APRIL

Berlin

There is a space between yesterday and tomorrow where one can easily lose one’s way. A wasteland with no safe corners, full of young Germans, those under 25. The Nazi system is all they know. Now it has ceased to exist. What’s left? A void. They seem to gather there, wavering, wanting to remain immobile.

They are caught between a yesterday under Hitler, when they ‘never had it so good’, and a tomorrow that might turn out to be different, and might be better. But there are no guarantees.

The space cannot be located on any geographical map. Yet it clearly lies between East and West, the points of the compass are clearly marked, still no one can say which direction these young people should take. A thought spreads from one to the other, morphing into a consensus: as long as they make no choice, they cannot make the wrong one.

Dearborn

Henry Ford dies on 7 April, though he seems to have been in excellent health.

In the course of his life, he not only invented the principle of the production line, used to manufacture cars and war material — something which none other than Joseph Stalin considered crucial for the Allies’ victory over the Germans — but also, in the early 1920s, he funded the translation and publication in the United States of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and printed 500,000 copies.

In 1919, he bought The Dearborn Independent newspaper, which went on to publish a series of anti-Jewish articles. These were collected in a book called The International Jew: the world’s foremost problem, together with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and one of the readers they inspired was Baldur von Schirach, later to become the leader of the Hitler Youth. A ‘decisive’ book for his anti-Semitic development, he declared when testifying in Nuremberg. Another reader on whom it made a deep impression was Adolf Hitler; hence Henry Ford is the only American mentioned by name in Mein Kampf.

Although Ford made a public apology in 1927, admitting that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was based on lies and forgery, in 1938 he received the highest Nazi order that could be conferred on a non-German, the Order of the German Eagle, together with a personal greeting from Adolf Hitler, who, incidentally, had a portrait of Henry on the wall of his Munich office.

Now he is dead. So it goes.

Delhi

Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, is holding talks about the country’s future with three men who can scarcely bear the sight of each another. The Earl prefers Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the leaders of the Indian National Congress. Mohandas Gandhi, on the other hand, also from the Congress party, is a person he views as a half-naked fakir, an unfathomable spiritual phenomenon, and he regards it as divine providence when their meetings fall on a Monday, the one day of the week on which Gandhi abstains from speech. The third man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League — well, he, in Dickie’s view, is a psychopath, so chilly that one feels the cold if one spends any length of time in the same room. The three Indian leaders are all lawyers, thoroughly Anglicised, highly qualified, and educated partly in Great Britain.

Could they have been friends, or at least allies, setting aside their mutual aversion? Could they have approached the Viceroy, Dickie, in a different way? Could the bloodbath of Partition have been averted? But Dickie is in a hurry, and the three men are competing for power and influence.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the political leader of the Raj’s Muslims, eats pork, drinks whisky, and seldom frequents the mosque. He loathes the way Gandhi brings spirituality into politics — ‘it is a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he has done’ — and is convinced that religion fuels chauvinism among both Hindus and Muslims. For this reason, he balks at conferring any spiritual authority on Gandhi by using the title ‘Mahatma’, the Great Soul. ‘Mr’ will do just fine, and this is something for which Gandhi cannot forgive him. In the past, Jinnah strove to unite the Hindu-dominated National Congress and the Muslim League, but the growing violence has made him an increasingly strong advocate of partition. Now he wants to see a separate Muslim state.

But Gandhi resists all thoughts of what he calls ‘vivisection’. He would prefer a community with the Muslim Jinnah in the leadership to seeing the body of Mother India rent asunder. Jawaharlal Nehru cannot accept Gandhi’s attitude, though he too is initially opposed to partition. But when violence tears the country apart from within, his position changes. Muslims and Hindus drown each other, burn each other’s houses down, and drill holes in each other’s skulls to watch each other bleed slowly to death.

As mentioned, Dickie likes Nehru best. The two men agree that old Gandhi doesn’t understand what’s going on; he is too busy travelling around, trying, by his presence, to lay balm on open wounds. They also agree that it would be better if Jinnah were elsewhere — let him have his moth-eaten Pakistan to keep him happy.

On 10 April, Lord Mountbatten gathers his staff together and announces that a just solution has been worked out. It is important that responsibility for the solution be transferred to the people of India, to avoid the blame being placed on Great Britain. By the way, Punjab and Bengal will have to be divided.

Thus Great Britain’s 350-year-old Raj fractures into three fragments: East and West Pakistan — a geographically impossible unit, separated by thousands of kilometres — with the Indian subcontinent in between. This is how its people fall apart: villages, houses, families. This is how life itself falls apart, giving way to arson and torn-up rice paddies, migration and flight, thousands of unburied bodies along the railway lines. This is how everything falls apart.

Berlin

A predicament between no-more-war and peace. A huge mess.

While work is in progress on the seventeenth edition of Der Ruf, the magazine is banned. The authorities in the American zone have tired of constantly having to censor it; they might as well close the whole thing down.

The editor, Hans Werner Richter, and his staff have all been German POWs in US custody, and now they will not be confined within the thinking of the victorious powers. They want to see links between the Eastern and Western zones, rather than ever-growing gaps, and dream of socialism as a bridge between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

All around them, front pages, articles, and public conversation are full of voices keen to redeem the German spirit, der Geist, from Nazism. The one has nothing to do with the other, the voices claim; it’s all a malicious misunderstanding. The German spirit is essentially a rich and cultivated one, but it has been taken hostage by vile Nazism.

The circle of young writers to which Hans Werner Richter belongs are starving like everyone else; they lack employment and social position, but are ready to create a new German language free of lies. Distancing themselves from the notion of collective guilt, they are, at the same time, repelled by the sanctimonious attitude now spreading through Germany, which they liken to snails’ slime.

The writer Thomas Mann also observes the attempts under way in his former home country to mask the violence of the last 14 years with the notion that German culture is essentially good. He has just completed a novel that depicts a composer who, entering into a pact with the devil to acquire great new artistic knowledge and success, has to forfeit his capacity for love in exchange. The novel arises from the understanding that the bourgeois culture in which Mann lived, and loved, held the embryo of Nazism within. The idea of intoxication merges with that of anti-reason, he notes. The result is the tragic fate of Germany.

Jura

One bright cold day in April, the clock strikes 13. Eric Arthur Blair steps ashore on the Scottish isle of Jura with his three-year-old son, Richard, and that is just about all he brings. His wife, Eileen, died during a routine operation less than a year after they had adopted the boy. Now only father and son are left.

Eric Blair is worn out and poor, and does what he can to keep his grief at bay. Since Eileen’s death, he has been writing as though possessed: book reviews, essays, reportage, analyses. A friend at The Observer lends him his house on Jura, and Blair gratefully accepts the opportunity to leave the world to itself.

To reach the whitewashed house in Barnhill, a good 10 km from Ardlussa, you take the ‘Long Road’ northwards until it comes to an end, then continue a little further. There stands the house, as luminously white as a tranquilliser. And below it, the sea. Nothing more, nothing else. That is all. House. Sky. Heath. Sea.

He spent some time in Barnhill last year. Now he notes in his diary that nothing is the same, everything is in disarray. The grass hasn’t started to grow yet, there are hardly any birds to be seen, the hares are few and far between. On 12 April, the sea is calm. No seals in sight.

We speak of time as a flow, a broadly meandering river that one cannot step into twice; we say it forms loops, yet flows onward. As if it issues from a spring, has a direction and an ocean waiting somewhere.

Sometimes there are people who place themselves in the middle of the metaphor, turning themselves into measuring instruments and analysts. What direction are we flowing in, what is the destination towards which blood is coursing, and what are people doing with their thoughts? What words are used, and what is the meaning they are designed to conceal?

Eric Blair is one of them. On Jura, with its white rabbits and adders, he takes as clear and unsentimental a view of the surrounding reality as of the surrounding language. As George Orwell, he writes:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Now he is on the run from his success as an author and journalist, escaping from requests for lectures and commissions, withdrawing from the public sphere and the unusually cold winter, to live life in the Inner Hebrides. There is no electricity or running water, but he has a glass of brandy a day, an idea for his next book, and the desolate surroundings he needs to be able to realise it.

Marseille

By this time, the British are aware of the white ship that was reconditioned in Baltimore harbour and has now arrived in Marseille. In fact, they have got to know about several old vessels being used for illegal smuggling of refugees. Over the last month alone, they have prevented eight ships from mooring in Palestine, each of which was carrying about a thousand surviving prisoners from the camps. The Jews on board are taken to camps on Cyprus which are already overfull, and there they must await their lawful turn to leave.

The British call on France to take action to halt the flows of refugees from the French coast, in particular this American passenger vessel, the President Warfield. Make use of administrative obstacles, they write to the French Foreign Ministry, prevent the ship from restocking with food and drink, refer to maritime safety, do what the hell you like, but don’t let it out of the port of Marseille.

Hundreds of thousands of people drifting through Europe, on their way out, on their way home, on their way to a place unknown, for the past is no longer a dwelling place.

Over 5000 Jews gather at the Romanian border with Hungary. Where are they heading? Onwards. The Hungarians decide to arrest all those who cross the border without legal documents and send them back to Romania.

Rumours are heard, so frequent, so worrying, and from such reliable sources that one must assume they are true: in the American occupation zone of Germany alone, over 125,000 people are making their preparations, all of them with the same goal in mind: to reach Palestine with false papers and by unlawful means.

Columbia, South Carolina

The present can be defined as a state of war-like peace.

Bernard Baruch, the American millionaire and presidential adviser, stands below the portrait of himself, giving a speech written by someone else. It is 16 April. He wants to have workers working harder, fewer strikes, and agreement between labour unions and employers.

The world needs to renew itself, both physically and spiritually, says Baruch. This simple sentence is sufficiently vague to contain the universal anxiety about such renewal, mixed with the universal hope that it will actually come to pass — words like a container of inflammable gas.

‘Let us not be deceived. We are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home.’

The American press quotes and praises Baruch, the analysis of a cold war impresses people with its acuity, and people adopt the concept as if this were the first time it had been uttered. Yet these words are in fact taken from an essay on the atom bomb already written by George Orwell in 1945. Orwell’s words capture the contemporary situation, but two years later the contemporary situation has moved on and takes the words back.

The term ‘cold war’ quickly gains even wider currency when journalist Walter Lippmann’s book of that name appears. The Cold War contains a series of articles in which Lippmann roundly criticises President Truman’s foreign policy and anti-Soviet strategy. The crack in the world that is widening in violence, the Cold War, actually originates with the American quest for power, as well as incompetence, says Lippmann.

He is not alone. Many heavyweight US politicians accuse America of replacing British imperialism in the Middle East with their own, risking war with the Soviet Union, abandoning important diplomatic negotiations, misunderstanding the civil war in Greece, supporting totalitarian forces there, and frightening the American people.

In his diary, President Truman makes no reference either to Lippmann or to his critique.

New York

Simone de Beauvoir dines with Marcel Duchamp on 19 April. Afterwards, she attends a party held in her honour. Le Corbusier is there, as are Kurt Weill and Charlie Chaplin.

Washington

Raphael Lemkin will never forget the time he heard Winston Churchill speak. The speech, broadcast by radio two months after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, dealt with what was actually happening under cover of the fairy tale name ‘Operation Barbarossa’:

The aggressor … retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands — literally scores of thousands — of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale … We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

The words lingered. A lawyer specialising in international law, Lemkin was living in exile, having fled from the Nazis in Poland. He pondered the crime without a name, and decided to name it.

A few months before Churchill’s speech, Lemkin arrived in the United States. His reputation grew thanks to the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in November 1944, in which he analysed and defined the crime to which he had given the name of genocide.

After the war, he was given a job at the Pentagon examining Nazi declarations and decrees on the persecution and murder of Jews in the occupied countries. But Raphael Lemkin wanted more; he wanted to change the world.

In the name of honesty: while all this is true, it is also misleading. No human life can be reduced to individual sentences. Fragments of Lemkin’s correspondence, notes, and an unfinished autobiography reveal everything else that Raphael Lemkin was. Traces of his yearning for love, and his bitterness. The warm and happy closeness to his mother, the memories of a childhood in which he embraced birch trees and rode bareback, feeling a deep sense of oneness with all living things. Here is the deep wound that will never heal: when he discovers that his mother was murdered in Treblinka. Here are his relationships with women who want to take care of him, the tenderness he inspires. The lack of clarity about his emotions. What happens to his feelings of desire? Secrets, unwritten diaries. The self-chosen solitude in which he wraps himself, the despair he breathes. And then there is the fact that will set its stamp on the rest of his life: his absolute determination, his obsession, to make genocide an internationally recognised crime.

To get closer to the power to change the world, he contacted one of the judges at the US Supreme Court, Robert H Jackson. Lemkin sent articles about his work, and suggested that the judge borrow his book from the Supreme Court’s library. Robert H Jackson read it. Later, when President Truman appointed Jackson chief prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial, Lemkin’s ideas and words filtered down into its work.

Gradually but resolutely, Lemkin approached the inner circle of lawyers working on the preparations for the trials. New laws had to be drafted. There were no old crimes in existence that covered the recent violence. Two new international offences were defined: crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace.

Through Robert H Jackson, Lemkin was invited to take part in the preparatory work, but he was not given any specific role. He made both friends and enemies. His name was pencilled into the list of participants in the working group, not written in ink. He was not given an extension of his own. There were colleagues who thought him maladroit, seeing him as someone who bragged about his book and ignored those around him. Yet he made an impression. It was thanks to his intense lobbying that the concept of genocide was included in the charges against Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hans Frank, and the other Nazi leaders. And during the International Military Tribunal — the first major trial in Nuremberg — ‘genocide’ was uttered for the first time in a courtroom. The British prosecutor even quoted verbatim from Lemkin’s book during one cross-examination.

He himself endured equally in the light and the shadow. At the same time as the trial was taking place, he was trying to find out what had happened to his parents and the rest of his family. He discovered that the US authorities in Germany were releasing 500 SS men every day, simply because they could not afford to keep them in custody. Neither photographs nor fingerprints were kept. He slept badly owing to anxiety and grief.

Unshaven, with untrimmed hair and an unkempt appearance, Lemkin wandered the corridors of Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel, where the US lawyers had their quarters. A kind soul in torment, a shadow who longed to bring more light into the world. His colleagues were sympathetic, but could hardly bear his presence.

Lemkin went as far as to ask one of the prosecutors to persuade the president of the tribunal to incorporate the concept of genocide in the judgement to be handed down at Nuremberg:

Indeed, we cannot keep telling the world in endless sentences: Don’t murder members of national, racial and religious groups; don’t sterilise them; don’t impose abortions on them; don’t steal children from them; don’t compel their women to bear children for your country; and so on. But we must tell the world now, at this unique occasion, don’t practise Genocide.

When the judgement was pronounced, Raphael Lemkin was on his sickbed in Paris. Several years — a war, a peace, the murder of millions of people, and a trial — had taken place since he had heard Winston Churchill refer to the crime without a name. He listened to the radio broadcast about Nuremberg, and until the judgement had been read out in full, hope remained. But there was not a word in it about genocide — nothing.

Malmö

Per Engdahl is gathering his forces: spidery networks, the old boys, diffusion of impulses.

The Swedish Security Service knows that Engdahl contacted some of the remaining European Nazi and Fascist cells back in 1945. They know he is now cooperating with Carl-Ernfrid Carlberg, the Swedish financier. This Carlberg runs a publishing house in Stockholm whose activities have included translating and publishing books by Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, and publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. During the war, Carlberg gathered information and advertised the publication of a two-volume ‘Who’s Who of Jews in Sweden’, which listed all Swedish Jews and their spouses, and was responsible for publishing the Swedish version of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda magazine Signal.

Carl-Ernfrid Carlberg is devoted and unwavering in his Nazism. In the run-up to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, he collected money for a gift. After the news of the attempt on the Führer’s life in 1939, he sent a personal telegram to wish him well.

The Swedish police know that the millionaire Carlberg is a member of Per Engdahl’s Fascist movement, and that Carlberg and Countess Lili Hamilton are the instigators of the Committee to Assist the Children of Germany, and later of an organisation called Assistance for German Officers. Over the years, they collect about 40 million Swedish crowns, money that benefits not only poverty-stricken German children, but also a large number of Nazi officers. Countess Hamilton later becomes vice-president of Stille Hilfe, an organisation that provides support for Nazis who are in hiding, sentenced, or on the run.

But as yet the Swedish police are unaware that Carlberg is in touch with Ludwig Lienhard, an SS officer who, as far back as 1944, was involved in shipping highly qualified Nazis to Argentina via Sweden. In a complex operation, in which he was acting on behalf of both the Swedish Government and Nazi Germany in parallel, it appears that he got several thousand Swedish-speaking Estonians who were at risk of Soviet reprisals out of the country, hiding them in Stockholm with Carl-Ernfrid Carlberg’s assistance.

Now Lienhard wants to travel to Argentina himself, and he is funding the journey by offering space for fugitives on board an old ship, Falken, which is in Stockholm for repairs. The boat is in very poor condition. Carlberg is contacted; he inspects the vessel and invests at least 30,000 Swedish crowns in the project.

In the course of police interrogations later in 1947, Carlberg will plead debilitating memory loss, and do what he can to downplay the link between himself and Ludwig Lienhard. But in this cool spring, they are both visited by a young German-Argentinian, Carlos Schultz. He has been instructed by President Perón to recruit 1000 people to come to Argentina, preferably Estonians or Swedish-speaking Estonians, but chiefly highly educated people with Aryan blood. Carlos Schultz and Ludwig Lienhard make long lists of Nazis in Sweden, and equally long lists of Danes and Norwegians known to have worked for the Nazis. The names are sent to Buenos Aires, which responds with passports and authorisation to enter the country. Argentine diplomats in Stockholm and Copenhagen lend a helping hand. Passports are stolen and forged, identities are concealed.

The illegal trafficking of fugitives over the border between German and southern Jutland continues: a steady stream of white, well-educated refugees, who are dispatched through Denmark to Sweden, and onwards to Latin America.