Table Of ContentFrom Nuremberg to Nineveh
– war, peace and the making of modernity
Mark Turley
Copyright © Mark Turley 2008
The right of Mark Turley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmit-
ted, in any form, or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise
circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain
by
Vandal Publications, London
ISBN 978-0-9559810-0-5
CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design by Anastasia
This one is for Uta and Lola.
The past and the future.
Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................9
2. And so it goes…...................................................................13
3. The Climate of the Time......................................................15
4. The Legal Platform..............................................................21
5. Defendants?..........................................................................31
6. The Indictment.....................................................................35
7. A most terrible and convincing case....................................40
8. Der Dicke.............................................................................45
9. The Loneliest Man in the World..........................................61
10. Skinhead, skinhead!...........................................................67
11. The Penitent Man...............................................................75
12. I am Kaltenbrunner…........................................................84
13. The Root of all Evil..........................................................102
14. Nazi Diplomacy...............................................................111
15. The Politics of Race.........................................................116
16. The Sailors........................................................................128
17. Befehl ist befehl...............................................................132
18. A Thousand Years of Guilt..............................................139
19. The Pied Piper and the Voice of Radio Deutschland.......148
20. A final word on the trial...................................................155
21. Genocide at Nuremberg ..................................................162
22. Freedom, Democracy and ‘The Conquering of Evil’......174
23. An Unseen Tyrant?..........................................................183
24. The Conceits of Academia...............................................187
References..............................................................................189
From Nuremberg to Nineveh
Introduction
Pre-dating the earliest days of recorded history, going back to the oral traditions of the ancient tribes, the
most abiding theme of human storytelling has been the battle between good and evil. The Hindu legend of
Rama and Sita, Adam and Eve, Beowulf and Grendel, the list could stretch for volumes. This clear division
of our experiences of the world appeals, it seems, to something simple within us. It offers comforting an-
swers to our most troubling questions. It symbolises both our dealings with each other and that which we de-
scribe as ‘conscience’. And it speaks of simple self-knowledge. After all, each of us is capable of kindness,
compassion and sometimes cruelty. From folklore’s witches and dragons, to Satan’s army of demons, to the
inscrutable Dr. Fu-Manchu or Darth Vader, we have used the motif of the monster, the fiend or the wicked
villain and usually their ultimate defeat, to juxtapose that which we believe to be good and noble about our
species.
The generation of people that grew up in the 1920s and 30s, during the fragile peace that followed the
Great War, were perhaps more imbued with this notion than any that had gone before. The captivating, new
medium of cinema raised them on a diet of weekly serials. One dimensional characters, physical action and
cliffhanger endings provided the template. ‘Horse operas’ were big box office too – tales of the Wild West,
of spreading the American way beyond existing frontiers, in which morality was so clearly defined as to be
shown by the colour of a man’s hat. Throughout their childhoods and adolescence this age-group received
regular doses of celluloid, pseudo-virtue in digestible, two-hour chunks. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gram-
sci, would have described this as creating a ‘cultural hegemony’.1
Following in the trenchfoot bootsteps of their fathers, who endured hell in the quagmires of Verdun,
Paschendale and the Somme, this new cohort of cannon-fodder reached young adulthood and found them-
selves embroiled in a vicious and attritional war. Their war, however, would be far worse. Worldwide, sixty
to seventy million people would die in it. And wartime, of course, has always leant itself to the promotion of
simple moral polemics. As observed by the Chinese general, Sun Tzu, in his legendary manual ‘The Art of
War’, written in the first millennium BC, ‘The Tao causes the people to be fully in accord with the ruler.
Thus they will die with him and not fear danger…Warfare is the Tao of deception.’2
Upon winning the war, the leaders of this generation of westerners had then to set about winning the
peace. Just as before, popular culture and cinema would be invaluable, (as would academia – history is, after
all, just another form of story) and the huge raft of films and books made about World War Two since its
end, with very few exceptions, have enforced the idea that it was a battle between the forces of darkness and
the forces of light: Star Wars without the spaceships.
Considering how simplistic this narrative is, it has shown incredible longevity. With the passing of time
and the healing of divisions and resentments, it would have been reasonable to expect a more balanced view
to emerge. Yet even today, in the early 21st century, opinion polls asking for the ‘most evil man in history’
will invariably throw up Adolf Hitler and often Himmler, Goebbels and Eichmann in their top tens. Roose-
velt, Truman and Churchill are never mentioned. The latter is still regarded by many in Britain as a hero, a
symbol of national greatness. Not only that, but the abbreviation ‘Nazi’ has become synonymous with evil.
And this is not just in the popular mind.
The much quoted political theorist Hannah Arendt, after observing the trial Of SS officer Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961-62) coined a famous description. He possessed, she said, the ‘banality of
evil.’3 This has become an oft-repeated sound-bite, appearing in newspaper articles, book reviews and all
things connected to the history of the time. He did not, Arendt declared, appear to be deranged or a psycho-
path. His demeanour in the dock convinced Arendt that he was merely a normal bureaucrat who had partici-
pated in the Nazi conspiracy in much the same way as a senior manager in any hierarchical organisation
1 Gramsci identified hegemony as a tool of ideological control used to maintain the status-quo by ensuring that society could
be dominated by one group.
2 Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Running Press 2003) p.11-15
3 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 1994 new ed.)
10 – From Nuremberg to Nineveh
would.
It is testament to the level of unreality with which that period of history has been regarded that such a bi-
zarre comment could achieve such renown. It shows that even academics bought into this idea of Nazi evil, to
the extent that Arendt believed it was comment-worthy (she wrote an entire book about it) that Eichmann did
not display outward signs of it.
This demonstrated that on several levels our image-hungry culture has made a childish connection be-
tween an ideology – National Socialism – and a mythical, religious notion – evil. This may have been expe-
dient once, when we needed to rouse the boys to take up arms for the cause, but that time has long passed.
Yet for various reasons, many of them political, this connection has persisted into the present day. Over the
last thirty years, the majority of serious books on the subject have made little attempt to take a more adult
view. Titles have included; Adolf Hitler, Evil Mastermind of the Holocaust (Jacobs-Altman), The Evil that
Men do, the Rise of the Nazis (Rubin), Heydrich, the Face of Nazi Evil (Drederichs), Explaining Hitler, the
Search for the Origins of his Evil (Rosenbaum), Hitler, the Pathology of Evil (Victor), The Logic of Evil, So-
cial Origins of the Nazi Party (Brusleigh), Mirroring Evil, Nazi Imagery in Recent Art (Kleebatt), Hitler’s
Bureaucrats, the Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (Lozowick), Leap to Life, Triumph over Nazi
Evil (Rebhun), Soldiers of Evil, Commandants of Nazi Concentration Camps (Segev), Nuremberg, Evil on
Trial (Owen) and many, many more.
This book sprang from a simple premise, that in the real world, you know, the one that exists outside of
Hollywood and comic-books and blood-and-guts horror novels, there is no such thing as evil. It also sprang
from a question – how can so many supposedly intelligent people, university professors, published historians
and researchers, buy into such a silly idea?
Invariably when considering these issues, we are led on a path toward the Holocaust, the result of the es-
calating anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis during the thirties and early forties, in which it is said that six mil-
lion Jews (perhaps as many as eleven million people altogether) were singled out and deliberately extermi-
nated, roughly half in huge homicidal gas chambers. Beyond that, however, and sometimes it is difficult to
see beyond that, we are faced with a very clear issue. And it is to do with how we, in the modern world, per-
ceive the things that happen to us. On examination, we see that some events become iconic.
Everyone remembers, so we are told, where they were when Neil Armstrong descended the ladder and
walked on the moon. The shootings of John F. Kennedy or John Lennon, Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a
dream’ speech, the finding of Elvis Presley, cold on his toilet, full of burgers and barbiturates, all occupy sa-
cred places in our collective consciousness. They have been engineered into legend and became far greater
through repeated recollection than they ever really were.
Even when this grab-bag method of memory is applied to the horrors of war, the knowledge it imparts is
still delivered superficially, as snapshots – that howling, Vietnamese girl, naked before a Napalm sky, the
Hiroshima mushroom cloud, the bodies at Belsen. We use them like stock-photos, to be wheeled out when-
ever a bit of pathos is desired – look here’s that important thing that’s common to all of us – isn’t it poign-
ant/amazing/terrible?
But none of this, obviously, bears any relation to genuine memory. These images are only simplistic
visualisations of things too complex and problematic to show in a photo or a ten second movie clip. These
‘memories’, in so far as they exist, have been manufactured for us.
The event primarily discussed within these pages does not have iconic status. Unlike the visceral images
of World War Two, The Nuremberg Trial receives relatively little coverage. It wouldn’t make such a good
snapshot, you see. But in the pages that follow it will be demonstrated that it was an event so fundamental in
creating the world we live in now, that every global citizen should examine it. It was arguably the defining
event of the last hundred years – we still live in its shadow. And like a great deal of things that happen during
or as a result of war, it has been so obscured by propaganda that few understand its true meaning.
