering public enthusiasm for continued fighting. A tight, symbiotic relationship soon emerged between the national media and the intelligence services of each major power, as both groups had an interest in wide dissemination of moving stories that demonized the enemy and sanctified each country’s own war effort. Dozens of men who later emerged as prominent journalists and public relations specialists, among them Walter Lippmann and Arthur Sweetser of the United States, pioneered modern tactics for organized media campaigns, early radio broadcasting, staged events, and other war propaganda.6 Some of the stories were myths or deliberate disinformation, of course. But there were no shortages of real atrocities, or of real heroes, in this war. As the fighting drew to a close, potent public sentiment emerged in the victorious Associated Powers to punish the Central Powers not only for allegedly initiating the conflict but also for a long list of atrocities that their forces had perpetrated. Popular demands for trials of the German kaiser and his high command became key election issues in both Britain and the United States.7

  The second reason why wartime atrocities became an important issue at the 1919 peace conference was that for the first time there were reasonably specific agreements concerning what was to be considered a war crime. Each of the major belligerents had signed the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1864 and 1906 (also known as the Red Cross conventions), which set basic standards for military conduct during wars. The governments had formally agreed not to destroy one another’s hospitals or hospital ships, for example, and had banned use of poison gas and deadly expanding (dumdum) bullets. They had also accepted measures regarding the honorable treatment of navies and of merchant ships.8

  The Hague and Geneva conventions reflected a compromise between the national security strategies of the world’s principal powers and the antiwar idealism of the era. The conventions rhetorically committed the signatories to peace, and peace activists of the day welcomed the treaties warmly. As a practical matter, however, the Hague conventions often proved to be measures to more rationally manage military conflicts on the European continent. Both Hague conferences had come about largely because of an acute need on the part of the declining European monarchies to restrict the contemporary arms race, which had already begun to bankrupt empires. Most of their actual provisions were derived from European commercial treaties on naval seizure of goods. The terms reflected the conviction of a number of business leaders of the day, notably Andrew Carnegie, that stable international commerce was the most effective means of maintaining peace among nations. Just in case, though, most of the major powers included loopholes intended to immunize themselves from the conventions when they chose to do so. The United States, for instance, specifically exempted anything it might choose to do in Central and South America and the Philippines from the terms of the Hague agreements.9

  The treaties aimed to make war a “professional” matter conducted between regular armies and navies fighting according to mutually accepted rules of engagement. They sought to protect (European) civil commerce and civilians from war and to set ground rules for the treatment of war prisoners, conduct under a flag of truce, and so on. All wars were supposed to be formally declared—no sneak attacks—and there were provisions encouraging rivals to negotiate before beginning an armed conflict.

  At the same time, the main military powers quite openly sought to use the conventions to stabilize Europe and buttress their authority over shaky colonial empires. They formally banned fighting by guerrilla groups, revolutionaries, and unauthorized armies, which had increasingly become a problem for imperial powers worldwide. The military and legal doctrine known as “reprisal” authorized countries that had signed the treaties to legally commit what would otherwise clearly be crimes—shooting hostages, mistreating prisoners of war, etc.—to punish enemies during wartime for their (alleged) war crimes, so as to deter them from further violations.10 This meant that rebellions could “legally” be met with extraordinary savagery, in part because the basic revolutionary tactic of guerrilla fighting by irregular troops had itself been declared to be a war crime.

  The colonies and subjugated countries that attended the Hague meetings were in many cases represented by European or American attorneys whose salaries had been paid by foreign business interests. U.S. diplomat John Foster, who had been U.S. secretary of state in 1892–93, represented the crumbling Chinese imperial government at the 1907 Hague conference, for example. Foster’s grandson John Foster Dulles, then still in college, was the “Chinese” delegation’s recording secretary.11

  Nevertheless, the Hague conventions and the Geneva conventions did provide an early legal framework under which nations could seek redress for some types of atrocities, particularly in Europe. They provided an important reference point establishing that the major powers accepted some formal limitations on war, at least among themselves.

  Third, the issue of German war crimes became closely bound up with the debate over war reparations. Even the defeated powers agreed in principle that some form of restitution should be paid to the victims of war crimes, though exactly who fit into that category was subject to bitter dispute. By 1919, millions of people had been killed or maimed by poison gas, aerial bombing, submarine attack on civilian shipping, or mistreatment as prisoners of war—all actions that appeared to be in violation of the Hague or Geneva conventions. The final cost of paying damages to these people would run to tens of billions of dollars, depending in important part on how the term war crime was defined and how responsibility for such offenses was allocated.12 In this way, the international response to the atrocities of World War I acquired a substantial economic aspect, in addition to its more widely recognized moral, political, and judicial dimensions.

  War crimes and crimes against humanity thus emerged at the Paris Conference as a pivotal issue, both in symbolic and practical terms. This was more than simply an important judicial matter; it became a focus of a wide-ranging debate over what sort of society Europe would build in the wake of the war.

  The destruction of the old European order carried with it new political and economic opportunities, many of which greatly favored the United States. That in turn spurred the careers of a generation of scholars, attorneys, and executives on both sides of the Atlantic who specialized in U.S. political and business relations abroad. Each of the belligerent countries gave new prominence to its small cadre of experts on international affairs, intelligence, propaganda, and economic warfare. As the war wound down, many of these experts went on to become professionals in newly emerging aspects of international trade, banking, and legal affairs.

  John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were archetypical of the group of U.S. specialists on European affairs that was to shape American relations with the Continent for the next fifty years. The Dulles brothers were the grandsons and the nephews, respectively, of two U.S. secretaries of state. John Foster Dulles’s ambition, even as a child, had been to become a corporate lawyer, as his grandfather had been. Allen wasn’t quite sure what he wanted, except that it had to include adventure and conquest.13 Both were to get their wish.

  John Foster Dulles grew up squint-eyed, square-shouldered, and wound so tightly, his detractors joked, that if he sat on a lump of coal he could turn it into a diamond. His family connections helped him win a position in 1911 as a junior attorney with the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Except for a handful of short adventures in government service, John Foster Dulles was to remain at Sullivan & Cromwell for the next forty years. “This was to be his real career, the one at which he spent most of his life,” Dulles’s biographer Ronald Pruessen has written, “and it was to affect greatly almost everything else he ever did.”14

  Dulles specialized in international legal services for banks, corporations, and syndicates of wealthy investors. His law firm had pioneered the practice
of international legal support for multinational companies back in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,15 and Dulles’s personal efforts consisted in large part of ensuring that such services continued to develop throughout the first half of the twentieth. His first clients in his early years at Sullivan & Cromwell included a powerful German-American pharmaceutical company, Merck & Co., French banks investing in Brazilian railroads, U.S. and British banks buying up Nicaragua, and a syndicate of major U.S. investors who had pooled their funds to invest in European stocks and bonds.16

  John Foster Dulles’s government service during World War I became closely intertwined with his business aspirations. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Dulles’s Uncle Bert, Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State, and Foster Dulles joined the State Department in 1917 as a specialist in political-economic affairs. He soon undertook negotiating assignments for the War Trade Board, where he organized the exchange of American raw materials for Danish shipping facilities, agreements with Spain for exclusive U.S. purchasing of Spanish horses and mules—important to the war effort in those days—and similar measures that marked the dawn of modern economic warfare. He then spent a few months in U.S. military intelligence before becoming, at age thirty-one, one of the State Department’s most important representatives at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference—all in less than three years.17

  His brother Allen, meanwhile, entered the U.S. Foreign Service, the career staff of the U.S. State Department, and was posted as a junior intelligence officer in Bern, Switzerland, in early 1917. Switzerland was neutral in the European war, and Bern became an informal center where shifting groups of nationalist rivals, emigré insurrectionists, and international businessmen could meet. It was at Bern “where I learned what a valuable place Switzerland was for information, and when I became interested in intelligence work,” Dulles remembered later.18 He was assigned responsibility for liaison with representatives of the various Central European liberal-nationalist groups rebelling against the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through Slovak lawyer and diplomat Ivan Kerno, Dulles met and befriended prominent Czech nationalist leaders such as Jan Masaryk and Eduard Beneš, and many Central European diplomats19 he was later to cultivate as sources of intelligence and influence during his subsequent work, particularly at the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and the Central Intelligence Agency after the war.

  Allen joined his brother at the 1919 Paris peace conference, where John Foster Dulles served as an assistant to the chief U.S. negotiator, Norman Davis, and specialized in German war reparations and related financial matters.20 Officially, Allen became a member of the Czech Boundary Commission, which carved the new Czechoslovak state out of Germany’s Sudetenland and pieces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was simultaneously in charge of the U.S. delegation’s political intelligence efforts in Central Europe.21 He was twenty-five years old.

  By most standards, Allen Dulles was a junior member of the Foreign Service, the low man on the totem pole. But with Uncle Bert as secretary of state, Allen Dulles could seek and at times did gain the ear of the President of the United States. When the 1919 Communist revolution broke out in Budapest, Hungary, for example, Dulles’s recommendations for measures to “isolate the Hungarian Revolution from Russia and prevent its spread to neighboring countries” made its way to President Wilson’s desk; it is found today among Wilson’s papers. Dulles’s comments even at this early age were consistent with those that were to mark his geopolitical concerns for the next four decades. Among his points for President Wilson: Send U.S. gunboats to “control the situation in Budapest”; encourage the Czechs, Romanians, French, and Slovenes (each of whom had territorial claims against Hungary) to seize Hungarian rail lines, mountain passes, and other strategic points; distribute U.S. food aid on the condition that the Hungarians establish a “responsible” (i.e., counter-revolutionary) government; and begin aid and propaganda measures to shore up the traditional structures of power in surrounding countries.22

  As things turned out, Wilson did not send gunboats to Budapest, but the Czechs and Romanians did indeed invade Hungary, and with their help Hungarian admiral Miklós Horthy established a new administration in Budapest favored by the West. In the meantime, the threat of Communist rebellions in Budapest and Berlin helped push the conferees at Paris toward a more accommodating settlement with the new German government, which many saw as a bulwark against further insurrections in Central Europe.

  The Paris Conference broached the issue of war crimes as its first official act. It created a “Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties” that was to decide who was to be held responsible for initiating the war and on the mechanisms for prosecuting alleged war crimes. The U.S. representatives to this War Crimes Commission were Secretary of State Robert Lansing and James B. Scott, a senior legal advisor to the State Department. Lansing became the commission’s chairman.23

  Lansing viewed agreements such as the Hague conventions and Geneva conventions as infringements of U.S. national sovereignty. He strongly opposed any trials for war crimes or atrocities beyond those that the defeated powers might choose to carry out against their own military officers. “Lansing exhibited one curious state of mind,” observed presidential advisor Edward House during an earlier debate over the U.S. response to the sinking of the Lusitania. “He believes that almost any form of atrocity is permissible provided a nation’s safety is involved.”24 When House asked Lansing who should best determine the level of atrocity appropriate to protect the nation, Lansing replied, “the military authorities of the nation committing the atrocities.”25 Thus, the leaders of the armed forces accused of committing a crime should be the final judge of whether the act was justified in the interests of the nation. Lansing believed that any new precedents set by the Paris conference against war crimes would probably endanger the United States in a future crisis, and he insisted that his government exempt itself from international commitments that might limit its freedom of action.

  Lansing contended that punishment of German leaders was undesirable for political and economic reasons as well. “[H]ow far should we go in breaking down the present political organization of the Central Empires or by military operations render them utterly impotent?” Lansing wrote during the negotiations. “We have seen the hideous consequences of Bolshevik rule in Russia, and we know that the doctrine is spreading westward. The possibility of a proletarian despotism over Central Europe is terrible to contemplate.… The situation must be met.… We must look to the future, even though we forget the immediate demands of justice. Reprisals [against Germany] and reparations are all very well, but will they preserve society from anarchy and give to the world an enduring peace?”26 Lansing lobbied influential friends before and during the conference, historian James Willis reports, arguing that “any breakdown of authority in Germany must be avoided to prevent the spread of Bolshevism.”27

  But there was strong sentiment among the European delegates on the War Crimes Commission for tough action. The majority called for trials of Kaiser Wilhelm and other German leaders. Their resolution indicated that “abundant evidence” had already been collected of “outrages of every description committed on land, at sea, and in the air, against the laws and customs of war and the laws of humanity” by Germany and its partners. It described the Central Powers’ wartime rule as “a system of terrorism … aided by all the resources of modern science” that had been created for the purpose of suppressing all resistance. They cited thirty-two specific crimes, including massacres of civilians, torture and massacres of prisoners, use of human shields, mass requisition of private property, destruction of hospital ships, aerial bombardment of undefended cities and towns, religious persecution, deliberate starvation of civilians, manipulation of currencies, destruction of industries in German-occupied zones for the purpose of “promot[ing] German economic supremacy after the war,” pillage, rape, and forced labor. They contended that
Germany and the Central Powers were solely responsible for initiation of the war and the criminal activities that flowed from it.28

  In an important departure from tradition, the commission singled out Turkish massacres and deportations of Armenian civilians as being so grotesque that—although they had not been specifically banned by the Hague and Geneva conventions—these actions were inherently criminal under the most elementary norms of human behavior. This was, they said, a “crime against humanity.”29

  Lansing strongly objected to any introduction of the concept of “laws of humanity” and to trials of foreign leaders before any foreign or international court. International law, he contended, regulated relations among nations; it had no jurisdiction over what a state chooses to do to its own people. International efforts to set human rights standards could never be enforced, he continued, and their failure would undermine compliance with treaties that could be enforced, such as treaties concerning international commerce, which remained fragile despite their relative success during the previous century. Lansing voiced similar opposition to the demands that Kaiser Wilhelm and other leaders be tried before an international court. A leader should be responsible to the “political authority of his country,” not to an international court, Lansing contended. The kaiser should be forced from power but not tried.30

  Germany floated its own proposals concerning war crimes in letters to the conference and in press statements. (Germany remained an enemy power at this stage, barred from presenting delegates.) The German government claimed to support an independent commission to study the question of war guilt, offering to submit cases of accused German criminals to an international court of neutral jurists if the Associated Powers would do the same. However, Germany wanted to retain the authority to retry Germans who were found guilty. The delegates at Paris viewed the proposals as efforts to sidestep responsibility and never formally considered them.31 Indeed, the fact that the Germans had made these recommendations tended to cut short discussion of somewhat similar French overtures favoring creation of an international criminal court. To some delegates the French proposals were too much like the German plan.