MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD
N [COLSON THE newspapers during the last few weeks have been publishing photographs, not only of the arrest and interrogation of enemy officials and generals, but also of their corpses after they are dead. Obviously it is necessary, for purposes of identification and record, that such photographs should be taken: what I question is whether they should thereafter be published in the Press. It has been customary in this country, when a murderer has been convicted and hanged, to cast a veil of official decency over his last moments. Reporters are not permitted to be present at the execution, and all that the general public is allowed to see of the final ceremonies is the posting of a square sheet of paper outside the gate of Penton- ville, Brixton or Lewes. In this, it has seemed to me, we display a higher sense of human values than is displayed either in Russia or in the United States ; since if there be any meaning at all in the phrase " the majesty of the law," then the last act of all such dramas should be conducted with reticence and dignity. It is a solemn action on the part of the State to apply the overwhelming apparatus of its power to the extinction of an individual life ; and if that action is to be robbed of its solemnity by the introduction of unworthy elements such as sensationalism, vindictiveness or gloating, then we shall find ourselves reverting to the barbarism of the pillory or the old and most disgraceful exhibitions around Tyburn Tree. For if, as we are assured, the quality of mercy " blesseth him that gives and him that takes," then the vice of vengeance is not only horrible to those who have to suffer under it, but a curse upon those by whom it is publicly indulged in. Our ancestors, in their wisdom, realised in time that public executions were bad for the public soul ; but even in the eighteenth century nobody was obliged to witness such tragedies who did not desire to do so ; today the vicar's daughter sees these horrors as she sips her morning tea.
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I am not, I trust, a vindictive person, but I admit that there have been moments during the last twenty years when I have told myself revenge stories regarding the fate which I should desire for Mussolini or for Himmler. I recall one afternoon many years ago when, after visiting the arrogant Italian pavilion at the Paris Exhibition, I paced the quays devising humiliating punishment for the man who had conceived so dangerous and so untrue a scheme of national ostenta- tion. Yet once a man, however hateful, is entirely at one's mercy, once he is caught like a rat in a trap, it is only human that a strain of mercifulness should come to mitigate one's anger and that one should not desire his final extinction to be attended by circum- stances of unnecessary humiliation, cruelty or exposure. Even a rat should be drowned expeditiously and quietly, and not suffered to run around in agony while the onlookers shout and jeer. It was right that the Italian people should themselves exact their retribution upon Mussolini ; but it was not right that his body should have been exposed to gross indignity when he was dead , and it was even less right that the newspapers in this distant country should publish photographs of his body hanging like a trussed turkey from a petrol- filling station. Sejanus ducitur unco—and such inevitably is the fate of all dictators ; but the gravity of the Romans would have been disturbed if the final degradation of Sejanus had been exhibited, for every matron and every virgin to see, upon the kiosks of Cremona or Lyons. Heinrich Hinunler, again, was an international criminal if ever there was one ; but that does not justify any gloating over his half-clothed corpse.
* * * * The worst effect of total war is that it destroys the moral sensi- bility even of those who entered it with the finest motives. We started out, in all sincerity and ardour, " to fight evil things." The spirit of unity, courage and self-sacrifice which we developed during these atrocious years was beyond all praise. It would be tragic indeed if, in developing these great virtues, we were to lose or to forget those other virtues of tolerance and decency which were the two most distinctive virtues which the people of these islands pos- sessed. "After all," said Mr. Churchill in the House of Commons not so many months ago, " After all, we are decent folk—all of us." It is because I believe this to be profoundly true that I regret when I see us indulging in indecency. I am aware that terrible crimes against humanity have been committed in this war ; I am convinced that the expression " war criminals " is not sonic mere phrase used by the. victors for the purpose of imposing vengeance upon the vanquished ; I believe that it represents, not only a fact of justice, but the very essence of human conscience. I should wish those responsible for all this human misery, I should wish those who ordered or executed these sadistic crimes, to be brought to justice and to be punished, both as retribution for themselves and as a deterrent against future criminality. Under no circumstances what- ever must the guilty be allowed to escape. But this necessary act of retribution must be carried out upon clearly announced principles of procedure. It is for this reason that the visit of Justice Robert Jackson, and the Conference which is to meet this week under Lord Wright's chairmanship, are of such importance. For unless the rules and categories are agreed from the outset the process of punishment may become empirical and confused. Public opinion, in this country at least, will soon become glutted with retribution ; those war criminals who happen to come first on the list will be convicted, whatever may be their comparative complicity ; whereas those who come last on the list will, owing to a change in the public mood, be treated, however great may be their proved guilt, with greater leniency. And injustice will thereby be perpetrated.
I shall not, I trust, be accused by my Soviet friends of diversionary activities if I suggest that their conception of war-guilt is likely to be more generalised than our own. It has for long been an accepted theory in this country that the State should only execute an individual after he has been found guilty of murder by a jury of twelve fellow- citizens. In Russia, on the other hand, it has for long been customary to eliminate all those whose political ideas either are, or may be pre- sumed to be, opposed to those of the party in power. It will not be easy, even when the trials of war criminals begin, to strike a reasonable balance between these two different conceptions. It will he even more difficult to do so once the major criminals have been identified and convicted, and when the long list of minor war criminals comes up for consideration. In two years from now, by which time most of the major offenders will have been put on trial, the public in this country will have become wearied of the process, and some difficulty is bound to arise regarding the surrender into Russian hands of countless junior officers or officials who will have been by then for several years in British or American captivity, and against whom the evidence may not be wholly conclusive. Our difficulties will be increased by the fact that the Russian authorities will not understand our hesitation to agree to any such mass trans- ferences ; they will imagine that we are anxious, for some sinister motives, to preserve from elimination the German officer class ; and it is for this reason, among others, that it is so important that some clear statement should be made before long by Judge Jackson and his colleagues regarding the categories into which war criminals in our hands are to be divided and the legal methods by which they are to be tried. Failing such a statement, much future confusion and misunderstanding is bound to result.
* * * * After the last war we blurred the whole issue, and vitiated the final result, by including in our list of war criminals both those who had committed actual cruelty or violence and those whose responsibility, such for instance as that of Hindenburg, was, to say the least, remote. By bunching together the comparatively innocent with the demonstrably guilty we destroyed the moral basis for retri- bution, with the result that many evil men escaped. This time we must secure, by an exact definition of principle, that the guilty do not evade punishment and that the innocent do not incur it. And having stated our principles, we must stick to them regardless of clamour either at home or abroad.
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