The Writers' Castle, page 4
Deane was also invested with wide-ranging authority to maintain order. His duties included such unpleasantries as handing over to the military police an American kitchen hand who had secretly been selling food to Germans. In the courtroom, several correspondents were found stealing headphone covers as souvenirs. Blankets from the press camp were also popular keepsakes. Deane had to confiscate the stolen items and even found himself compelled to temporarily restrict the availability of alcohol in the camp after residents consumed more than was good for them. He was also on the receiving end of complaints, for instance, Erika Mann’s disgruntlement with the postal service, which had mistakenly forwarded two months’ worth of her mail to Paris.29
For Germans in the region, the press camp was an employer. Some 150 locals, including several POWs, were hired to work at the castle, for instance in the kitchen. Deane had to monitor the quality of the food, answer to his superiors after inspections and ensure that the beds were made. People were constantly coming and going. Correspondents had to be tough to stick it out in Nuremberg and keep reporting on the trial. The more spectacular the proceedings became, the more correspondents resided in the press camp, whose population was directly proportional to the level of sensation on offer. Three hundred journalists were crammed into the castle at the beginning of the trial, but by January 1946 that number was down to 175. It rose back to 200 during Göring’s cross-examination. “Hermann the German”, as Deane referred to the prominent Nazi and former Hitler favourite, was a big draw. After that the number of residents again declined, only to swell back to such a level shortly before the rendering of the verdicts that Walter Gong wrote in the German newspaper Main-Post of a “battle of reporters”.30 The importance of the Nuremberg Trial as a media event was underscored by the fact that, for the first time since the end of the war, individual broadcasters linked up in larger networks.
Deane was not uncritical of American media representatives. While remaining friendly and even somewhat subservient in his face-to-face dealings with them, he made no bones about what he thought in his private correspondence. Some of the Americans were pushy and arrogant, insisting that he organize vehicles for day trips, requesting preferential treatment and making impossible demands. Others misbehaved, got drunk, fell down and injured themselves and got into fights. Deane also distrusted the tendency of many US correspondents to exaggerate and, encouraged by their editors, to make their reports as lurid as possible.
On 10th December 1945 the US magazine Newsweek wrote of “The Nuremberg Show”, but the proceedings were often anything but spectacular, with the testimony trying the patience of many observers and yielding nothing new to report. Under such circumstances, the detonation of an unexploded bomb from the war in Nuremberg, in which no one was hurt, was eagerly interpreted as a terrorist attack, or a commonplace act of street violence portrayed as a political assault. “Don’t get too worried over the things you read about Nuremberg in the papers,” Deane wrote to his wife. “You see, the correspondents are here in droves, and the trial is very full most of the time. They have to scratch around for sensational stories in order to keep their bosses in New York thinking they’re working, and even the smallest bit of violence around these parts gets a big play.”31
Name-dropping was a popular pastime. George W. Herald, who reported for the American INS News Agency, claimed to have run into the literary crème de la crème one day in a press-camp bathroom, after mistaking his own toothbrush for John Steinbeck’s (monogrammed) one. In Herald’s telling, John Dos Passos contentedly splashed around in the tub in the background, while Hemingway, clad only in a terrycloth towel around his waist, complained about the local wines.32 As amusing as this anecdote may have been, there is no evidence that Hemingway or Steinbeck were ever present either in the castle or at the trial.
East–West Conflicts
Deane was often required to mediate in political and cultural squabbles. For example, while the Western correspondents were happy with the camp’s arrangements for Christmas holidays, as the court went into recess from 21st December until New Year’s Day, Soviet residents felt slighted when no arrangements were made for their plans for the Russian Orthodox holiday on 7th January. Soviet correspondents also complained that the Russian newspapers put out every morning for general use were stolen by colleagues trying to learn the language.33
Soviet journalists were housed separately on the other side of the intersection in front of the castle, in a former civil servants’ canteen the Americans called the Russian or Red Palace. Initially, as photographer Eddie Worth recalled, Soviet correspondents lived with their colleagues of other nations, but the Soviet secret police intervened to end that experiment in multiculturalism. The defenders of Communist political rectitude, it seems, were nonplussed by how quickly Soviet journalists became accustomed to the relative comfort of the castle and to the opportunity to exchange ideas with their peers from the West. “The Russians would come down in the morning, take a pint glass and crack as many eggs into it as they could, and then go down the table pouring in Heinz tomato sauce and all the things that they’d never seen before—and that was just for starters!” Eddie Worth later wrote. “We were being looked after by an old German soldier from the First World War, and we came back one day and noticed that there were no Russians around, and asked him what was going on. He told us that some very nasty-looking gentlemen, with red bands round their hats, had come in. Obviously some of the Russians had been talking about the tremendous time they very having—there was a grand piano on each floor, and singsongs and booze-ups every night—and they had rounded them all up and put them in some stables down the road.”34
The former civil servants’ canteen building was hardly a live-stock stable, but the physical separation within the camp was a manifestation of the East–West conflict beginning to emerge on the world stage. Instructions coming from Moscow were strict in both a social and professional sense. Soviet media representatives were forbidden from maintaining personal relationships with non-Soviets, and their articles were monitored and censored to ensure ideological conformity. Whereas British and American journalists reported with professional distance, their Soviet colleagues tended to engage in the emotional anti-Nazi tone used by the prosecution.
Representatives of the two blocs pulled no punches during the evening debates in the press camp, where alcohol flowed freely, and encounters took place despite the best efforts of the ideological wardens. If we believe Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoy, differences of opinion were loud but respectful, albeit with an unmistakable undercurrent of mistrust. “‘You see in my newspaper I can take every senator and every congressman to task and nothing will happen to me,’ opined one representative of an American newspaper group,” Polevoy wrote. “‘Can you say the same?’ he provokingly asked a Soviet colleague. The Russian countered coolly: ‘And what about your boss? Can you also take to task a senator or congressman who’s a friend of your boss or agrees with him politically. Well? Will you still get into print? And if you do, what happens next?’”35
There was a lot of truth to questions like that. No less than William Shirer would eventually be fired from television station CBS for disagreeing with his boss. Nonetheless, journalists from East and West did operate under different conditions in Nuremberg. American correspondents critically evaluated the trial, a few to the point of even questioning its legality, something their Soviet counterparts would never have been allowed to do. Even the conservative Chicago Tribune and Stars and Stripes expressed scepticism about trying German generals who, in the eyes of many American military officers, had done nothing but their duty, and The New York Times comprehensively reported on the debate.36
Winston Churchill’s famous speech of 5th March 1946, in which he described an “iron curtain” descending on Europe from Szczecin to Trieste, disrupted the fragile coexistence of the Soviet and Western correspondents. Churchill’s words and his call for the Western allies to form a common front against Moscow marked the start of the Cold War. The front page in Stars and Stripes bore the headline: “Unite to Stop Russians, Churchill Warns at Fulton”. Pravda immediately responded by calling the former Prime Minister an “anti-Soviet warmonger”. Soviet journalists in the press camp were more relaxed. They had been on the receiving end of so many harsh capitalist words in the past that a few thousand more from Churchill made no difference.37 And in any case, they scoffed, the main point of the British ex-leader’s cantankerous speech was merely to remind people he still existed.
But when the British radical leftist journalist Ralph Parker arrived in the camp, there was no more concealing the political animosity. As a New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, Parker had reported on events on the Eastern Front during the early years of the war. In time, though, he came to disagree with British policies towards the Soviets, claiming that pre-war policies in London had sought to bolster pro-fascist regimes as a way of rallying anti-Soviet powers. For that he was suspected of being an agent of the Soviet secret police. His Russian wife, with whom he lived in Moscow from 1941, was even said to have collaborated with the NKVD. After the war, Parker began working for the British Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker. Much to Deane’s disgruntlement, when Parker arrived he insisted on socializing exclusively with the Soviet friends he had made during his time reporting from the front. As an American, Deane felt unable to deny the requests of a reporter from such a close ally as Britain. “There weren’t enough armchairs in the [castle’s] Blue Salon so people sat on the windowsills and the floor,” recalled Boris Polevoy. “The toasts to the Soviet Union ended with the words hurrah, vivat, prosit, cheers and even hoch!”38
One of the castle’s two dining rooms during the days of the press camp.
The castle’s social centre was the large bar between the two dining rooms, in which, as Deane remarked, there was frequently more activity than in the courtroom. The master of ceremonies was the barkeeper David, described by Polevoy as an “amusing American with gleaming teeth”. He was considered a true alchemist with cocktails—another reason for outsiders as well as residents to seek out the press-camp bar. According to Polevoy, he was adept at defusing political and cultural tensions, calming down heated tempers with his easy-going manner and skills as a mixologist. His reaction to Churchill’s speech in Fulton was to create a new cocktail called the “Sir Winny”. No one found it particularly palatable, but as Polevoy noted in his journal, that seemed to be precisely David’s intention.
In a Foreign Land
During the Christmas holidays, the judges and prosecutors left Nuremberg, and US chief counsel Jackson toured post-war Europe. Under the Christmas tree in the castle were bottles of booze, dried fruit, writing implements and cameras, and many of the correspondents took part in a charity event, raising money for fifty Latvian children who had been forcibly taken, along with their parents, from their home country to Germany. Once again, it was Deane who organized everything. His contacts also made him a much-coveted source of information for his journalistic colleagues. On Christmas Day he interviewed the prison chaplain and reported on how the Nazi inmates were celebrating the holiday. When Hitler’s political testament and marriage certificate were found in nearby Tegernsee, Deane read the documents aloud to the correspondents.39 Like many other members of the military, he also smuggled items left behind by high-ranking Nazis. For example, on 8th November 1945 he sent his mother in the USA a book that, he proudly informed her, came from Heinrich Himmler’s library.
Deane’s correspondence is full of the homesickness felt by many US soldiers in Germany, who saw their work as done now that the war was over. He repeatedly complained that the trial was inexplicably dragging on. It had been years since Deane had seen his parents, his wife or his young daughter. Still, instead of pressing to be sent home, he stayed on because the trial was a chance to make valuable connections. When he returned to the USA he intended to re-enter civilian life and work as a journalist, and where else could he meet so many influential people from the American media as in the press camp? “I think my experience here will pay dividends one of these days,” he wrote to Lois.
Sometimes, at weekends, the correspondents went on excursions. The US Army had requisitioned hotels and spas in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berchtesgaden, and soldiers’ letters are full of their amazement at the natural beauty of Alpine Bavaria—as well as the strangeness of local customs. Most of the reporters had never witnessed cows wearing bells or livestock being driven from mountain pastures into valleys. A popular joke ran that the Bavarians’ secret weapon was actually their cows, since nothing else could disrupt traffic so effectively.40
The joke played upon the idea that underground Nazis might still represent a military threat. In September 1944 Himmler had founded “Operation Werewolf”, a clandestine insurgent operation that was supposed to fight on using sabotage and acts of terrorism in the event that Germany was occupied. Fear of “werewolves” proved to be unfounded, but it still meant that the Nuremberg court was heavily fortified to guard against the war criminals being freed in a guerrilla action. Correspondents were subjected to tight security and required to show press cards and allow their briefcases to be searched to be admitted to the trial. Machine-gun-toting military police patrolled the corridors, and a control post of piled-up sandbags was constructed in the hallway in front of the courtroom. “There is strict control on the ground floor,” wrote Erich Kästner. “There is also strict control on the second floor, and on the third floor there are two strict controls. Many people are turned away despite their uniforms and identification.”41
In February 1946, when the US Army received a tip that an underground network of fugitive SS men were planning attacks on foreigners and a jailbreak in Nuremberg, a tank unit was brought for protection. The exasperated French journalist Sacha Simon remarked: “More than twenty times, I have walked at night the five kilometres from Fürther Strasse to Stein. I have lost my way in dark narrow alleyways and asked shadowy figures in front of walls a hundred times for directions and have always arrived back in the best of health from these nocturnal expeditions.”42
“Deutschland, Deutschland ohne alles”
The reports from the correspondents in Nuremberg often used the metaphor of “zero hour”. Many of them were acquainted with the city from the Nazi Party rallies there, and precisely because of its symbolic associations Nuremberg was frequently treated as a microcosm of Germany. Aerial bombardment had plunged city into medieval-level destitution. Survivors rummaged through debris looking for food, lived from hand to mouth, drank from rain gutters, cooked over campfires and existed in bombed-out buildings, bunkers or improvised huts. The extent of the devastation was immense, with the city’s old town being nearly destroyed. Some 178,000 people still lived within the city limits, about half of its pre-war population. The stench of rotting flesh and disinfectant was everywhere. Thousands of corpses remained beneath the ruins. “Nuremberg was practically a dead city,” remarked the art historian Philipp Fehl, an American interrogation officer. “You walked through the old town as you would through a painting by Dalí. Sometimes, the exterior of a building would collapse right before your eyes with a dull noise—one step, one rolling stone could cause a breathtakingly beautiful building to disintegrate into a pile of rubble.”43
Reuters correspondent and press camp inhabitant Seaghan Maynes told of walking his German secretary home one evening. As the well-dressed and well-groomed woman told him to stop in front of a ruin, he was confused and protested: “‘Well, look I’ll bring you home! I can’t leave you here!’ And she said, ‘No, this is it.’ And I saw where she went: she went into a hole in the ground. Her mother and two other youngsters were there, living in this hole which had been the cellar of a house. And yet this girl appeared as though she had come out of a very nice home where the laundry had taken care of her clothes.”44
The people of Nuremberg were too preoccupied with their precarious personal existences to take much interest in the trial. Like most Germans, they had worries enough of their own, were trying to deal with the loss of family members and didn’t have coal to heat their homes or enough to eat. And after twelve years of Nazi propaganda, many no longer trusted the press. Others, recalcitrant and defiant, dismissed the trial as a political show rather than an attempt to serve the cause of justice. Germany’s collapse had encouraged a mentality of self-sufficiency and obstinance. Many Germans also wallowed in narcissistic self-pity, leading to what psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich would call twenty years later an “inability to mourn”.
Billy Wilder, who as a member of the US Army attended a test showing of the re-education film KZ (Concentration Camp) in Nuremberg’s twin city of Erlangen in June 1945, was astonished that, after being forced to watch horrific scenes of piled-up corpses, the audience remained in their seats for a Western that was shown afterwards. Novelist Alfred Döblin, a trained psychiatrist, showed understanding for German obstreperousness, drawing a connection between the food crisis, political apathy, occupation and disenchantment: “You see lots of emaciated and pale faces among older people, and the youths on the street are also emaciated. Hunger in this country is a terrible force. In particular, it makes people sinister and rebellious. As is well known, it’s difficult to negotiate with a person whose guts are grumbling, and if he normally gets no joy from politics, how can it be different now that he especially hates those people whom he believes are stealing his daily bread.”45
