A Passing Fury: Searching For Justice At The End of World War II

A. T. Williams

Jonathan Cape, £25

Review by Brian Morton

Six million murdered; and a semi-colon. Post-war justice for the victims of the Holocaust and retribution for its perpetrators hung on a small matter of punctuation. The issue was whether action could be taken against those who had committed crimes against German nationals as well as the populations of occupied Europe, or whether only war-related offences were to be prosecuted. It was a substantial difference, and not just semantics; and it was a sign that the post-war trials were fated to be a curious mixture of the forensic and the political. The Russians had no particular desire for transparency and sought to apply the same steamroller lack of discrimination their military brought to active theatres. The Americans saw law as theatre in another sense. France had the painful and recent experience of occupation. Poland, where some of the worst wartime atrocities were committed, on what is always described as an “industrial” scale (a word that somewhat diminished specific human responsibility), was obliterated. Only Britain seemed to stand out for the old-fashioned legal virtues rather than a rush to judgement.

This is precisely what disturbed many Britons at home. Why were concentration camp guards accused of setting dogs on women or beating helpless prisoners to death afforded sometimes passionate defence by British military counsel? An irate correspondent to the Daily Mail objected to kid-glove treatment of the “Belsen beasts”. The editorial response was as fascinating as it was terse: “Indignant reader . . . should remember that Belsen trial serves secondary purpose as example to Germans of democratic legal process. Long proud tradition of British justice is that accused persons have right to choose their defenders”. In other words, don’t fight the great war for democracy and then ditch its principles as soon as you’ve won. Even so, some found it difficult to watch British lawyers grinding exceeding small as they cross-examined camp victims about the precise detail of horrific events, catching them in contradictions of date or matters of identification. We’re reminded that this was the method used by Slobodan Milosevic during his self-conducted defence.

Williams takes that very wide view of his subject. He has written previously on the death at British hands of Baha Mousa in Basra in 2003, the subject of A Very British Killing, which won the Orwell Prize. His main focus here is not the well-documented Nuremberg Trials, where the notion of justice as theatre was subsequently reflected in umpteen film and television versions. His concern is less with the big fish, which would include Justice Robert H. Jackson as well as Herman Goering and Rudolf Hess, and more with the extraordinary programme of investigation and justice that sought to bring individual perpetrators to book. The names he turns up – Noel Till, Tommie Backhouse, Major Cranfield – are mostly little known now, though a certain Lt Col Leo Genn brought a touch of self-conscious glamour to the benches, having appeared in Olivier’s back-stiffening Henry V and keeping an eye very much to the camera.

There was glamour on the other side, too. While many of the camp guards were openly described as sub-human or Neanderthal – this was an important quibble: were the lawyers dealing with culpable humans or will-less robots of Nazism? – there was also an icy blonde beauty among the “Belsen beasts”. I remember my father being strangely fascinated by Irma Grese, who seemed to own all the fatal attributes of glamour: a very young woman when the war began, she perhaps stood out among the brutalisers for being female, though she wasn’t alone in that, and for being beautiful. She has never quite become associated with a concept, as Adolf Eichmann was with that misleading term “the banality of evil”, and yet for a generation who remembered the pre-war Germany, the sunshine, the free-and-easy girls, the endless steins of beer, she seemed to sharpen the key questions: was the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazis, or Germans? was a nation culpable, or just the SS? It’s a question that, as with the Eastern war and the Japanese camps, has never quite been resolved. It’s as relevant at the moment as it ever was and it has a strong impact on how war crimes are remembered and memorialised.

A key aspect of A Passing Fury, and perhaps the key to its riveting success as history is Williams’s own involvement in the story. A troubled, sometimes fractious presence, he takes it on himself to visit as many of the sites as possible, pausing in front of ivy-swamped war graves, tatty memorials, hard-to-find museums, worrying whether there’s something inherently wrong in having a gift shop and cafeteria where thousands died horribly or whether the simple act of drinking coffee and eating buns is an assertion of simple need and hope. The story he tells through all this is intriguing in that it shifts attention away from the Nuremberg dock and towards men in British battledress attempting to dispense justice at a time when from East and West, the two Cold War superpowers, with more urgent geopolitical matters to negotiate, were anxious not to let the rhetoric or practice of “fair trial” get in the way of prompt action. Prompt action meant the noose. Amid the prevarication, the inevitable imputations of softness on anti-semitism, the blimpish inflexibility and blunders, there is a genuine nobility at the heart of this book.