The Bitter Taste of Victory (27 page)

Like Erika Mann, de Menthon saw the trial as the first step to German re-education. The condemnation of Nazi Germany by the tribunal would constitute a first lesson to the German people, enabling the process of spiritual denazification to begin. Like Thomas Mann, de Menthon suggested that Germany had strayed into the realm not merely of villainy but of hell. Nazism’s ‘original sin’ had been to exploit ‘one of the most profound and most tragic aspects of the German soul’; having seduced the Germans into devilishness the Nazis had utilised the inventions of contemporary science to attempt to plunge the world ‘into a diabolical barbarism’. That spring Mann had complained that Germany’s best had turned into evil through ‘devilish cunning’. Now the French prosecutor was suggesting that the tribunal at Nuremberg had the power to judge the corruption of the German soul.
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De Menthon’s speech was lauded by the judges and more surprisingly by the prisoners. Biddle thought this the most interesting and most moving of the prosecutors’ speeches, though he was hardly unbiased when it came to comparing it with Jackson’s. In his autobiography Biddle later praised de Menthon for seeking to distinguish and understand ‘the German soul within the dark cloud of German action’, and for speaking about the Germans ‘as members of a group to which all human beings belonged’. On the day of the speech itself, Hans Frank, the former governor-general of Poland and the only defendant publicly to repent, lauded de Menthon for delivering a stimulating speech. ‘That is more like the European mentality. It will be a pleasure to argue with that man.’
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Perhaps Frank was pleased that de Menthon had avoided the term ‘crimes against humanity’ in his speech, focusing instead on ‘crimes against peace’. He had made no reference to the deportation or murder of the Jews, referring only to the damage to ‘their personal rights and to their human dignity’. This reflected a widespread tendency among the Allies to forget the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims. At Nuremberg,
Jackson’s opening remarks about the annihilation of the Jews had been followed by a case for the prosecution chiefly focused on the Nazi war crimes rather than the Jewish genocide. Similarly,
Death Mills
made no mention of the 6 million Jewish dead. The victims of the camps were described as being of ‘all the religious faiths, all political beliefs, condemned by Hitler because they were anti-Nazi’. The newsreels about Bergen-Belsen in British cinemas did not generally refer to the skeletal figures as Jews. It would be another ten years before the people of Europe confronted their Jewish dead.
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The French prosecutor’s speech provoked renewed speculation about who exactly was on trial in Nuremberg. Birkett suggested in a letter three days later that there were now two trials going on simultaneously: ‘the trial of the defendants in the dock and the greater trial of a whole nation and its way of thought’. The tribunal had become a locus for the debate about collective guilt that had been playing out in the German press since the end of the war. When Erika Mann complained about the ‘complete lack of feeling of their collective guilt’ displayed by the German policemen, and when Ernst Robert Curtius told Stephen Spender that the Germans were all guilty and could achieve nothing without wholesale repentance, they were representative of a wider school of thought.
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The reasons why collective guilt applied more to the Germans than to the citizens of other totalitarian regimes were obvious. Hitler had always insisted that he represented the will of the people; it was evident that the concentration camp system had required the co-operation of hundreds of thousands of Germans; there had been no wide-scale protest from either the intellectuals or the masses. It was easier for exiles than ‘inner emigrants’ to maintain this position without also holding themselves accountable and many Germans inside and outside Germany followed Thomas Mann’s line that no one could escape judgement, urging full-scale repentance. ‘We are being made responsible, but we do not want to be made responsible,’ complained Pastor Niemöller, an influential priest who had been interned in Dachau. ‘And by refusing
to be made responsible we are depriving ourselves of the possibility of becoming free again.’
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Two of the most thoughtful accounts of collective guilt came from the exiled philosopher Hannah Arendt (now based in the US) and her former teacher Karl Jaspers, who had remained in Germany throughout the Third Reich although, unlike Curtius, he had been barred from his teaching position on account of his problematic views and his Jewish wife. As a Jew, Arendt had left Germany hurriedly for Paris in 1933. She had lost her German citizenship in 1937 and been interned in a concentration camp in France in 1940 as an ‘enemy alien’. In 1941 she managed to escape the camp and emigrate to the US with her mother and husband, the German Marxist philosopher and poet Heinrich Blücher. She had quickly gained status in the US as a philosopher and public intellectual and in 1944 she became the director of research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. As the war came to an end, Arendt took it upon herself to pronounce judgement on the question of German guilt. She felt betrayed by her former countrymen and especially by her former teacher and lover, Martin Heidegger, who at least until 1934 had been openly enthusiastic about Nazism and who had remained a member of the Nazi Party until its demise. ‘I can’t but regard Heidegger as a potential murderer,’ Arendt would say sadly the following year.
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In an essay entitled ‘Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility’, which was published in the US in January 1945 and in Germany in 1946, Arendt reminded her readers that a central thesis of Nazism was that there was no difference between Nazis and Germans. This had been made manifest by the general order subordinating all soldiers to the party and by the allocation of duties of mass murder in the concentration camps to members of the Wehrmacht. The Nazis had allowed this to be public knowledge because they wanted the Allies to abandon the distinction between Germans and Nazis so that in the event of defeat the victorious powers would be unable to distinguish between them. For Arendt the lines between so-called good and bad Germans had become so blurred that ‘the only way we can identify an anti-Nazi is when the Nazis have hanged him’. The totalitarian policy had made
the existence of each individual in Germany dependent upon committing or being complicit in crimes.
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This was primarily a political analysis, but Arendt went further in suggesting that philosophically not only all Germans but all of their contemporaries were implicated in Nazi evil. Anyone who still distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans did not apprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe. The challenge was not to disentangle the good from the bad but to decide how the world outside Germany was to conduct itself when confronting a people for whom the boundaries between the guilty and the innocent had been effaced. She believed that the most honest reaction was to recoil in shame; not shame at being German, but shame at being human, when humans were capable of these deeds: ‘For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.’ The survivors were left needing to develop a personal sense of shame as an expression of their repulsion at evil. They needed as well to forge a politics that fostered collective awareness of man’s capacity for evil.
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When she wrote this essay, Arendt had had almost no contact with anyone in Germany for years. After the war came to an end, she began to rekindle lost friendships, especially with Karl Jaspers, to whom she now sent regular food parcels. Writing to thank her, Jaspers observed that his task was to rebuild order out of chaos. He pronounced himself ‘optimistic, provided world history does not just roll over and destroy us’, although it was impossible to do much thinking in the midst of all the day to day chores.
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In Germany, Jaspers was engaged in thinking about the same questions as Arendt. Near the end of the war he had declared in his diary that ‘whoever survives must decide upon a task to which he will dedicate the remainder of his life’. His task was to rebuild intellectual life in Germany and for this he needed to establish how to wrest hope from guilty defeat. In August 1945 he displayed the kind of shame described
by Arendt in a lecture celebrating the reopening of the medical school of Heidelberg University where he was once again employed:

We survivors did not seek death. We did not go out on the streets when our Jewish friends were led away, nor did we cry out until they destroyed us as well. We preferred to stay alive on the weak, if justified grounds that our death would not have helped anyway. That we live is our guilt. We know before God, what deeply humiliates us.

Unlike Curtius, Jaspers was determined to include himself among the guilty Germans, though it was inevitably difficult to strike a balance between self-recrimination and analysis. And his views had won him the respect of the occupiers. His former student Golo Mann had arrived in Heidelberg earlier in the month, pleased to make contact with his teacher, whom he found had become ‘very white, thin and old’. Mann told a friend that Jaspers was one of the few people in Germany who had not become ‘strange and unattractive foreigners’ to him and reported that the American officers frequently called on the philosophy professor, asking him to explain Germany to them.
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Jaspers was moved by Arendt’s essay, when he read it in December, and told her that it had made him feel he was ‘breathing the air I so yearn for: openness and justice and a hidden love that scarcely allows itself expression in language’. He persuaded the editor of
Die Wandlung
(a new journal Jaspers had founded with three colleagues) to translate the essay into German and publish it in April 1946. Arendt’s piece in part prompted the thinking that led to a series of lectures in the winter of 1945/46 which he would publish as
Die Schuldfrage
(‘The Question of German Guilt’) in 1946. Here he distinguished between criminal, political, moral and metaphysical guilt, suggesting that political guilt was collective (this was the kind of guilt on trial in Nuremberg) while metaphysical guilt was universal (leading to the shame described by Arendt).
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Arendt was sceptical about Jaspers’s views. She complained to him in August 1946 that his definition of Nazi policy as a crime (‘criminal guilt’) seemed inadequate. ‘The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough.’
For Jaspers, Arendt’s response had the danger of elevating Nazi guilt beyond the criminal and therefore endowing it with ‘greatness’ and losing sight of its banality. He had more time than Arendt did for the Nuremberg trials. She had stated specifically in the January 1945 essay that ‘we will not be aided either by a definition of those responsible, nor by the punishment of “war criminals’’ ’. Evil was to be fought by people ‘filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race’. She complained to Jaspers in the August 1946 letter that if the Allies were to hang Göring it would be completely inadequate. The guilt of the Nazi leaders overstepped and shattered all legal systems, hence their smugness in the dock.
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Whether guilt was seen as afflicting the Germans or humanity as a whole, it did not provide much of a practical template for life. It is therefore not surprising that those politically concerned with the actualities of postwar Germany tended to reject the idea of collective guilt and to allow for the possibility of the good German, needing some people to be left to govern Germany. None the less, they still insisted on the need for a general acknowledgement of responsibility, if only as a first step towards re-education.

The contradictions in these simultaneous positions were demonstrated by the rhetoric of both the Western and the Eastern Allies. As a communist newly arrived from the Soviet Union, Johannes Becher to some extent followed the Soviet position that the Germans were Hitler’s first victims (a view also publicly propounded by Bertolt Brecht) and that the Germans were more in need of societal than individual reform. In the first issue of his magazine
Aufbau
in January 1946, Becher lauded the court at Nuremberg for putting the senior Nazis on trial, stating: ‘We bear witness to the monstrous crimes committed by the Nazi war criminals against us, the German people.’ Becher claimed here not only that all the soldiers who had been killed were victims of the political deception of the Nazis but that ‘what was done to the Jews was done to
us
’, though he did add that Nuremberg needed to be ‘accompanied by an
inner
judgement that every German must carry out upon himself’ and that they would probably find that nobody was free from blame. Talking to foreign visitors, however,
Becher was more dismissive of his compatriots. Interviewed by William Shirer, Becher complained about the lack of guilt among the survivors, claiming that the ‘deadness of the German soul’ was far worse than the physical ruins of the bombed cities. He had been shocked to find that many Germans regretted ‘the loss of their little flats and their ugly furniture’ more than they regretted the loss of human life. In his opinion the need for warmth and shelter did not allow the German people to have ‘dead souls and nitwit minds and not the slightest desire to make good their awful crimes’.
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