Trials and tribulations
Richard Lamb
NUREMBERG: THE LAST BATTLE by David Irving Focal Point, £25, pp. 362 After the first world war there was strong public demand in France and Britain for the Kaiser and other prominent Germans to be put on trial as war criminals, and the Allies produced a list of 854 potential defendants, including well known generals and politicians. The Weimar government jibbed and the upshot was that a few Germans were tried by a German court at Leipzig, whereupon inter- est petered out.
The atrocities of the Nazis in the second world war were so well known that the Allies had no option but to punish the major perpetrators. Churchill and Eden, backed by the Lord Chancellor, Simon, and the Attorney General, Maxwell Fyffe, at first wanted to execute the Nazi leaders out of hand. Surprisingly, Stalin would not have it, and the International Military Tribunal was set up at Nuremberg with British, American, Russian and French as both judges and prosecutors in 1946 to try the chief German war criminals.
The Nuremberg Trials were highly unsatisfactory. The selection of the accused was haphazard. Both Generals Keitel and Jodl were charged (and eventually hanged) against the advice of the British Foreign Office. With Keitel in the dock there was no point in adding Jodl. The Germans were accused of aggressive warfare, although the British and French had done the same by invading Norway, and the Russians Poland and Finland. The Russians insisted on charging the Germans with the shooting of thousands of Polish soldiers at Katyn near Smolensk although the British and Ameri- cans had indisputable evidence that the Russians themselves had carried out the massacre. The British Admiralty pointed out that the German admirals had behaved `pretty well;' yet Doenitz and Raeder were charged with crimes at sea for behaviour which had been imitated by the Americans and British. A pernicious facet was that the judges seemed also to be the prosecution. However, despite its imperfections and miscarriages of justice, the Nuremberg Tri- als established with world-wide publicity the truth about the unspeakable Nazi atrocities which produced the death and torture of millions of Jews and others from conquered nations.
Telford Taylor, a chief American prose- cutor, laid bare many grisly secrets about Nuremberg malpractices in his personal and authoritative book The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1993) with an unedifying account of the deliberations of the judges showing on what 'shallow considerations' the grim decisions were taken, even describing them as 'callous and unthink- ing'. In Nuremberg: The Last Battle David Irving duplicates much of Taylor's meticu- lous work, using the same American sources. Still, with his usual painstaking research, Irving has produced fresh inter- esting sidelights from German sources.
Whereas Taylor criticised Nuremberg objectively, Irving is heavily prejudiced. He shows strong sympathy with the Nazi defendants and bitter hostility to the judges and prosecutors, condemning as improper the judges' frequent wining and dining with the prosecution lawyers. For all its faults, Nuremberg was not quite the travesty of justice which Irving contends it was.
He claims that the Americans deliberate- ly starved nearly one million German POWs to death after the surrender, quot- ing as his sole source the book by James Bacque, Other Losses, which has been total- ly discredited. He also states that Churchill `possibly' ordered the assassination of Mussolini by British agents although there is not a scrap of evidence to support this allegation.
At Nuremberg, evidence about the German resistance and the Stauffenberg bomb plot was given by two survivors, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Hans Bernd Gisevius. Irving describes them as `two traitors' and writes that the gullible American prosecutors were completely taken in by 'these renegades', ignoring the fact that their books contain the most authentic first-hand evidence about the Resistance.
With no worthwhile supporting evidence, Irving alleges that the defendants were `Ever killed a man?' starved while in prison at Nuremberg in an attempt to lower their morale. This is manifestly untrue, and Goering's physical condition improved markedly during this period. Irving equates Hitler's orders for atrocities with Churchill's orders for indiscriminate bombing of German cities. The ethics of indiscriminate bombing are controversial but memories of the Blitz and V-bombs are rife in Britain so that the bombing of Germany is still seen as reprisal raids. Perhaps after another 50 years Irving's claim will be taken more seri- ously.
The use of slave labour by the Nazis was an outstanding iniquity. Irving does not try to justify it, but is on stronger ground in criticising the British and Americans for allowing a great number of Germans to be deported to Russia for forced labour after the war.
According to Irving the private files of Jackson, the chief US prosecutor, provide `disturbing evidence of tampering with and distortion of justice'. Taylor tells almost the same story. Certainly when the defence raised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret clauses about dividing up Poland, they were fobbed off by the British presid- ing judge, Mr Justice Lawrence.
Irving records with delight how Goering scored off the prosecutor Jackson, so that the court dissolved in laughter and Jackson blew up in fury after he had asked Goering why plans for remilitarising the Rhineland in 1936 were kept secret, and Goering replied that the Americans never informed Germany of their mobilisation plans. It was absurd to accuse Goering of planning an aggressive war because there was incontro- vertible evidence in the Foreign Office files that he had done his best to deter Hitler from attacking Poland in 1939. The transcript of the Nuremberg Trials has been published in English in 23 volumes (six million words) with nine volumes of documents. Irving complains that only prosecution documents were printed and not those of the defence. This deprives historians of much interesting material but does not justify Irving's warn- ing that the Nuremberg archives must be treated with caution; they are essential research material.
Irving revels in the details of the allied political jealousies, the internal wrangling between the national teams and the sharp and ever- present divergence between those who sought quick revenge and those who insisted on a proper trial governed by the principles of justice. All this has already been described by Telford Taylor, but Irving adds many worthwhile footnotes to a sorry tale. His wild accusations against the Allies are unconvincing and do nothing to modify the accepted view of Na l behaviour.
Richard Lamb's next book Mussolini and Britain, will be published by John Murray In the Spring.
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