Free A Train of Powder by Rebecca West Page B

Services of the time. It is obvious that if an admiral were ordered by a demented First Sea Lord to serve broiled babies in the officers’ mess he ought to disobey; and it was shown that these generals and admirals had exhibited very little reluctance to carry out orders of Hitler which tended towards baby-broiling. Here was another point at which there was a split between the people who had attended the trial, or long stints of it, and the people who had not. Much evidence came up during the hearings which proved these men very different from what the products of Sandhurst and Dartmouth, West Point and Annapolis, are hoped to be. Doenitz, for example, exhorted his officers to be inspired by the example of some of their comrades who, confined in a camp in Australia, found that there were a few Communists among the other captured troops, managed to distract the attention of the guards, and murdered these wretched men.
    But it was in the case of the admirals that the court made a decision which proved Nuremberg to be a step farther on the road to civilization. They were charged with violating the Naval Protocol of 1936, which reaffirmed the rules of submarine warfare laid down in the London Naval Agreement of 1930. They had, and there was no doubt about it, ordered their submarines to attack all merchant ships without warning and not stop to save the survivors. But the tribunal acquitted them on this charge on the grounds that the British and the Americans had committed precisely the same offence. On May 8, 1940, the British Admiralty ordered all vessels in the Skagerrak to be sunk on sight. Also Admiral Nimitz stated in answer to interrogatories that unrestricted submarine warfare had been carried on by the American Navy in the Pacific Ocean from the first day that the campaign opened. The fact was that we and the Germans alike had found the protocol unworkable. Submarines cannot be used at all if they are to be obliged to hang about after they have made a killing and throw away their own security. The Allies admitted this by acquitting the admirals, and the acquittal was not only fair dealing between victors and vanquished, it was a step towards honesty. It was written down for ever that submarine warfare cannot be carried on without inhumanity, and that we have found ourselves able to be inhumane. We have to admit that we are in this trap before we can get out of it. This nostra culpa of the conquerors might well be considered the most important thing that happened at Nuremberg. But it evoked no response at the time, and it has been forgotten.
    But in this court nothing could be clear-cut, and nothing could have a massive effect, because it was international, and international law, as soon as it escapes from the sphere of merchandise (in which, were men good, it would alone need to be busy), is a mist with the power to make solids as misty as itself. It was true that the Nazi crimes of cruelty demanded punishment. There in Nuremberg the Germans, pale among the rubble, were waiting for that punishment as a purification, after which they might regain their strength and rebuild their world; and it was obvious that the tribunal must sit to disprove Job’s lament that the houses of the wicked are safe from fear. A tyrant had suspended the rule of law in his country and no citizen could seek legal protection from personal assault, theft, or imprisonment; and he had created so absolute a state of anarchy that when he fell from power the courts themselves had disappeared and could not be reconstituted to do justice on him and his instruments. Finally he had invaded other territories and reproduced this ruin there. Plainly some sort of emergency tribunal had to take over the work of the vanished tribunals when it was possible, if the Nazis were not to enjoy a monstrous immunity simply because they had included among their crimes the destruction of the criminal courts. It was only just that the Nazis should pay the due penalty for