Processing evil

At his first examination by US army doctors following his arrest, Hermann Göring was discovered to have painted his fingernails and toenails bright red. He was addicted to morphine. After he sobered up to present his defence, the highest-ranking Nazi to stand trial at Nuremberg was gloating, manipulative, unrepentant. He often seemed to come out ahead in cross-examinations. When the prosecution screened footage of Nazi ceremonies and rallies, Göring visibly preened at the sight of himself. Rebecca West, who covered the trials for The New Yorker, wrote « when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. » 

The Nuremberg trials (1945-6) were the first draft of historical judgement on the devastation of World War II. Yet it is probably Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem that became the defining legal reckoning with the Holocaust in popular memory. Perhaps this is because Eichmann’s trial was later and televised, or because, thanks to Hannah Arendt, we have come to find the figure of the impersonal bureaucrat more grimly appropriate to the vast industrial scale of death. But if the Jerusalem trial (and Arendt’s assessment of it) have since shaped how we think about perpetrators, it is certainly not because Nuremberg lacked the more compelling villain. Where Eichmann embodied the banality of evil, Göring stood for something like its virtuosity.

By the time the trials began, the Allies had already lost two prisoners to suicide. To prevent further losses, the commandant of Nuremberg prison introduced new protocols: daily searches, a 24-hour watch; custom-built tables designed to buckle under a man’s weight; as they slept, prisoners were instructed to lie with their hands outside their blankets so that nothing could be concealed. 

Nuremberg had been one of the sites targeted via aerial bombing with explosive and incendiary bombs deliberately combined to ignite a firestorm. In the gleeful language of the British press at the time, it had been Rotterdamned; it had been Hamburgered. The streets smelled of death. As the British deputy chief prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe recalled in his memoirs, « people peeped at us from bunkers under partly shattered houses, apathetic and wretched. » The rubble heaped at the sides of the roads buried so many corpses that it was feared they would contaminate the water supply.