The Bitter Taste of Victory (28 page)

These contradictions were also present in the rhetoric and policy of the occupation forces. In theory, the Allies all allowed for the possibility of the good German. Even Morgenthau and Vansittart saw Germans as communally displaying the vice of rabid militarism rather than as collectively guilty in a more metaphysical sense. But as the Allied forces liberated one camp after another and examined the systematic horrors wrought by the Germans, they developed a rhetoric that implied collective guilt. ‘
Diese Schandtaten – Eure Schuld 
!’ (‘These atrocities – your fault’) proclaimed the posters laying the sights of the camps before the locals of the towns they adjoined. In the final edit of
Death Mills
the word ‘Nazi’ had been replaced with ‘German’ in the commentary to underline the responsibility and guilt of all Germans. It is not surprising that at least one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg should put the entire German nation on trial along with their leaders.

8

‘Let Germany Live!’

Fighting the Peace: March–May 1946

The case for the prosecution at Nuremberg finally came to a close on 7 March 1946, after seventy-three days. Following five long months of winter, the weather was starting to thaw but the majority of Germans were weak from cold and hunger and the food situation showed no signs of improving. By the end of March rations had dropped to 1,275 calories in the US zone and 1,043 in the British zone. The writer Ernst Jünger complained that they were now half what they had been the previous year. ‘This is a death sentence for many who up to now have only been able to keep their heads above water with the greatest effort, above all children, old people and refugees.’
¹

The government and public in Britain and the US were becoming frightened by the continuing desperate conditions in Germany. At the start of January, John Dos Passos had published an article in
Life
magazine headed ‘Americans are Losing the Victory in Europe’, reporting the ‘sobering experience’ of being glared at accusingly by Europeans who felt that the Americans may have helped sweep away Hitlerism but had inflicted a cure that was worse than the disease. They were disappointed by the American handling of DPs and black markets and by their ‘fumbling timidity’ with the Russians. Later that month, the former prime minister Winston Churchill had warned the House of Commons that Britain could not afford to let chaos and misery continue
indefinitely in their zone of Germany: ‘The idea of keeping scores of millions of people hanging about in a subhuman state between earth and hell, until they are worn down to a slave condition or embrace communism, will only breed at least a moral pestilence and probably an actual war . . . Let Germany live!’
²

Churchill had the situation in Germany in mind when he gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March announcing that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’. He condemned not only the creation of totalitarian governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union but the ‘enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany’ made by the Russian-dominated Polish government. ‘This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up,’ he complained; ‘nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.’
³

In Nuremberg, the defendants were delighted to read reports of Churchill’s speech just as the case for the prosecution was reaching its end. They were immediately hopeful that the rift between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would widen and that the British and Americans would recognise the former Nazi leaders as their comrades. Albert Speer later recalled how they were collectively gripped by a ‘tremendous excitement’. Hess stopped acting the amnesiac and reminded the others how often he had predicted a great turning point that would curtail the trial and restore their ranks. As a result they were relatively cheerful when the defence case began on 8 March. And the courtroom was crowded again with spectators who shared the defendants’ good humour, hopeful that the tribunal was about to regain its theatricality now that the Nazis themselves were entering the witness box.
⁴

The British painter Laura Knight had been in Nuremberg since January and now enjoyed watching Göring begin his performance on 13 March. Knight had been appointed as the official British painter recording the trial; her work was to be exhibited at the London Royal Academy’s summer exhibition that year. An energetic sixty-eight year old, she was used to being close to the action. In the 1920s she had travelled with a circus, where, in addition to sketching and painting the
performers, she learnt to do acrobatics. During the war she had been busy as a WAAC (War Artists’ Advisory Committee) artist boosting morale with her paintings of factory workers and combatants. Arriving in Nuremberg, she had been dissatisfied with the view from the spectators’ gallery and was pleased to be allocated an empty broadcasting box cut into the walls of the courtroom immediately above the dock. Here, between sketches, she would occasionally wrap herself up in a big Shetland rug she had brought with her and fall asleep. Like David Low, Knight saw the tribunal chiefly as a visual spectacle. Göring’s pink and white skin contrasted with Hess’s green pallor; the Snowdrops’ helmets and the sheets of paper strewing the courtroom were like a fall of snow. She had to remind herself that the drama being enacted before her did not belong to the theatrical stage: ‘that the performing cast in the dock do not pull all matter aside at the drop of the curtain, go straight to their dressing rooms and take off their make-up’.
⁵

Now, however, she was attentive to the detail of the action in the dock. Göring gave twelve hours of evidence with very little interruption from the judges’ bench. He was intelligent and energetic throughout, using his time in the witness box to demonstrate his heroism rather than his innocence. This meant that he played into the hands of his prosecutors. He admitted proudly that he had destroyed opposition to Nazism, that he had crushed ‘so-called freedoms’, organised black markets in occupied countries and helped to eliminate Jews from the public sphere. But in the process he gained the respect of his audience and made some hard-hitting jibes at the Allies. Asked if the Germans had looted in Russia, he responded that they had but that at least they did not ‘dismantle and transport away the entire Russian economy’ as the Russians had in Germany; asked if Hitler was the head of the state, government and armed forces, he replied that he was indeed, ‘following the example of the United States’.
⁶

Cross-examined by Jackson, Göring triumphed. When Jackson’s questions were too general, Göring patronisingly subdivided them into specific sections. At one stage Jackson produced a document supposedly describing the ‘liberation of the Rhineland’ that turned out to be about the ‘cleaning of the Rhine’. Embarrassed, Jackson retorted that
the document did at least show planning ‘which had to be kept entirely secret from foreign powers’, to which Göring responded slickly: ‘I do not think I can recall reading beforehand the publication of the mobilisation preparations of the United States.’ As always, Biddle enjoyed the discomfort of his compatriot. When the British deputy prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe took over on 20 March, Biddle reported to his wife that Jackson was ‘sitting by, unhappy and beaten, full of a sense of failure’. Under Maxwell Fyfe’s more incisive questioning, Göring became less complacent. He now appeared to be more of a childish bully whose swagger had been exposed as fearful.
⁷

Knight found that the talk in the Grand Hotel bar every night was of Göring. ‘What did you think of Göring’s answer?’ people asked; ‘He looks the sort of person you would enjoy spending an evening with!’ others observed. She herself examined him physically, preparing to paint the defendants. She noted his big head and face, lack of neck, huge body, short legs and arms. His soft grey Reich marshal’s uniform hung over him in folds, emphasising his lost bulk. Like many of the other onlookers, she was impressed by his magnetism. ‘What a benefit to humanity he might have been had his bent been other than for evil,’ she wrote in her diary. Knight was moved by the small human struggles going on amid these men who were soon to be condemned to death. Hess had been refusing to eat, apparently wanting to die a martyr. He was the only prisoner who did not bring a snack for the eleven o’clock break and on one occasion Göring broke his own large biscuit in half and tried unsuccessfully to make Hess eat some of it.
⁸

Knight’s suite in the Grand Hotel had been built for Hitler. Her bed was the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in, with a huge down pillow under her head and an enormous duvet (issuing from a world of blankets, Knight described this admiringly as a ‘still huger down pillow over my body’). Sometimes she wondered if Hitler had laid his head, ‘so uneasy in its ill-fitting crown’, upon her pillow. Like Lee Miller, she was unnerved but fascinated by entering the sensual world of the man responsible for the devastation she saw and heard about each day. She found it strange that she now slept so soundly on Hitler’s pillow each night, ‘after days spent in listening to the horrors brought
about by his descent from the idealism of his beginning to that overweening ambition’.
⁹

She spent her evenings with the Canadian deputy assistant adjutant-general of the British War Crimes Executive, Major Peter Casson, who was responsible for looking after the important British visitors. Together they toured the ruins of Nuremberg, surveying the rubble heaps under which ‘homes’ had been erected. They went into a building that looked like a doll’s house with its frontage wide open. Only the third floor was almost intact and there Knight found a bed and a baby in a cradle balanced dangerously near the open front of the building. A man and a woman were eating scraps that made Knight feel guilty for the luxurious food she was consuming nightly. The contrast between the two worlds made the frantic socialising of the Allies unreal, not least because no one could forget the trial they were attempting to escape. One night she dined at Lawrence’s villa where they talked briefly about Picasso but found that the conversation kept returning to the courtroom. ‘We sit side by side with death – and death by the million – wherever we are,’ Knight wrote in her diary. She was struck by Norman Birkett’s pity for the prisoners, whom he seemed unable to forget.
¹⁰

Sometimes Knight and Casson went to the nightly entertainment at the Grand Hotel, which seemed to Knight to be staged to save the visitors from nervous breakdown. Visiting later that summer to assist the prosecution, the civil servant and historian John Wheeler-Bennett was appalled by the contrast between the opulence of the hotel and the penury of the Germans who literally flattened their noses against the cracked glass panels, looking in at the occupiers. ‘Inside we, the conquerors who had brought their leaders to trial, were disporting ourselves in a manner certainly vulgar and virtually callous.’ Knight veered between criticising and embracing the vulgarity. One evening she took a young Canadian serviceman called Edward Clare for dinner in the Grand Hotel and then disappeared, saying that there were people she needed to speak to. Clare retired to the bar where suddenly he heard a drum roll and saw that the dance floor had been swiftly cleared. Knight appeared spotlit in the middle of the floor; without introduction, she nimbly spun backwards in the air. She walked off the dance floor, the lights were
brought up and dancers gradually congregated again. Knight informed Clare that an old friend had bet her that she could no longer do the backflip at which she had once been proficient.
¹¹

On another evening during a cabaret show the tightrope broke and Casson rushed over to help the tightrope walker who had landed on the floor. It turned out that the girl knew Knight; she was the fiancée of a bareback horse-rider with whose troupe Knight had once travelled in England. Now Casson and Knight drove in a military jeep to spend an evening with the circus people. For a few hours they danced, ate cakes and drank white wine while their new friends performed acrobatics on the hearthrug and played the guitar. At last they seemed to have escaped the presence of death.

Knight’s drawings were almost finished. She showed them to the novelist Evelyn Waugh when he arrived on 31 March. There was a series of sketches for a painting of the defendants in the dock and a collection of drawings of individual British judges and lawyers. She had started a painting depicting the prisoners in the dock against a background of corpses and burning buildings. Meeting Waugh, Knight asked repeatedly: ‘You don’t think it
illustration
do you?’ Waugh tried to tell her that he liked ‘illustration’ but he found that ‘the poor old girl had plainly had her tastes warped by Roger Fry’.
¹²

In fact the painting is not mere illustration. It is stamped with Knight’s very personal vision. The canvas is dominated by formal constructions of line and colour of which Roger Fry might have approved: the severe lines of the benches, all pointing upwards towards the destruction; the fall of snow of the white helmets and papers, echoing the straighter lines of the seats. The perspective of the painting is the aerial view of Knight’s box, which renders the defendants and their counsel strangely small and obscure and allows the burning buildings at the top to seem as though they are about to sweep up and subsume the brighter figures in the foreground. The defendants themselves are as ordinary as they seem in Low’s cartoons: reading and writing, legs crossed or splayed, Walther Funk with his head in his hands. However, against the background of apocalyptic horror the men seem more terrible and perhaps also more pitiable because they are so normal.