Year Zero (33 page)

Robert H. Jackson, another of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg (and a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), was far from a revolutionary extremist. But he was convinced that the trial was more than an exercise in establishing guilt and punishing the guilty. He believed that he was speaking for civilization. The world would be a better place after Nuremberg. In his opening statement, he proudly claimed: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.” But it was of the future that he was thinking when he added: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well.”
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Jackson was an idealist. The trials were part of an effort to build a better world, where the horrors of the past would never be repeated. After the
trial was finally over, Jackson, accompanied by the British barrister Peter Calvocoressi, took a trip to Salzburg to attend the first music festival held there since 1939. They heard
Der Rosenkavalier
, and were particularly impressed by a young German singer named Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who sang beautifully.

The great soprano actually had a small cloud hovering over her head; she had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1940, had performed recitals for SS officers on the eastern front, and had been romantically linked to an SS general and Nazi governor of Lower Austria. Perhaps she had done all these things out of conviction. Perhaps she was an opportunist. But her reputation soon recovered after the war. The person who was most responsible for this revival was the man she married in 1953, the British music impresario Walter Legge, a Jew.

E
rnst Michel, the Nuremberg trial reporter, was one of thousands of men forced to leave Buchenwald on a cold and very often deadly march on April 8, 1945. Others left behind with a reduced number of SS guards knew that, if the Americans didn't arrive soon, they would surely be forced to follow the same hideous route, or be killed on the spot. Buchenwald, built on the crest of the lovely Ettersberg, was among the worst German concentration camps. One of the many tortures devised by the SS was to suspend men from trees with their elbows tied behind their backs. The screams of pain gave the name “singing forest” to this gruesome place where Goethe once contemplated the beauty of nature and conversed with a young poet friend who made notes of the great writer's observations.

There was a small underground organization in the camp, led by communists, who had hidden some guns in the barracks, as well as a
shortwave radio transmitter built by a Polish engineer. A desperate message went out on April 8: “To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.” Three minutes later the answer came back: “KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.”
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Few of the inmates had enough strength left to attack the SS guards, or even to celebrate when the Americans finally came. But the fitter members of the camp resistance had decided not to wait for the Third Army's arrival. The knowledge that deliverance was at hand was encouragement enough. So they stormed the watchtowers and used the guns they had hidden for just such an occasion to kill the remaining guards.

While the U.S. soldiers tried to get water and food to the desperately ill and dying, the communist resistance leaders were already turning their minds to the future. Almost immediately the gate of Buchenwald, with its cast iron words
Jedem das Seine
(“To each his own”), was plastered with signs that read: “Never Again!”

Never Again was a sentiment that all people who had suffered in history's worst human conflict would have shared. But it was, for many, more than a sentiment; it was an ideal, perhaps a utopian ideal, a belief that a new and better world could be created from the ashes. Even as many people, including my father, pined for normal life to resume, others knew that this could never be. The world would not simply revert to what it had been before. The destruction of much of Europe and many parts of Asia, the moral bankruptcy of old regimes, not least the colonial ones, the collapse of Nazism and fascism, all these things encouraged the belief that there would be a completely new start. The year 1945 would be a blank slate; history would be happily discarded; anything was possible. Hence such phrases as “Germany, Year Zero” (
Deutschland, Stunde Null
), adopted by Roberto Rossellini as the title of his film about life in the ruins of Berlin, or the
Gruppe Neubeginnen
(Group Starting Afresh), formed by German social democrats exiled in London.

Of course, anything was not possible. There is no such thing as a blank slate in human affairs. History cannot be wished away. Besides, even though almost everyone agreed that past horrors should never recur, there was less agreement on just how to make sure of this. Utopian ideals, or even the more modest ambitions for political change, come in many different shapes.

We know what kind of revolutions the Soviet and Chinese communists had in mind. It is also clear what Asian nationalists in European colonies were hoping for. The goals of communist parties in western Europe, held in check by Stalin for his own geopolitical reasons, were more complicated. In any case, significant power—all the bravery of French or Italian partisans notwithstanding—would remain beyond their grasp. And yet a remarkable change did take place in western Europe, instigated by social democrats who had been planning for peace long before the war was over. The most radical change came not in formerly occupied countries, but in that conservative island country, that fortress of tradition whose heroic defiance had kept European hopes alive in the bleakest days of the war, when the Nazis appeared to be invincible: Great Britain.

•   •   •

MY BRITISH GRANDMOTHER,
rising to the patriotic fervor of a typical immigrants' daughter, was outraged when, in July 1945, her compatriots had the gall to vote against Winston Churchill's Conservatives: Winston out, Clement “Little Clemmie” Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, in, with a landslide. In a letter to my grandfather, still waiting to be released from army duty in India, she lamented the “black ingratitude” shown by the British towards “that great man to whom we owe everything.” My grandfather, who was also born in a family of Jewish immigrants, was less vehement, but then he was in the army, and had been exposed to other views.

Even the victors in the July election were so surprised by the sheer scale of their triumph that there was a kind of hush before the celebration.
Trade union delegates, gathered in drafty northern hotels, watched in silence as figures displayed on giant screens went up and up. The final results: 393 seats to Labour, 213 to the Conservatives. A report in the
Manchester Guardian
: “The thunder on the Left changed to lightning as the election results flashed out Labour's victory. The only slow-motion today was in the rather stunned way people at first took it all . . . Through it all Mr. Attlee remained calm and discreet. He looked a little tired.”
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A genuinely radical program came with an outward show of modesty. The most famous note of triumphalism only came a year later, when Hartley Shawcross, one of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg and a far more glamorous figure than his party leader, told Parliament: “We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time.”
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That this instance of crowing was held against him for the rest of his life shows how careful the new guard was about not looking too proud.

After the election, the
Guardian
carried a comment from the United States: “Queer that England should go Socialist when America is getting rid of the New Dealers and going right back to the Centre.”
⁴

There were other interesting reactions from abroad. In Palestine, Jews rejoiced because Labour was thought to be more pro-Zionist than the Tories. The Greek royalists were shaken, but the embattled left was jubilant, hoping in vain for a change in its own fortunes. The Soviet news announced the Labour victory without comment. General Franco's fascist government in Spain expected a break in diplomatic relations. And in India, the ex-premier of Bengal, a Muslim grandee named Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, observed: “It appears the British electorate has thrown overboard the one person who saved them from annihilation, and this has taken place even before the war is over.”
⁵

Perhaps it is true what a French politician said at the time, that ingratitude is the characteristic of a strong people. Actually, Churchill was still revered. The impossible ideal for many voters might have been a Labour government with Churchill as prime minister. But as the political correspondent of the
Guardian
said: “The country has preferred to do without Mr Churchill rather than to have him at the price of having
the Tories too.” The Tory party “is not merely condemned for its past: it is rejected because it has no message for the times. Great Britain, like the Continent, is clearly straining after a new order.”

Churchill himself was a little dazed by it all, but took his defeat in relatively good humor. His wife, Clementine, perhaps hoping to see more of her husband at home, had told him it may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise. To which Churchill responded: “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” He had wanted the national coalition government of the war years to continue, at least until the defeat of Japan. In fact, since he was never very keen on party politics (he changed parties twice), he probably felt more comfortable presiding over a national government than one consisting of a single party. But, according to Harold Nicolson, the diarist and diplomat who lost his seat in the election, Churchill didn't complain. He showed a “calm, stoical resignation—coupled with a shaft of amusement that fate could play so dramatic a trick, and a faint admiration for the electorate's show of independence.”
⁶

Some of Churchill's colleagues in the Conservative Party were more understanding of their opponents than my grandmother was. Harold Macmillan, who must have sensed the mood in the British Army, wrote in his memoir that given the tremendous difficulties of rebuilding the nation, “it may well be that by a sound instinct the British people felt that it would be wiser for a government of the Left to be in control.”
⁷
He added, however, that many people had been persuaded during the war that “immediately the struggle was over there would follow a kind of automatic utopia.” The socialist state, under British leadership, they thought, in Macmillan's reading, “would bring about unexampled prosperity in a world of universal peace.”
⁸
Such naïve idealism may have been in the air. But the notion that Churchill's Britain had passed, and the time had come for a more equitable society, could not be dismissed simply as a pipe dream. What Macmillan was perhaps reluctant to acknowledge was the resentment felt by people who had done most of the heavy work towards men of his own class.

This didn't escape the notice of Harold Nicolson. In the unmistakable
tones of a different kind of class peevishness, Nicolson noted in his diary on May 27 that people felt “in a vague and muddled way, that all the sacrifices to which they have been exposed . . . are all the fault of ‘them' . . . By a totally illogical process of reasoning, they believe ‘they' mean the upper classes, or the Conservatives. Class feeling and class resentment are very strong.”
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But was it so illogical to feel that things could not go back to what they had once been, to the “normal” state of class deference, the natural acceptance of privileges or the lack thereof, of being excluded by birth from enjoying the benefits of a decent education, a solid house, or proper medical care? Much has been written after the war about the solidarity of people linked at a time of national peril, of the good-natured “London-can-take-it” British bulldog spirit, when everyone mucked in together. But those same leveling experiences had also created a new sense of entitlement, where the old inequalities would no longer do. That was the British version of Never Again.

The American critic Edmund Wilson attended a Labour Party meeting in an industrial town of narrow coal-dark row houses. He watched Harold Laski, the party chairman and Marxist academic, make a speech on a gray afternoon to grimly attentive men and women dressed in worn-out army surplus clothes and ill-fitting “demob” suits. Laski reminded his audience that Winston Churchill was “in favor of the traditional Britain, with a few measures of practical construction.” But in the “traditional Britain,” he would have them know, only 1 percent of the population had owned 50 percent of the wealth, and only 1 percent of army officers came from working-class families.

As Wilson listened to Laski talking about the blessings of socialist government, he noticed an elderly woman (who may have looked older than she actually was), staring at the speaker with a hungry intensity that reminded him of other pale and gaunt Europeans who seemed different from the poor in times of peace, as though they belonged to a peculiar “breed with ravenous eyes like an animal's” that saw “only with appetites that were simple and stringent.” And there, “erect before this woman and
all her silent companions,” stood Laski, “slight, bespectacled, high-browed, making them promises which could perhaps not always be realized,” and “talking to some degree the mere cant of politics.” And yet “he held to his post by some tension that magnetized and turned him toward that craning grey-faced chicken-eyed woman.”
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In Greece, Wilson had the chance to mingle with British army men. Somewhat to his surprise, he found a peculiar animus among the common soldiers, not just against their officers, but against Churchill himself. One man “expressed himself very strongly on the subject of Churchill's cigar.” Whenever British soldiers met their American counterparts, they couldn't but notice how much better the GIs were being treated by their officers. In Delphi, of all places, Wilson detected “the almost complete class line-up, on the issue of the Churchill government, between the English officers and the English troops.” He “found no English soldier who had not voted for Labour and only one officer who had.”
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This observation is impossible to disprove, but there may have been a slight element of projection here; Edmund Wilson was himself rather sensitive to the subtle and unsubtle ways by which the English express superior status, towards Americans as much as to the lower ranks. In fact, the shifts in British society cannot be entirely explained by class warfare. Wilson got only part of the story. Noel Annan, a senior military intelligence officer in 1945 and later provost of King's College, Cambridge, among other grand positions, was typical in almost every respect of the English
haute bourgeoisie
, except perhaps for his strong intellectual interests. He voted Labour in 1945, as did quite a few other young officers. Annan relates why in his memoir. It wasn't that he didn't admire Churchill; he simply “doubted whether [Churchill] understood what the country needed after the war.”
¹²

Another reason, aside from class feeling, why the war changed social and political attitudes was that people were becoming better educated. The British wartime government had put much effort into cultural improvement. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) organized classical music concerts and theater performances in
factories, church halls, and air-raid shelters. Debates and education programs were set up for the intellectual elevation of the troops abroad. In Cairo, where many soldiers were stationed, a mock parliament was formed by leftist servicemen in 1943 to discuss politics, in the words of one airman, “as though we were living in the yearned-for peace . . .”
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