The War Guilty

In London last week well-bred, well-fed Herbert Claiborne Pell, U.S. member of the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, continued to shuffle his papers, read reports, collect data. But his time, and the American people's, was running out. The corpses of three German officers dangling in the cold market square at Kharkov, swiftly tried and swiftly hanged by the Russians for the slaughter of Russian civilians, posed a question to Americans. What responsibility shall the U.S. take in the punishment of the war guilty?

At the Moscow Conference it was decided that each United Nation shall be the judge of war crimes committed in its own territory. Does this mean that the U.S. could wash its hands of the whole business? Many Americans would like to think so. Those who believe that the answer to the German problem is extermination of the German people--the most vocal of whom are Litterateurs Clifton Fadiman and Rex Stout--have few supporters.

But the U.S. conscience may be troubled. For, next to Freedom, the concept which Americans hold most dear is Justice. And to U.S. legalists the swift action of East European trials smacked unpleasantly of the drumhead. Will the war be won if Justice is lost? Yet what shall the U.S. reply if, attempting to impose its code of elaborate safeguards and tortuous delays, its injured allies turn on it and cry: "Did they burn your homes? Did they murder your wives and children?"

These are hard questions. Thus far most Americans have taken refuge in a grim and too easy sophism: "The Russians and Poles and Czechs will handle the Germans; the Chinese will take care of the Japs before we can do anything anyway." But can the U.S., fighting a united war for a united peace, retreat into moral isolation? The Nazis think not. Last week they were blaming the Kharkov hangings on Roosevelt and Churchill, and threatening to take retaliation on U.S. and British prisoners.

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