BELSEN TRIALS
Sta,—Mr. Kempson's letter about the Belsen trials expresses a point of view which I have read and heard exprosed almost everywhere in recent weeks. It may be that this general impatience with the slow processes of justice is only a momentary deviation from our normal habit of mind in this country, one of the numerous dislocations caused by seeing so many of the conventions of our civilisation outraged during recent years. Let
us hope so, for otherwise we shall in due course find that the tap-root, as It were, of that civilisation has been cut.
During the final collapse of the German armies we know that many acts of rough justice were done by ourselves, the Americans and our other Allies in the west, and that these acts of summary execution left the world a cleaner place. But experience has surely shown us that such acts when done in the heat and tensity of battle do not corrupt the doer any more than the ordinary acts of war. To shoot a captured S.S. man out of hand during a battle or a victorious advance, when one knows what dreadful deeds S.S. men have habitually perpetrated, is not appre- ciably more brutalising than to fire a machine-gun at the distant figures of enemy soldiers in ordinary trench warfare.
But we are no longer in a state of active war. The vital sanctions of conventional society are now, or should be, again operative, and for the British authorities to shoot or hang—personally I hope they hang—the Belsen creatures and all others like them unless they are first found, each and all, to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt in a trial as fair and full and proper as we know how to make it, would be to do the British people irreparable harm. It would in the long run, I believe, do more damage to Western Europe in its state of fevered weakness for these persons to. be punished without the sanction of a trial at law than for them to escape scot free. There will have been enough killing in the name of retribution by the time it is all over..
By precisely what right these people can be tried by a British court under any other than German law for zcts committed on German soil against persons not of British nationality I do not profess to understand, nor does that matter, for the conscience of civilised humanity demands that they should be tried in the name of. decency. My point is that this is a supreme instance where justice must not only be done, but must also appear to be done, and that is why I am thankful for the tedious and meticulous thoroughness of the Belsen trials, however boring they may be to the spectators.
. We are going through a period when the choice between short- and long-term policies is going to be far more agonising than it usually is. I, for one, am glad that the British Government has plumped for the long term, it least in this case.—Yours faithfully, EDWARD FRANKLIN. The Royal Automobile Club, London, S.W. r.
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