Six hours a day, in dead artificial air, in the shadowless brightness of dead-white lamps, twenty-one accused men face judges, counsel, and the operetta-like US military policemen. Around them revolves the whole tremendous machinery of the trial. Swarms of men and women trot round the corridors, sway in their office-chairs, giggle at the chocolate-and-gum counters of the "Post Exchange"; clash, unite, divide over forms, priorities, facilities and prestige of doubtful importance; gorge their meals in haste, gossip feebly over the artificial intercourse of life in the graveyard of Nuremberg.
* * *
The twenty-one men in the dock ache for diversion, nudge one another about a peroxide-curled girl in the gallery. Only the public, always changing, gloats, searches for sensation: opera-glasses in the prettily-gloved paws of plump wives and over-powdered girl friends of the Military Government officials; German Jews gaping, still scared, recognising.
One is amazed, at first, by the tame obedience of the prisoners to the rules of the game. Do they accept its lawfulness, and why?
Goring, at close quarters, petrifies. Thinner, but his huge face still lion-like, he yawns, chuckles, prattles, stretches, leans forward, poses grandly, is lively, quick-sighted, dangerous - a large-dimension adventurer; confident, because he has made the decision. The others (except stunted Hess) still fight for life, and hope troubles them, pales their faces with fear.
Raeder (old broken man-at-arms) listens to his counsel's pronouncements with horrifying concentration. Keitel, hawklike, tragic, broods on defeat. Kaltenbrunner - like a trapped bandit, stupefied but feigning indifferent dignity - remains watchful. Doenitz is both grotesque and tragic: his Junker pride turned to absurdity, he still retains its bearing emptied of content. Schacht - intellectual blagueur - creates discord, arrogant in his suppleness, more and more sure of his safety. Frank hides behind dark glasses, ear-phones, pale tufty baldness - the shabby mask of a "kitsch" villain, who interwove ruthlessness with the sloppy romanticism of his love-life.
Streicher, a broken cripple; Funk, Sauckel - the rabid victims of complexes, of the jealous chase after physical valour, after Valhalla. Soldier, careerist, aristocrat, intellectual, adventurer, brute, fool, swindler, or degenerate - the most shattering are the faces that could be labelled "normal", that prove ever-present evil, that could be replaced by anybody from the public gallery.
The men of the Tribunal have the dummy faces of the Law of England, or Russia, or France, or America - abstract creatures moulded into their traditional shapes of Judges.
* * *
The court drains one's energy; the bedlam of little contacts, promises, drinks, "who's whos" saps one's alertness. The drama is performed against the constant interferences of whispers, smiles, diversions; the background weighs heavily on the show, shatters with its trivial comedy one's sense of Judgement and Retribution.
The people of the court have their "fancies". "Goring's in good form today," gaily announces an Allied lawyer; "Frick was suicidal again," they worry; a woman- journalist, writing Frank's story, talks of him with intimate understanding. A British prosecutor, in the pissoir, to a German counsel: "I enjoyed your excellent speech."
Propped by the seemingly careless, bored theologians of law, with rare outbursts of emotion diffused in endless speeches on military rulings, neutral seas and jus-tified invasion, trickling drop by drop with history - the Trial wades its way towards JUSTICE.
* * *
The blank, clear day outside disquiets. The division of the Court (Guilty versus Judges - Defeated versus Victors) disappears. Ivy-like life crawls over and submerges the borderline. War's heroic simplicity of good and bad has ended. Justice grows many-faced, projects itself on the future, or looks back to the beginnings of guilt, or loses its track in the jungle of social and national biology.
Against the crashed vistas of Nuremberg an old woman under an umbrella drifts after her daily anxieties, joins the bread queue, cries over her loneliness; a legless boy plots revenge against odds; another confides in American ears his hatred of Russia; an elderly man, who was fat and bull-necked once (his face fallen in, his nape in grisly bulges, his suit hanging over a still surviving belly), pleads "Bitte schon"; a girl and a black soldier laugh, holding hands - gloom and longing dispersed; a D.P. Pole in American blue-tinted uniform, lost and alone, looks for direction.
In the far-stretching desolation, a child stoops, pulls at a weed and says to her mother: "O, schone Blumchen."
The trial, which had begun the previous November, ended a month after this article appeared. Of the total 24 accused, half were sentenced to death
