Authors: Rebecca West
A Train of Powder (11 page)
The executions were to take place on October 16. Some time during the preceding night Göring killed himself. The enormous clown, the sexual quiddity with the smile which was perhaps too wooden for mockery and perhaps not, had kicked the tray out of the hands of the servants who were bringing him the wine of humiliation, the glasses had flown into the air and splintered with a sound too much like laughter. This should not have happened. We are all hunters, but we know ourselves hunted by a mightier hunter, and our hearts are with the hunted, and we rejoice when the snared get free of the snare. In this moment visceral mournfulness changed to visceral cheerfulness; we had to applaud for the flesh that would not accept the doom that had been dealt to it but changed it to an expression of defiance. All those people who had fled from Nuremberg, British and American and French, who were scattered over the world, trying to forget the place of their immurement, would straighten up from whatever they had been bent over and burst out laughing before they could help themselves, saying, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of us yet.” Surely all those Germans who walked through the rubble of their cities while their conquerors drove, they too would halt, and throw back their heads, and laugh, and say, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of them yet.”
Göring should not have been permitted even this small amelioration of his doom. True, we now know some reasons for feeling that he might have been allowed to get a little of his own back. Like all the Nazis, he had been plagued by the attentions of the psychiatrists who haunted Nuremberg Jail, exercising a triple function of priest and doctor and warder hard to approve. They visited the men in the cells and offered themselves as confidants, but performed duties at the behest of the court authorities. When some of the defendants seemed to be taking an unrepentant pro-Nazi stand in their line of defence, one of the psychiatrists worked out, at the commandant’s request, a plan for a new seating arrangement at the lunch table in order to break up this group and expose them to other influences. It is not easy to think of an accused person on trial before a national tribunal being subjected to such manipulation by prison officials. There was no silver lining to this cloud. One of these psychiatrists has related, without humorous intention, that when Göring asked him what a certain psychological test had revealed about his character, he replied that it had shown that he lacked the guts to face responsibility. Göring had also the benefit of spiritual care of a remarkably robust kind.
He asked the Lutheran chaplain to give him Holy Communion on the night before the executions, but the chaplain refused, on the ground that he was probably shamming.
Nevertheless Göring should not have been given the chance to use his courage to weaken public horror at his crimes, to which his courage was not relevant. The Nazis were maniacs who plastered history with the cruelty which is a waste product of man’s moral nature, as maniacs on a smaller scale plaster their bodies and their clothes with their excreta. Since sanity is to some extent a matter of choice, a surrender to certain stimuli and a rejection of others, the nature of mania should never be forgotten. It is unfair, not only to Germans, but to all the world, if the vileness of the Nazis be extenuated; and it was unfair that this Nazi of all Nazis should have been allowed to disguise his gross dementia. This suicide meant a long-term danger to human standards, and it might have meant a short-term danger too, had it not been for the severity of the following winter. Germany was to be ice-bound and waterlogged and had no time to think of reviving the Nazi party; and if that stretch of bad weather broke Europe’s heart, it also broke the continuity of popular political thinking and forced it on to a fresh phase not shadowed by resentment at conquest. But the Allies had failed idiotically in a prime matter. All to no purpose had the military policeman in the V.I.P. gallery shaken the venerable Lord of Appeal and bidden him wake up and uncross his legs. All to no purpose had his colleague waved his club round the ears of the judge and asked him how the hell he had got in. All to no purpose had the maternal colonel shadowed our passes with his pendulous bosom. The cyanide had freely flowed.
But worse than that had happened. No wise person will write an unnecessary word about hanging, for fear of straying into the field of pornography. The strain of evil in us, which, given privileges, can take pleasure in the destruction of others by pain and death, takes delight in dreams about hanging, which is the least dignified form of death. That delight emits the strongest of all the stinks that hang about the little bookshops in the backstreets. Yet if there must be capital punishment, it had better take the form of hanging. That murderers should be killed by injections is a fatuous suggestion, for this could not be efficiently done without recourse to the aid of doctors, who could not give it without breaking the Hippocratic oath and losing their sacred characters as the preservers of life. In these days it is vitally important to maintain this traditional concept of medicine in its purity, since a totalitarian government might imitate the Nazi state in asking its doctors to exterminate an unfavoured class or perform lethal experiments on it, and it would be well that both doctors and the public should realize this to be an obscene retrogression. The electric chair has the disadvantage of raising in the vulgar a vision of regal stoicism; the half-witted gangster can feel it is his throne, and the current links him with the scientific cosmos of Superman. The firing squad is the happiest of executions, for it gives the condemned man a chance to gain the good opinion of his executioners; and for that reason it must be forbidden, like suicide, to those whose crimes are vile and must be remembered as vile. There remain decapitation and hanging; and the bloody act of decapitation, with the grace notes of horror that are added when the headsman is failed by his skill, is a huntsman’s call to cruelty.
This long grim argument keeps the hangman in our lives. But this is a horrible necessity. It is not because we have grown too tender that we think it so. The mobs of the past, coarse-pelted as hogs, were distracted by the burden they had laid on another man’s soul by making him a public servant and publicly abhorrent. They acted as simple people do under the consciousness of guilt and pretended that it was their victim who was guilty. The crimes of which so many eighteenth-century hangmen were convicted lie on the records with an oblique air. Either they were the consequences of these outcasts’ frenzied misery or revengeful impostures practised by the community. When Dennis was accused of having joined in the Gordon Riots and stoked fires in the street with wood torn from Catholic houses, the Recorder believed his story that as he made his way through the burning city to his home the rioters had closed in on him, crying, “Here’s bloody Jack Ketch, let’s make him carry some to the fire,” and had threatened to burn him if he refused. But the jury condemned him to death; though it was not to have its will, for the state needed him to do his work, since it was not easy to get another scapegoat.
In the nineteenth century the mob grew milder and intellectuals addressed themselves to the task of self-analysis. But neither the mob nor the intellectuals grew kinder to the hangman and continued to show cruelty to one whose offence was of their own creating. Old Jimmy Bottin, paralysed, got about Brighton by using a chair as a crutch and sitting down on it when he was exhausted; and at the sound of the chair legs scraping the ground the people crossed the street and left him to hobble along alone. They were unjust to hangmen but they were not merciful to those who were hanged. Hangings were public until 1869, and it was a matter of common knowledge that the victims on the scaffold often took a long time to die and suffered horribly. In fact, they died of slow strangulation. In the past that had been accepted as the way that hanged men died. A free end of the noose was passed through a ring on the scaffold pole, and while the victim dangled in the noose the executioner pulled on it and strangled him. The drop system had been introduced in the hope that the fall through the trapdoor would dislocate the victims’ spines and cause instantaneous death; but still they died of strangulation.
No doctor, no lawyer, no professed humanitarian, took the trouble to inquire why this system had failed in its purpose. That was left to an illiterate cobbler from Lincolnshire named William Marwood, who was obsessed by hangings. He thought about them all day long as he worked on his boots and shoes; and he was visited by the idea that hanged men still suffered the pains of strangulation because the usual drop was not long enough to cause a fall of sufficient violence. He perceived also that to get a fall violent enough to dislocate the spine but not so violent that it tore the head from the body, the length of the rope must be in proportion to the weight of the body. Marwood succeeded in being appointed public executioner in 1871, and it was at once seen that his system went far to eliminate the risk of strangulation, but he never worked out any but an approximate formula for the length of the rope. This, however, was perfected by one of his successors, James Berry. These hangmen did a great work of mercy to the most defeated children of men, and they lifted from us all the guilt of torturing as well as killing. Yet we never thank them for it, their names are not written in gold like those of Shaftesbury and Schweitzer, and if we met them face to face few of us would immediately remember that we owe them reverence and gratitude; and it will be hardest for those to remember it who have stood outside a prison at the hour of a hanging. There is nothing to see there before the hanging except a white notice pinned on the great outer door of the prison, which bears an announcement that a man is to be hanged that morning; and after the hanging a warder comes out of a small door which is cut in the great door, and takes down the noticeboard and takes it inside, and brings it out again and hangs it up, with two other notices pinned on to it, one a sheriff’s declaration that the man has been hanged, the other a surgeon’s declaration that he has examined the hanged man and found him to be dead. But people come long distances to see this nearly invisible sight, often bringing their children, who have sometimes clamoured to be brought; and they go away with the satisfaction of those who have had their orgasm. There was never a lawful occasion which smelled so strongly of the unlawful.
When the Nuremberg tribunal came to deal with these delicate matters it proved to be as zanyish as we had feared it might be. It undertook the task of hanging eleven men with a dreadful innocence which made the reports of the journalists who witnessed the executions not nearly so unlike the testimony concerning Nazi atrocities which had brought these men to the gallows as one might have hoped. The hangman was an American sergeant who meant no harm but had not fully benefited by the researches of Marwood and Berry. The ten men slowly choked to death. Ribbentrop struggled in the air for twenty minutes. Yet it would be treachery against truth not to concede that justice had been done. Each one of these men who had been hanged had committed crimes for which he would have had to give his life under German law; and it would have then been an axe that killed him. But there are stenches which not the name of justice or reason or the public good, or any other fair word, can turn to sweetness.
The note of Greenville, South Carolina, is rhetorical. Among the stores and offices on Main Street there is a vacant lot that suddenly pretends to be a mountain glade, with a stream purling over a neatly assembled rockfall; and in the foreground there is staked a plaque bearing the words:
GREENVILLE CITY WATER WORKS 1939.
The water supply of Greenville, South Carolina, pure, sparkling, life’s most vital element, flows by gravity from an uncontaminated mountain watershed of nine thousand acres, delivered through duplicated pipe lines, fourteen million gallons capacity, a perfect water for domestic and industrial uses.
Not in such exuberant terms would the existence of a town water supply be celebrated in the North or in my native England, and no deduction can be drawn from this that is damaging to the South. The exuberance of the inscription is actually a sober allusion to reality. Here one remembers that water is a vital element, as it is not in the North or in England. One is always thinking about water, for one is always wanting to have a drink or take a shower or get some clothes washed. The heat of the South is an astonishment to the stranger. When the lynching trial in Greenville came to its end, late in May, it was full summer there, and the huge, pale bush roses that grow around the porches were a little dusty. Greenville was as hot as the cities that he on the Spanish plains, as Seville and Cordoba. But in those cities the people do not live a modern life, they do not work too grimly, and they sleep in the afternoons; here they keep the same commercial hours as in New York, and practice the hard efficiency that is the price this age asks for money. On this point they fool the stranger. It is the habit of the mills and other factories to build themselves outside the city limits to dodge taxation. So Greenville has a naïve-looking Main Street, with cross streets running, after a block or two, into residential sections, where the white houses stand among gardens that look as if they were presently going to pass into woods and fields and the clear countryside; and it has a population of 35,000. But outside Greenville city, in Greenville County, there are 137,000 people, 123,000 of whom live within ten miles of the city. In fact, the lynching for which thirty-one men were being tried in the court house was committed not, as might be imagined by an interested person who was trying to size the matter up by looking at a map and gazetteer, in a backward small town, but in a large modern city.
