Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from
other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole.”
“War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All
wars, and all decent people.”—Ben Ferencz
The leader by will of the people differs from the leader by
will of God in that the former is compelled to clear the road for himself or,
at any rate, to assist the conjuncture of events in discovering him.
Nevertheless, the leader is always a relation between people, the individual
supply to meet the collective demand. The controversy over Hitler’s personality
becomes the sharper the more the secret of his success is sought in himself. In the meantime, another political figure would be difficult to find that is, in the same measure, the focus of anonymous historical forces. Not every exasperated
petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in
every exasperated petty bourgeois.
Leon Trotsky- What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)
This is an interesting and well-researched book on the writers
who covered the Nuremburg Trials of leading Nazis after the Second World War.
The magnitude of the trials drew in journalists and writers from all over the
world. Writers John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner,
William Shirer, and future German politicians such as Willy Brandt all observed
the trials. The title of the writers’ castle was because the journalists were
housed in the Schloss Faber-Castell castle in Stein, a nearby town.
Neumahr is a German author and literary agent, and his book
is less about the crimes of the Nazis but more about the writer's reaction to
the crimes of the Nazis. As Neumahr points out in the book, not all journalists
or writers cover themselves with glory. Even a cursory glance at their
reports of the trials shows that some resorted to outright lying and presented less-than-objective accounts of the proceedings. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin
Alexanderplatz, offered a first-hand account of the courtroom he never
went to.
Others brought their ideological baggage with them, which
showed in their articles. Erika Mann was the daughter of the novelist Thomas
Mann. Because of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, (she was considered a Jew by
the Nazis) she held an abiding hatred of the Nazis, which coloured her writings
on the trial. The French Stalinist writer Elsa Triolet wrote many misleading
and downright false reports to support her belief that the Anglo-American
judges and lawyers were pro-Nazi.
Neumahr’s approach is “biographical and kaleidoscopic”. Given
the highly political nature of the trial, it is a little strange that NeuMahr
rarely delves into the politics of prosecutions or the writers that covered it,
which is a big weakness in the book. As Bill Niven points out, “In most cases,
he is as much, if not more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen
protagonists before, during and after their time at the Faber-Castell castle
than he is with their actual journalistic response to the military tribunal.
Neumahr is especially interested in all the social goings-on at the castle,
whose guests – despite the separation of male and female quarters and,
eventually, of Soviet reporters from all others – enjoyed a high level of
fraternisation. Neumahr follows the various relationships of his protagonists.
Erika Mann moved into the castle with her partner and fellow reporter Betty
Knox (whom she referred to as her ‘beloved lunatic’) despite the press camp
being run by the American military, for whom homosexuality was a punishable
crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US judge at Nuremberg, had an affair.
As Neumahr tells it, this was something of a relief for both parties: ‘Like
Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually frustrated’, he writes,
because ‘she hadn’t had sex with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on
Gellhorn, we learn about her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway,
while the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French writer Elsa
Triolet – who stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel and not the castle – focuses
heavily on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.”[1]
The book's strongest part is how Neumahr relates to
how many writers and journalists were morally tarnished by political bias or
other prejudices. This applies to author Eric Kästner[2].
One of my favourite childhood books was Emil and the Detectives. Despite having
his books burnt by the Nazis in 1933, Kastner made a career for himself under
the Nazis.
According to his Wikipedia page, “ The Gestapo interrogated
Kästner several times, the national writers' guild expelled him, and the Nazis
burned his books as "contrary to the German spirit" during the book
burnings of 10 May 1933, instigated by Joseph Goebbels. Kästner witnessed the
event in person and later wrote about it. He was denied membership in the new
Nazi-controlled national writers' guild, Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller
(RDS), because of what its officials called the "culturally Bolshevist
attitude in his writings before 1933. During the Third Reich, Kästner published
apolitical novels such as Drei Männer im Schnee (Three Men in the Snow) (1934)
in Switzerland. In 1942, he received a special exemption to write the
screenplay for Münchhausen, using the pseudonym Berthold Bürger. The film was a
prestige project by Ufa Studios to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of
its establishment, an enterprise backed by Goebbels.
In 1944, Kästner's home in Berlin was destroyed during a
bombing raid. In early 1945, he and others pretended that they had to travel to
the rural community of Mayrhofen in Tyrol for location shooting for a
(non-existent) film, Das falsche Gesicht (The Wrong Face). The actual purpose
of the journey was to avoid the final Soviet assault on Berlin. Kästner had
also received a warning that the SS planned to kill him and other Nazi
opponents before the arrival of the Soviets.[8] He was in Mayrhofen when the war
ended. He wrote about this period in a diary published in 1961 under the title
Notabene 45. Another edition, closer to Kästner's original notes, was published
in 2006 under the title Das Blaue Buch (The Blue Book).”[3]
Neumahr’s intention was never to write about the political
nature or the duplicity of those prosecuting the Nazis. As Bill Hunter points “During
this ten months, while the prosecutors of Britain, France, America and the
Soviet Union, listed the sickening crimes of Nazism, world events showed the
hypocrisy of the prosecuting Allies. Even while the aggressions of the Nazis
were being recounted. British imperialism was maintaining a regime of terror
and oppression in Greece, suppressing the colonial peoples struggling for
freedom, and strafing Indonesian villages.The British prosecutor prated about
justice. Meanwhile, Dr Kiesselbach, according to Tribune 6 September a declared
opponent of de-Nazification was placed by British imperialism in charge of the
German “Central Office of Justice”.
While the courtroom resounded with castigations of Nazi
oppression and racial discrimination, American imperialist suppression was
active in the Philippines, and lynch law was rampant in the Southern States.The
prosecutors denounced the occupation methods of the Nazis. Yet, even while the
French prosecutor mouthed phrases of indignation, the agents of French
imperialism were torturing the natives of Indo-China and burning their
villages.The miseries of slave labour under the Nazis were related to the court
at the same time as 10 million Germans were uprooted and wandered homeless as a
result of the wholesale expulsion policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the face
of world events during the trial, who can deny that at Nuremberg, the pot
called the kettle black, blackening itself still further even while doing so?[4]
[1] The Writers’ Castle’ by Uwe Neumahr review- https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/writers-castle-uwe-neumahr-review
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_K%C3%A4stner
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_K%C3%A4stner
[4] Bill Hunter on the Nuremberg Trial-). It was
published in Socialist Appeal in October 1946. www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/otherdox/nurember.htm
