Judgment in Hollywood

Curious how the fables of the First World War turned out to be the facts of World War II. The morbid imaginings of the Bryce Report—that German factory used to render bodies into soap, the Belgian babies murdered by the Huns, the crucified Canadian, Whitehall’s whole Grand Guignol propaganda show—became realities in Germany a generation later. In 1916, with what indignation did the United States lather up a war spirit at the thought of the imprudent innocents lost on the Lusitania; and in the next war American flyers would fry innocents from Berlin to Tokyo. Then, as the ironic World War I aftermath, there was Lloyd George fighting his khaki election with the slogan “Hang the Kaiser!” Of course he never meant it, but following World War II the first Nuremberg trial established the legal principle that any surviving defeated leaders would find themselves in the dock.

I remember on a snowy afternoon in January 1946 sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Nuremberg courthouse and looking down on the twenty Nazi defendants and thinking that we had finally got round to hanging the Kaiser. Not that I or anyone else needed to waste any sympathy on those survivors of the Thousand-Year Reich. Stripped of their tinsel, they looked shoddy enough, and I found it hard to imagine they had once made the earth shake. There was the androgynous Goering, his suet melted inside the stripped-down bulk of his marshal’s uniform; there was the auto-erotic ape Streicher chewing gum audibly; there were the flop-eared fox von Papen, Hess with his furred brows and mad blank eyes, the lackey Keitel trying to keep some pathetic remnant of military bearing. A drumhead courtmartial and a firing squad would have been good enough for them.

FR

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Francis Russell

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Curious how the fables of the First World War turned out to be the facts of World War II. The morbid imaginings of the Bryce Report—that German factory used to render bodies into soap, the Belgian babies murdered by the Huns, the crucified Canadian, Whitehall’s whole Grand Guignol propaganda show—became realities in Germany a generation later. In 1916, with what indignation did the United States lather up a war spirit at the thought of the imprudent innocents lost on the Lusitania; and in the next war American flyers would fry innocents from Berlin to Tokyo. Then, as the ironic World War I aftermath, there was Lloyd George fighting his khaki election with the slogan “Hang the Kaiser!” Of course he never meant it, but following World War II the first Nuremberg trial established the legal principle that any surviving defeated leaders would find themselves in the dock.

I remember on a snowy afternoon in January 1946 sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Nuremberg courthouse and looking down on the twenty Nazi defendants and thinking that we had finally got round to hanging the Kaiser. Not that I or anyone else needed to waste any sympathy on those survivors of the Thousand-Year Reich. Stripped of their tinsel, they looked shoddy enough, and I found it hard to imagine they had once made the earth shake. There was the androgynous Goering, his suet melted inside the stripped-down bulk of his marshal’s uniform; there was the auto-erotic ape Streicher chewing gum audibly; there were the flop-eared fox von Papen, Hess with his furred brows and mad blank eyes, the lackey Keitel trying to keep some pathetic remnant of military bearing. A drumhead courtmartial and a firing squad would have been good enough for them.