FH115 Final.qxd - Winston Churchill

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© 2001 MERRILL LYNCH & CO. INC. ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES ON WAR CRIMES Why was Churchill so forgiving of the Germans LLOYD W. ROBERTSON Awar crimes tribunal was a novelty at the time of the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Now such a tribunal—the International Criminal Court—may become a permanent institution. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made headlines by making a case against Milosevic; Pinochet was ordered back to Chile by a Spanish court. Milosevic was and is guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” which many people take to be equivalent to attempted genocide; Pinochet was charged with crimes similar to those the Nazis committed—not just war crimes, but crimes against humanity. Today many are wondering what will or should be done with surviving leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th. An international trial is again recommended in some circles. Whether these different cases should all be treated in the same way is a good question. Were the Nazis not merely an extreme case, but a bizarre exception Pinochet seems hardly comparable. Was Hitler’s a unique pathology If so, it may not be wise to pattern modern cases after the Nuremberg example; perhaps, instead of thinking only of punishing the guilty, we should try to discover what is beneficial. As we seek guidance on how to proceed, we may learn from the thoughts of Winston Churchill. What he says about war crimes and war criminals is remarkably consistent, if we allow for his need on occasion to temper his views alongside public opinion. Churchill came to believe that the Nuremberg trials were both just and beneficial—that they more or less successfully punished those who were guilty of terrible crimes. He referred to “Hitler’s crimes,” and the worst horrors of the Nazi movement, as “squalid.” But his embrace of the Nuremberg trials apparently remained an exception to his general view that defeated war leaders should not be tried. And the advocates of war crimes trials today are almost certainly recommending them in circumstances where Churchill did not. When World War I ended in 1918, Churchill was in Prime Minister Lloyd George’s cabinet. Lloyd George called an election, and both he and Churchill were surprised by the way the British electorate looked upon the late war. The public had a clear agenda, as Churchill wrote in The Aftermath: “Three demands rose immediate and clangorous from the masses of the people, viz. to hang the Kaiser; to abolish conscription; and to make the Germans pay the uttermost farthing [in reparations to the victors].” In contemporary language, we would say the British public wanted Kaiser Wilhelm, who had led his country into war, to be punished as a war criminal, and they wanted the German people as a whole to pay a finan- ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES is a periodic series of articles which apply Churchill’s wisdom and experience to modern-day issues among the Great Democracies. Responsible opposing opinion is welcome and will be published. Mr. Robertson, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto, taught in post-secondary education for eight years, including six in the United States. Today he works in government in Ontario, Canada. For anyone who wishes further to consider the issues he raises, he recommends a thoughtful book by a teacher of his, Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides. FINEST HOUR 115 / 28
cial penalty. However cruel and shortsighted these demands might seem now, there seemed ample reason for them at the time. Many countries had suffered terribly in the Great War, and Britain has been said to have lost a generation of young men. Germany had suffered as well, but the British people clearly saw the German government, along with Germans who supported what had begun as a very popular war, as aggressors deserving of punishment. When all parties to a war fight relentlessly and remorselessly, it might be difficult to support the claim that some are more guilty than others. In the case of the Great War, however, vast debates among historians continue to provide some support for the conclusion that Germany’s ambition to build an empire comparable to Britain’s, combined with the Kaiser’s impulsiveness and arrogance, were decisive factors in bringing this terrible war on the countries involved. Likewise, Germany was the first country to develop and use “gas” or chemical warfare; and in the early battles, Germans were known to use tricks such as pretending to surrender, then luring their enemies into an ambush. In short, the British had reason, based on knowledge, to believe that the Great War occurred because Germany wanted it, and was as terrible as it was because the Germans escalated it both in scale and in tactics. In The Aftermath, Churchill spends more time on the “reparations” question than on the “hang the Kaiser” question, but he does explain why there was such strong popular revulsion to the Kaiser, supported by virtually all politicians. (The moderates, including Churchill, insisted on a trial first. In January 1920 the Allies demanded that the Kaiser be extradited from his place of exile in Holland, but no further action was ever taken. The Kaiser died there in 1941.) “For four years the Kaiser had been pilloried by every form of propaganda as the man whose criminal ambition and wicked folly had loosed the awful flood of misery upon the world,” Churchill wrote. “He was the man responsible for all the slaughter. Why should he not be punished for it” Churchill admits he did not seriously challenge this view, at least not in public, but he also reports his private thoughts at the time: “Personally, I was not convinced that the responsibility of princes for acts of state could be dealt with in this way.” He says he considered the effect on the German people and thus on European politics: “It seemed that to hang the Kaiser was the best way to restore at once his dignity and his dynasty.” In later years Churchill was known to say that participants in the Treaty of Versailles were wrong to force a changed regime on Germany, and to end the reign of the royal family. In hindsight, at least, it seems there was something to be said for the Kaiser’s dynasty, and perhaps even for his dignity, if these might have helped prevent the rise of Hitler. We can get more of the flavour of Churchill’s own view from his report of a conversation he had with Lloyd George on the night of the Armistice, 11 November 1918. Enormous changes would now be required. Soldiers would come home, looking for jobs; women would (presumably) have to give up their munitions work, which had come to be higher-paying than similar jobs for men in peacetime. The economy would have to be switched to a peacetime footing; and of course there were real issues surrounding “the settlement of Europe”—including the moral and legal claims of the victors, and how best to rebuild the economies of friends, and perhaps of enemies as well. “The conversation,” Churchill writes, “ran on the great qualities of the German people, on the tremendous fight they had made against three-quarters of the world, on the impossibility of rebuilding Europe except with their aid.” Churchill and Lloyd George, apparently, had no interest in blaming the Germans—not even the Kaiser. On the contrary, they praised the former enemy for their war effort. As for whether Britain had an interest in helping or harming Germany, there was no doubt: Britain’s economy could enjoy maximum growth only if there was a healthy German economy. Churchill and Lloyd George could easily have advanced a more sophisticated version of the “popular” view that Britain was morally in the right and Germany in the wrong. It could have been argued, for example, that the balance of power before the war had not only favoured Britain, but had kept the peace; that any country which threatened the balance was an aggressor, responsible for the harm that ensued; that the British were right to oppose any threat to that balance. That was not a doctrine on which Churchill insisted—in fact, in the crucial passages, he doesn’t even mention it. Why was Churchill in 1918 so forgiving of the Germans, and possibly of the Kaiser himself After the end of the Second World War, which in many ways was a continuation of the First, Churchill reflected on the events that led Europe from the First to the Second. Once again he shows no anger at the Germans—certainly not at their ambition, which could easily become war-mongering, but was closely tied to their ability to overcome hardship: “Germany might be disarmed; her military system shivered in fragments; her fortresses dismantled. Germany might be impoverished; she might be loaded with measureless indemnities; she might become a prey to internal feuds: but all this would pass in ten years or in twenty. The indestructible might ‘of all the German tribes’ would rise once more and the unquenched fires of warrior Prussia glow and burn again.” Churchill wrote these words, describing the end of World War I, after the end of World War II; by then he FINEST HOUR 115 / 29
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