THE SPECTATOR
SELECTIVE MEMORY
The death of Rudolf Hess after 46 years in captivity — half his long life — might seem an event of scant significance, but at least it will put an end to embarrassed and embarrassing pleas for his release. Another small benefit will be the expense spared: his last 20 years of senile madness cost the world the equivalent of £16,000,000. cost the world the equivalent of £16,000,000.
This expenditure, we now learn, proved insufficient to prevent him from attempting suicide in the garden of Spandau prison. It would be interesting to know what precise- ly the 100 or so guards were doing as their infirm, senile, half-blind prisoner wrapped the wire around his neck. This particular inglorious episode might serve as a warning to those who imagine that all social prob- lems can be solved by the employment of more staff. But there are two further aspects of Hess's suicide worthy of note: first that an attempt was made to revive him, and secondly the refusal of the Russians to sign a communiqud concerning it.
Had He been a man full of well- deserved honours, a patient in an ordinary hospital, it is doubtful whether any self- respecting doctor would have exerted him- self to prolong such pointless suffering when there was no prospect of it being ended except by death. No one could possibly have thought Hess's life was worth preserving at all costs: an ancient, miser- able, paranoid Nazi. It seems therefore that efforts at resuscitation were designed purely to avoid the public embarrassment of the guards. As to the silence of the Russians, it proves once again that, glasnost notwith- standing, they regard the diffusion of knowledge, even on unimportant matters, as intrinsically dangerous, to be guarded against like the escape of some mutated virus from a biochemical warfare labora- tory. (In this they are not entirely unlike the British Civil Service, but without a press to hound them.) The principle of concealment is superior even to that of scoring all possible propaganda points. Should Hess have been released? The question raises a host of issues. He put himself beyond the pale of human sym- pathy by encouraging and abetting crimes of a nature and on a scale not remotely envisaged by earlier proponents of univer- sal forgiveness; but he was a victim of a judicial process of doubtful validity, which invented categories of crime ex post facto, and which employed as prosecutors and judges men who were themselves guilty of crimes almost as bad. On the Day of Judgment there will be little to choose between Hess and Vyshinsky.
Hess posed no conceivable threat to anyone for several decades of his incar- ceration. In a sense, he never did amount politically to very much. In a system which needs a Fiihrer, deputy Fiihrer is not a prestigious position. Hess was chosen pre- cisely because he was a devoted and pliant nonentity — without Hitler, he would have been a clerk with repellent views.
It is difficult to believe his prolonged imprisonment acted as a deterrent, either, to future genocidal maniacs. Retribution remains the only possible justification for his fate, and the crimes in which he eagerly, even joyously, participated were so monstrous that unending retribution, while useless practically, seems instinctive- ly right and fitting.
The Russians wanted to execute him. They felt so strongly because he had tried to neutralise Britain only weeks before the German invasion — when the war was still a war of the imperialist powers, between whom there was nothing to choose. Had he succeeded the war would have been cost- lier still to the Soviet Union, and might even have ended differently. (This view sits awkwardly with the later contention that Britain played no important part in Hitler's defeat.) Life imprisonment was the least the Russians could accept.
As for the British, they did not press too hard for the release of Hess, first so as not to appear unduly sympathetic to a Nazi, and second because Hess's flight to Scot- land had aroused Russian suspicions of British duplicity and equivocation. Much about the flight remained unexplained: documents had disappeared and it was possible there were embarrassing secrets still to be revealed.
But nearly half a century later, the true significance of the affair lies elsewhere. It is the use to which the imprisonment of Hess has been put in the Soviet press. Izvestia insisted to the last that Hess's crimes were unforgivable. His continued punishment, it stated last year, 'is, and remains, a sign of genuine humanity in the memory of millions of victims of Nazi crimes'.
Written by anyone other than high functionaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, this would be a respect- able statement. One might disagree with it, but one would acknowledge it as express- ing a possible point of view. There is no question that the Nazi atrocities — atroci- ties is a word far too weak, but we have no other — must never, never be forgotten, explained away, or by any other method depreciated. However, for the writers of Izvestia not all mass-murders are equal. Twenty million dead in the Great Patriotic War must never be forgotten; 20 million dead in the collec- tivisation and purges must never be re- membered. The inevitable conclusion from this disparity is that however tragic the suffering of the Soviet people in the last war, their government is grossly manipu- lating the memory of it for political ends. What ends? By its selective memorialisa- tion, the Soviet government fosters a sense of perpetual external threat that both justifies and explains the equally perpetual shortfall in all goods other than tanks and bullets. And each time the purely defen- sive forces of the Soviet Union render fraternal assistance to a tiny embattled clique in some far-off land, the lessons of the Great Patriotic War can be drawn once more.
Never forget, never remember: the twin imperatives of the Soviet schizophrenia.
Until glasnost includes a complete re- formation in the way history is learnt in the Soviet Union, one must be wary of pro- testations from that direction of humani- tarianism. That is one lesson, at least, of the Hess affair.
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