Victors define justice.
Brenda Elthon
1. The unseen Nuremberg film.
Agreement had been reached at Yalta.
There would be a criminal trial of the surviving Nazi leadership.
No summary executions.
But it would be unlike any other criminal trial in world history, staged by an international alliance of the victors who aimed to cobble together the world’s first precepts of international criminal law and apply them, carefully, at Nuremberg.
It would be unprecedented, but the unprecedented scale of lawlessness that had marked the Third Reich’s thirteen-year reign of terror demanded the world respond with one voice.
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” — Chief Prosecutor US Judge Robert Jackson, Nov. 21, 1945
The Nazi trial would take place in the elaborate Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, which had been left unscathed by the war and had suitable courtroom and prison facilities.
The prosecutors would come from the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union; and the evidence would be weighed and sentences rendered by esteemed jurists from those four Allied powers.
Rather than rely on eye-witness testimony, the evidence presented at the trial would come from the Nazis’ own records.
It would include films that they, themselves, had made of their heinous activities, official records and memoranda of their own decisions, their private journals and diaries, and photographs that they, themselves, had taken.
Additional films and photographs taken by Allied forces as they had marched to Berlin would fill out the record of Nazi atrocities and their government-sanctioned use as instruments of war.
The Nazi defendants would be given lawyers, with office space, stenographers and office supplies at their disposal; and they would be shown the evidence against them in advance, with translations into German, if necessary, to enable them to prepare their defense.
It would be a real trial, not merely a propaganda show trial of victors’ revenge; and its guiding principles would forge the basis for international criminal laws and procedures that would be used in the coming decades.
The eyes of the world, then and in the years to come, were on Nuremberg.
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason." — Chief Prosecutor US Judge Robert Jackson, Nov. 21, 1945
While arrangements were made for the US government printing office to prepare trial transcripts, plans were also made for the trial to be filmed by cameramen attached to the US War Department, who would create an authentic, comprehensive record of the Nazi crimes for history and the world to see.
The film of the Nuremberg trial would be shown in Germany as part of the necessary ‘de-Nazification’ of the German populace, from whom so much of the Nazi war machine had been hidden.
They would see images of the war’s destruction and the mass slaughter of civilians with their own eyes and hear many of their former leaders, shrunken and broken, admitting to their crimes.
And Americans would see the film, too, to help them better understand why their own wartime sacrifices and hardships were so necessary.
“The trial preserved the evidence, which had been made available to the defense and they had not been able to refute it; this insulates the evidence for time. It will be impossible to discount, having been preserved in official, adversarial proceedings.” — Judge Jackson, New York Times, June 16, 1946
This was the plan for the Nuremberg trials, as preparations commenced in the summer of 1945; but by the time the trials ended in late 1946, the world had changed.
The initial goal of postwar reconstruction had been to dismantle the German industrial state and grant the German people subsistence living through a stable, agrarian economy.
And discussions were held regarding the merits of dividing Germany permanently into several smaller states, with the transfer of some German lands to European neighbors.
But the destruction of the Third Reich and the devastation of Central and Eastern Europe had created a power vacuum in the heart of the continent, which the Soviet leadership saw as an opportunity for empire building.
Soviet troops remained in areas of Europe they had liberated; and the Kremlin intended to spread communism in those beleaguered regions through the installation of governments that were aligned with Moscow.
Germany was no longer the enemy.
It was the Soviet Union who posed the greater threat to European peace and stability.
The world had changed.
A small and weakened Germany would render it vulnerable to Soviet domination, but the emergence of a new, democratic and capitalist Germany aligned with the West would bolster the economic recovery of the rest of Europe and counter Soviet dominance.
This radical shift in US postwar policy based on an alliance with Germany required the support of the American public.
Seeing evidence of Nazi atrocities contained in the Nuremberg film would work against this diplomatic initiative, inflaming anti-German sentiments.
So, while the film was shown for two years to packed theaters in the American and British sectors of occupied Germany, the War Department refused to release the film in America and also refused the request of the film’s director, Pare Lorentz, to purchase the film and release it to the American public himself.
The film’s official release didn’t come until 1979.
And the wrongs which Judge Jackson and the others had sought to condemn and punish at Nuremberg were left, for decades, in the past, where they were ignored, denied by some, and sadly, repeated.
2. Gobbledygook
In 1966, the federal Bureau of Land Management published “Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go,” a little book aimed at improving written communication within the agency.
“The flossy, pompous, abstract, complex, jargon- istic gobbledygook that passes for communications in government ‘has gotta go!’"
Humorous, with delightful turns-of-phrase and heavily marked-up examples of government gobbledygook, the book provides sixteen lessons in writing “simple, direct, personal communications,” singling out President Franklin Roosevelt’s plain, simple writing style as an example for government writers to follow.
Roosevelt’s speech-writer’s sentence: “We are endeavoring to construct a more inclusive society.”
Roosevelt’s revision of the sentence: “We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”
The book’s key suggestions for writers wishing to improve:
Be specific and concrete.
Use strong verbs [the “power plant” of a good sentence].
Write for your reader, rather than to please yourself.
Be brief: “A basic rule for all writing is: Have something to say; say it simply; quit!”
3. Lost Ukrainian art.
Russian forces in occupied regions of Ukraine have looted forty museums, along with churches, cultural centers and historical sites, taking away priceless treasures reflecting Ukraine’s long, rich history.
Some of these treasures have now reappeared in Moscow museums and on the black market. Others have been destroyed in Russian bombardment.
In a museum in Ivankiv, Ukraine, dozens of artworks were destroyed in a fire following a Russian bombardment, including twenty by the beloved, internationally acclaimed Ukrainian folk artist Maria Oksentiyivan Prymachenko.
A self-taught artist, Prymachenko created primitive styled works in painting, embroidery and ceramics during a long career that spanned most of the twentieth century.
And she is beloved in Ukraine.
A street in Kyiv and a small exoplanet are named for Prymachenko and her work, shown internationally, has earned honors from UNESCO and been placed on Ukrainian stamps and coins.
"I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian." — Pablo Picasso
Experts claim these cultural losses are a part of the Kremlin’s plan to erase traces of Ukraine’s unique history and bolster Putin’s argument that Ukraine “is Russia.”
But the looting and destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage does not erase it; rather, it reminds the world of the artistic and cultural treasures that were irretrievably lost to Nazi looting and destruction during World War II.
It is this sad history that Putin repeats. Nothing more.
4. George W. Bush: a good or bad president?
National calamities have been good for George W. Bush’s presidential approval rating.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval peaked at 90 percent; and it stayed at or above 80 percent for the rest of 2001 as the US conducted military operations in Afghanistan.
The downhill slide began in March 2003, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Bush’s approval rating had already fallen to 71 percent by then, and it continued to decline throughout the initial phase of the Iraq War.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda brought Bush’s approval down to the high 40s in 2004, an approval rating that persisted during the subsequent years of turmoil in Iraq.
Bush’s lowest approval rating — 25 percent — came in the fall of 2008, when the financial crisis dominated the news; but the passage of time and the Trump presidency seems to have made Bush look good by comparison.
In 2018, after more than a year of Trump, 61 percent of Gallup’s respondents said they now viewed Bush favorably, a doubling of his approval rating when he left office.
5. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Edna St. Vincent Millay embraced progressive political ideals and feminism and she conveyed these concepts in traditional poetry forms.
[Rhyming words. Good punctuation. No odd sentence fragments.]
She was acclaimed in her lifetime, a feat few writers accomplish; and her fame came, in large part, from riveting readings of her works that she gave across the country and in Europe during the 1920s.
In her time, Millay was hailed as the voice of the new, “Modern Woman.”
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Figs from Thistles, 1918
6. Kitty, one of the six million.
The scale of loss is incomprehensible, and the directors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum seem to understand this.
So, they have made available more than one thousand family journals and diaries of Holocaust victims that tell the story of loss on a personal scale.
Among them is the diary of Béla Weichherz, a Jewish man from Czechoslovakia who began writing about his only child, Kitty, soon after her birth in 1929.
Béla’s diary begins as most baby books do, with the recording of milestones in Kitty’s growth and development.
She learns to speak in four languages.
She loves fairy tales and recites them to her dolls.
There are photographs of little Kitty, then drawings she has made, and then entries that Kitty, herself, has written.
As Kitty was growing into girlhood, her homeland, Czechoslovakia, was undergoing cataclysmic changes.
Nazi Germany dismantled the country in 1938 and conditions for Jewish people grew dire; and Béla’s diary entries reflect the new difficulties his family faced.
“I should also note how Kitty is reacting to the turbulent political circumstances these days. Above all else, she often asks questions to which one can’t give good answers. She figured it out on her own that nowadays it is not a good thing to be a Jew.”
The Weichherz family soon lost their home. Kitty was forced to withdraw from public school. Béla lost his job.
In March 1942, the Slovak government signed an agreement with Nazi Germany that permitted the deportation of Slovak Jews, as a part of Hitler’s Final Solution.
More than seventy thousand Slovak Jews would be sent to concentration camps.
“I have only one wish: to go together with Kitty and Mama …. For her age, Kitty is strong enough that she could go, but one would prefer to stay by the side of one’s child in such a difficult situation.” — the last lines of Béla’s diary
In June 1942, the Weichherz family was sent to Sobibor, a camp located deep in a forest in eastern Poland.
Sobibor’s sole purpose was the killing of Jews, and the Weichherz family is presumed to have been killed upon their arrival.
Kitty was then twelve years old.
7. What happened on January 31, 1968?
— Seven helicopters brought a contingent of US paratroopers to the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon to repel a Vietcong force that had invaded the embassy grounds, killing two Marine guards and five MPs. The US would suffer its highest number of Vietnam casualty deaths on this day — 245 men — and the day would later be considered the second day of the Tet Offensive.
— Following extensive staff investigations, the Senate Foreign Relations committee decided to commence formal hearings on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which had led to the Congressional authorization for President Johnson to use conventional military forces in Vietnam.
— The 83-man crew of the USS Pueblo was in its eighth day of captivity in North Korea, then ruled by the grandfather of Kim Jong-un. The Pentagon received word that one of the Pueblo crewmen had died.
— US Navy specialists were called to Greenland to aid in the offshore recovery of four hydrogen bombs that were lost on January 21, when a B-52 Stratofortress aircraft crashed in an attempted emergency landing at Thule Air Force Base in northwestern Greenland. Denmark raised concerns about radioactivity on its territory.
— A government advisory committee warned that the failure to prevent rioting, despair and anarchy in the nation’s largest cities constituted the gravest threat to the federal system of government since the Civil War.
— New York Senator Robert Kennedy said that he would not oppose the renomination of President Johnson ‘under any foreseeable circumstances.’
— A UN report said, ‘the world’s rich keep getting richer, while the poor keep getting poorer,’ warning that population growth threatened to outpace the development of food and other resources necessary to sustain human life.
— A US government scientist, speaking at a meteorology meeting, warned that burning petroleum and other organic compounds ‘to move a 120-pound woman and a bag of groceries to and from the market’ radically affects the Earth’s chemical balance and represents a long-term threat to human survival.
— Israeli and Egyptian forces traded artillery fire across the Suez Canal.
— An American-style supermarket opened in Moscow, near the Kremlin. Shoppers queued up at the door.
— United Airlines announced that, beginning in February, it would offer nonstop flights from New York to Los Angeles [‘then on to Hawaii, if you wish’] on its new Super DC-8 aircraft, which it called ‘the Royal Hawaiian.’ Seven stewardesses, in Hawaiian dress, would serve Hawaiian cuisine. Three movie screens. Leave at noon and arrive in LA at 2:40 pm. ‘Fly the friendly skies of United.’
— New York Mayor John Lindsey cut the ribbon on Radio Shack’s new Fifth Avenue store.
— Playing on Broadway: Fiddler on the Roof; Cabaret; Man of La Mancha; There’s a Girl in My Soup.
— Playing in movie theaters: Cool Hand Luke; Bonnie and Clyde; The Graduate.
— Playing on television: Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In; Gomer Pyle, USMC; Bonanza; Gunsmoke; Julia; Beverly Hillbillies; Mission Impossible.
— Playing on the radio: Hey, Jude; Love is Blue; Honey; Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay; Sunshine of Your Love; Mrs. Robinson; Harper Valley PTA.
8. Walter Cronkite interviews President Kennedy, September 2, 1963.
The interview marked the debut of the CBS Evening News, television’s first nightly half-hour news broadcast; and Cronkite would sit in the anchor chair of the program for more than seventeen years, becoming a trusted figure in the lives of millions of Americans.
His last day as anchor of the CBS Evening News was on Friday, March 6, 1981.
Dan Rather succeeded him the following Monday.
And that's the way it is.