Morning After Judgment Day

In a bomb-battered factory in London's East End, a wizened, 60-year-old cockney craftsman named Harry Moaks, widely renowned in the trade, was working last week on a special job. With his usual care, Moaks was readying a special consignment of finely woven, chamois-covered, grade-A hemp nooses.

The nooses were scheduled to be flown to Nuernberg within a few days.

The eleven clients for whom Harry Moaks was working were "shaking in their cells" at night (according to an official psychiatrist). Constantly watched for possible suicide attempts, they received visits from chaplains. Most of the condemned (or their wives) had appealed to the Allied Control Council for clemency or other modification of the sentences. "At least," sobbed Frau Brigitte Frank, wife of Poland's ex-Governor, "they could shoot him." Former Grand Admiral Erich Raeder requested that his sentence of life imprisonment be commuted to death by a firing squad so that he would not have to "languish in prison."

Chocolate for the Children. As their comrades began the death watch, the three men who had been acquitted by the tribunal held a press conference (during which Banker Schacht offered his autograph in exchange for chocolate bars for his daughters). Then they went through some trying experiences of their own. Frau Schacht put flowers on the table, expecting her husband for breakfast. But he did not come. When the three acquitted men were ready to leave prison they found a cordon of German police ready to rearrest them. They hastily requested (and got) permission to stay in jail.

Later, under cover of darkness, U.S. guards spirited Schacht and Fritzsche to private residences. According to the Anglo-Saxon legal principle which protects an acquitted man from "double jeopardy," U.S. Military Government officials ordered German police to leave them alone. But after only two days of freedom, Schacht was again jailed, by German police, near Stuttgart (where he had graveled just to see what would happen), to face denazification proceedings.

Such Thoughts. The four judges had left Nuernberg in an unseemly scramble immediately after their job was done. But the judges themselves still had to be judged. Opinion on their verdict ran in two directions. Naturally, most of the Nazis' surviving victims denounced the sentences as too lenient--specifically, in acquitting Papen, Schacht, the SA and the General Staff. Moscow echoed this criticism. Cried France's outspoken Franc Tireur: "The world naively believed it would never see worse than Naziism unleashed. It is seeing worse: Naziism absolved."

In Berlin, workers organized a protest strike, probably the first since 1933. Press dispatches quoted "average citizens" like

Olga Habernschaden ("Hanging is too good for them") and Hasso Grassmueck ("They should be made to feel the sufferings they brought on other people"). Soberer observers appreciated the Anglo-Saxon judicial restraint which had typically avoided a wholesale condemnation which history would have ascribed to vengeance rather than justice.

The other school of opinion held that the judges had been too stern. Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft denounced the hangings as violating "fundamental principles of American law." Some cynics still believed that Nuernberg had merely meted out the traditional victor's law over the vanquished. When a newsman asked General Eisenhower whether he believed he would have been hanged by the Germans, had the war gone the other way, Eisenhower answered smilingly: "Such thoughts you have!" A literary wag last week put such thoughts into a political fantasy. Excerpts:

On October 16, 1946, eleven top U.S. war criminals were hanged in the yard of Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia. According to the six German, Japanese and Italian newsmen present, all met their fate calmly except J. Edgar Hoover, who was drunk and disorderly.

The eleven men, convicted on one or both counts of waging aggressive defensive war, or spreading equalitarian doctrines, included: Bernard Baruch, close collaborator of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt; General George C. Marshall, former chief of staff; Henry A. Wallace, former Vice President and vicious fascist-baiter; General Alexander A. Vandegrift, former commander of the notorious Marine Corps; Charles A. Beard, democratic philosopher; Ezequiel Padilla, Trojan horse of the Mexican Anschluss.

Postscript. This fanciful turnabout was answered last week by U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, in an address before the University of Buffalo. Jackson declared that the trial's fundamental justification lay in its attempt to outlaw aggressive war and to destroy "the old theory that international law bears on states and not on statesmen [shielded by] 'sovereignty.' . . ." He reasserted his belief that this interpretation was actually implicit in existing international law, which the Allies had merely strengthened. Said he: "At all events, whether they be regarded as an innovation or a codification, those principles are law today. . . ."

Then Jackson added a portentous postscript to the judgment: ". . . Germany is not the only country whose governing party has practiced this method [mass persecution of minorities, bloody suppression of all opposition] of maintaining itself. Opposition ... to existing regimes today will earn the same fate in much of eastern Europe as it did in Germany. . . . There is great need that the statesmen pick up where the lawyers leave off at Nuernberg. . . ."

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