London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
September 30th.
And what a date.
Because on September 30th, 1938, Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich.
And on September 30th, 1946, judgement was being delivered at Nuremberg.
Exactly eight years.
Eight years from “peace for our time” to the dock at Nuremberg.
There’s your bookend.
There’s your history lesson.
And what happened between those two September 30ths was just about as terrible as anything human beings have ever managed to do to one another.
So let’s go back to the first one.
September 30th, 1938.
Neville Chamberlain comes home from Munich. He’s been meeting Hitler. Britain, France, Germany and Italy have agreed that Germany can take the Sudetenland, the German-speaking borderlands of Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia, incidentally, wasn’t at the table.
Always slightly alarming when four other people meet to decide what’s going to happen to your house.
Chamberlain lands at Heston Aerodrome, out west of London.
And he’s got a piece of paper.
The piece of paper.
He waves it at the crowd.
Later, in Downing Street, comes that phrase which history has never allowed him to forget.
“Peace for our time.”
And just to be fair to Chamberlain, the crowds loved it.
People desperately wanted to believe him.
Of course they did.
They remembered the trenches. The telegram arriving at the door. The missing son. The empty chair at Christmas. The names carved into the war memorial in practically every village, town and city in Britain.
Twenty years after the First World War, nobody wanted another one.
And hindsight is a wonderfully comfortable armchair.
We know what Hitler was going to do.
They didn’t.
Or rather, some people did, some suspected, some warned, but millions hoped against hope that perhaps this really was it.
Peace.
Anyway.
Turn the calendar forward.
Exactly eight years.
September 30th, 1946.
Different country.
Different room.
Different piece of paper.
And a very different mood.
Nuremberg.
The surviving senior figures of the Nazi regime have been on trial before the International Military Tribunal.
And now judgement is being delivered.
The following morning, October 1st, The Times opened its report like this:
“The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg yesterday entered upon the delivery of its unanimous judgement on the indicted Nazi leaders.
The four judges, followed by their alternate members, successively took up the reading of the document of 50,000 words, which in the name of the civilised world declared aggressive war to be the supreme international crime for which individual heads of state could not escape punishment.”
That last bit.
“Individual heads of state could not escape punishment.”
Those are extraordinarily important words.
Because Nuremberg was saying: you cannot hide behind the state.
You cannot say, “That was Germany.”
You cannot say, “Those were government orders.”
You cannot disappear into a uniform, a ministry, a bureaucracy, a chain of command.
Individuals did these things.
Individuals could be held responsible for them.
And there’s something else about the name.
Nuremberg.
That place name will do for our word of the day.
Nuremburg.
The name is generally thought to derive from something like “rocky hill” or “rocky mountain”.
Well, there’s an image.
Because that courtroom became a rocky escarpment for Göring and the rest of them.
They’d climbed extraordinarily high.
And now there was nowhere left to go.
Hermann Göring, once one of the most powerful men in Europe, sitting in a dock, wearing headphones, listening as the world passed judgement on what he and the regime he served had done.
And what had happened in those eight years?
That’s almost impossible to take in.
A world war.
Cities flattened.
Countries invaded.
Millions upon millions dead.
The Holocaust.
Six million Jews murdered.
Millions of other civilians murdered, starved, deported, enslaved.
Soldiers killed on battlefields stretching from North Africa to Russia, from Normandy to the Pacific.
London bombed.
Warsaw destroyed.
Rotterdam bombed.
Coventry bombed.
Stalingrad.
Dresden.
Hiroshima.
Nagasaki.
And behind so much of it, not some mysterious force of nature.
Not an earthquake.
Not a plague bacillus.
Decisions.
Human decisions.
Which is why that Nuremberg principle matters so much.
Individuals could not escape into the abstraction of the state.
There is, incidentally, an almost surreal little footnote in The Times that day.
While the paper is reporting judgement at Nuremberg, elsewhere in its columns people are worrying about getting out of Britain.
Emigration.
New Zealand was proving particularly attractive.
And you can understand it.
Six years of war. Rationing. Bomb damage. Housing shortages. Austerity. Europe exhausted.
New Zealand must have sounded like another planet.
Sunshine. Space. Distance.
About as far from Nuremberg as you could get without falling off the edge of the map.
There was even advice about how prospective emigrants might settle.
Follow the coast.
I rather love that.
The judgement of history being pronounced in one column.
And in another, somebody effectively saying, “Right. New Zealand. Which way?”
That’s life, isn’t it?
The enormous and the ordinary rubbing shoulders on the same newspaper page.
But come back to those two dates.
September 30th, 1938.
September 30th, 1946.
Eight years.
A man stands at an aerodrome holding a piece of paper and promises peace.
Eight years later, other men sit in a courtroom and hear a 50,000-word judgement on what happened when that peace failed.
And perhaps there is one other way of measuring those eight years.
There is a line in the Talmud.
A tremendous line.
“Whoever destroys a single life, it is as though he had destroyed an entire world.”
One life.
One world.
And Europe had not lost one world.
It had lost millions of them.
Every person killed was a world.
A childhood. Memories. Friendships. Jokes. Habits. Hopes. People they loved. People who loved them.
And all the children they might have had.
All the mornings they might have woken up to.
All the ordinary Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays they never got.
Whole worlds.
Extinguished.
Which gives that courtroom at Nuremberg an even sterner significance.
This wasn’t simply a reckoning with men who had started a war.
It was a reckoning with men whose decisions had helped extinguish worlds.
Eight years earlier, Chamberlain had stood at Heston with his piece of paper.
“Peace for our time.”
Eight years later, at Nuremberg, the accounting had begun.
September 30th.
Same date.
Different world.
Literally.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets ahead.
And while I’m here, a personal note. Happy Birthday to Charles in Wisconsin.
See you tomorrow.