LET THE SWISS DO IT!
Mayir, Milton
Let The Swiss Do It! By MILTON MAYER THE Nazi atrocities, as they are revealed in newspaper stories and photographs, are unspeakable. They are almost unimagineable. Yet, every last one of them may...
...Vengeance is blinding...
...It will keep the wheel of vengeance turning...
...Longer ago, still, the God of the Jews, the same God Who demanded an eye for an eye, said, "Vengeance shall be Mine...
...It is easy to overlook the dubious authenticity of the sources of some of the stories...
...Still longer ago, Machia-velli said, "A conquered people should be either exterminated or liberated...
...That is all...
...Long ago, Carl Sandburg said, "There are not nails enough to nail down victory...
...If the stories are, nevertheless, all true down to every last fantastic detail—such as the report from Buchen-wald that babies were killed by breaking their backs over the knees of Elite Guards—the whole civilized world has to face the terrible responsibility of tracking down the individual criminals, assessing the degree of the offense in each case, and administering exact justice...
...The only relevant question is: Are the Swiss better able to administer justice in this case than we are...
...It is easy to overlook the admitted, but unemphasized, fact that in some camps prisoners were treated humanly...
...But we do not want to take the easy way...
...Atrocity stories, if they succeed in persuading us that Germans are subhuman, justify the proposed dismemberment of Germany and the proposed enslavement of the German people...
...Anything less than extermination and short of liberation simply maddens them...
...We must protect ourselves against Nazi ideals, or the Nazis, even though they have been destroyed, will have won the war...
...because Nazism is itself an attack upon humanity...
...We are parties to the case...
...The law assumes vengefulness in the heart of the victim and rules him incompetent to administer justice...
...We are not Nazis and we do not want to be...
...Goebbels once said: "Even if we lose the war, we will win, because our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies...
...The next one will, and the one after that...
...I ask only that we build the new world on the only principle that the Nazis really hated...
...The Choice We Have If vengeance is futile, if it is justice that we seek, why not turn the case of the Nazi atrocities over to the Swiss for investigation, prosecution, and punishment...
...I say we are not...
...In his report from Buchenwald, he writes, on the one hand, that the Hitlerites should be exterminated and the rest of the Germans put into strait-jackets, and, on the other hand, that the prisoners liberated at Buchenwald included 2,000 German anti-Nazis...
...I do not ask as much as Lee asked Grant—and got—at Appomattox...
...It will not build a better world than the one that produced the Nazis...
...I do not ask as much as Lincoln asked in the Second Inaugural...
...In justice, then, not in vengeance, the capital criminals must be sought out and punished...
...But are...
...Spitting on Mussolini's corpse—or cutting the heart out of Hitler, or hitching a Japanese to a plough—may be sweet...
...That was the way of George III, and our ancestors, who were, charged in Parliament with being beasts, were the beneficiaries of Edmund Burke's insistence that a whole people can not be indicted...
...The God Who claimed vengeance for his own exhorted His people to justice...
...We have entrusted them with our most vital diplomatic and economic concerns...
...Not The Easy Way It is the guilty individuals who must be punished...
...It is easy to overlook the fact that thousands of the prisoners were Germans...
...It is easier to punish a whole people, but that is Hitler's way...
...Germany will not stay dismembered any more than Austria did...
...It is easy to overlook the contradictions...
...American judicial practice requires exclusion of so much as the shadow of a doubt as to the exact identity of the individual criminal and his exact condition when he committed the crime...
...And you must either agree with me or repudiate the first principle of the American judicial process...
...Are true neutrals better able to administer justice than vengeful victors...
...The law does not allow the victim of a crime to prosecute, judge, or punish the criminal...
...The German people will never stay enslaved any more than the Negroes in America...
...Take the editor of the Chicago Sun as a random example...
...Let us assume that the stories are all true...
...If every reported atrocity is true—including the report of a Soviet Extraordinary Commission that Nazi soldiers shot children for target practice—the guilty individuals may run into thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands...
...Hitler rose to power in Munich with the single slogan of vengeance—vengeance against the real or fancied injustices of Versailles...
...Atrocity stories drive us crazy with hatred and divert us from the pressing problems that antedate Hitler...
...Whatever the figure, it is still something short of 80 million Germans...
...Thei-e are, to be sure, fantastic discrepancies in the reports...
...because the German people, under the Nazi regime, were the aggressors...
...But true, or almost true, or only partly true, they serve the purpose of making us hate a prostrate enemy...
...They were fighting for injustice, and if they drive us to the commission of injustice, they will have won what they were fighting for...
...The first principle of the American judicial process is that no man is a good judge in his own case...
...It is easy to overlook the consideration that a German GI—not a Nazi beast—from Dresden may have been bestialized by learning that his city was wiped off the map in a single day's bombing with 300,000 of his fellow-citizens killed according to American reports...
...The Wheel Of Vengeance Atrocity stories sell newspapers...
...It is easy for us to believe the newspaper reports, fortified, as they are, by photographs...
...We have a strong interest in it...
...we Americans, though few of us are as frenzied as the editors of great newspapers, in a condition to administer justice...
...The Germans of Silesia and East Prussia will not stay Polish any more than the Sudetens stayed Czechoslovakian...
...What will it do...
...Every Hitler in history has risen that way...
...It is easy to overlook the admitted, but unemphasized, fact that starvation was and is common among the loyal Nazi subjects in the German cities...
...Yet, every last one of them may be true...
...Vengeance will not raise the tortured dead...
...Vengeance makes fools of the vengeful...
...I put it to you squarely, my fellow-Americans: Do we want the satisfaction of vengeance or the blessing of justice...
...But repugnance is a small matter when justice is at stake...
...We have praised their democracy and admitted their impartiality...
...It will not solve the problems we had before Hitler...
...They make us hate, not at a time when we have to fight, but at a time when we have to build a new world, a better world than the one which produced the Nazis...
...worse yet, a prostrate nation...
...and because Germans have killed thousands of our countrymen and tried, as is the custom in war, to kill millions of them...
...That principle is justice...
...I do not ask that we build the new world on charity...
...My proposal may be repugnant to my fellow-Americans...
...Why do we not step down from the bench, like members of our own Supreme Court when a case in which they are interested is called...
...Atrocity stories intensify the demand for a Carthaginian peace...
...They may not relish the job of hangman—who does?—but perhaps we can prevail upon them to accept it in the interest of a world which we wish to see built upon justice...
...These oversights are easy for us because we have been at war with Germany...
...It will not put an end to war...
...And the character of the evidence—including photographs of gas chambers and piles of emaciated bodies, the testimony of liberated prisoners, and the inspections of the scene after the fact—would not be held under ordinary American judicial practice to be sufficient for conviction in a capital crime...
...If we Americans are vengeful—and I am, for one— we are incompetent to administer justice in the case of the Nazi atrocities...
...Are we to put anti-Nazis into strait-jackets...
...But will it help us in our fanatic determination to build a better world...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
