Year Zero (30 page)

An appeal for mercy was turned down by MacArthur. Yamashita's lawyers tried, without much hope, to get the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the trial invalid. Their claim was that military commissions had no right to try former enemies in peacetime, and that the trial had not been conducted fairly. The Supreme Court decided not to contest the legitimacy of the military court, but two justices were highly critical of the trial. In the dissenting words of one of them, Justice Wiley B. Rutledge Jr.: “It is not in our tradition for anyone to be charged with crime which is defined after his conduct . . . Mass guilt we do not impute to individuals, perhaps in
any case but certainly in none where the person is not charged or shown actively to have participated in or knowingly to have failed in taking action to prevent the wrongs done by others, having both the duty and the power to do so.”
¹⁸

Yamashita declared that his conscience was clear. The evidence of the Manila Massacre, of which he claimed to have been ignorant when it occurred, had shocked him profoundly. He told his lawyers that it would have been hard for him to return to Japan anyway after leaving so many dead men behind. After hearing his sentence, he wrote a short poem:

The world I knew is now a shameful place

There will never come a better time

For me to die.
¹⁹

Yamashita was hanged on February 23, 1946, at Los Baños, a picturesque hot spring resort south of Manila.

•   •   •

GENERAL MACARTHUR HAD
a peculiar and interesting justification for his implacability in the case of his Japanese adversary. Yamashita, in his view, had brought dishonor to the military profession.

The traditions of the fighting men are long and honorable. They are based on the noblest of human traits—sacrifice. This officer . . . has failed this irrevocable standard; has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldierly faith. The transgressions resulting therefrom as revealed by the trial are a blot upon the military profession, a stain upon civilization and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten.
²⁰

In his grandiose way, MacArthur was voicing a common sentiment of his time: the trials against the German and Japanese war criminals, as
well as their accomplices, were not just about restoring the rule of law, but about restoring “civilization.” This was the language of prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials as well. It was typical of MacArthur to equate civilization with “soldierly faith.” The idea of conducting trials to blot out the “memory of shame and dishonor,” on the other hand, was most important in countries humiliated by foreign occupation. Perhaps MacArthur was thinking of the Philippines. But that memory was like a shadow everywhere hanging over trials of national leaders who had collaborated with the occupiers, even when they had done so for what were in their own minds honorable reasons.

One thing Pierre Laval, the highest-ranking minister in two Vichy governments, and Anton Mussert, “the Leader” of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), had in common was that they saw themselves as honorable men, patriots who had done everything in their power to serve the interests of their countries. They faced their executioners, after being swiftly tried for treason in the fall and winter of 1945, convinced that they were dying as martyrs and would one day be not only vindicated but recognized as saviors. The other thing they had in common was that they died as the most hated men in their respective nations. There were worse, more brutal people. Neither Laval nor Mussert had a taste for violence. On the contrary, Laval had been a left-wing pacifist during World War I and never lost his personal loathing for military action, even, some would argue, in defense of his nation. He was a born appeaser, confident that he could outwit even the devil in negotiations. As he told his lawyer: “To collaborate to me meant to negotiate.”
²¹
Both men, in fact, had stood up to the Germans on occasion to defend the interests of some of their compatriots, usually without much success. And yet they were almost universally loathed. Which is why the outcome of their trials had to be a foregone conclusion.

Laval and Mussert, like Yamashita Tomoyuki, were physically unprepossessing, which can't have helped. Mussert was a pudgy, round-faced little man so utterly unsuited to the black uniforms and leather coats of his fascist party that he always managed to look ridiculous. Laval, never a
booted and uniformed rabble-rouser, but a professional politician in striped trousers and a habitual white necktie, had the air of a disreputable merchant of questionable goods: short, dark, greasy-haired, with hooded eyes and a perpetual cigarette staining his crooked teeth and bushy moustache. Mussert started his professional life as an engineer (he designed autobahns, among other things), and Laval as a lawyer. Laval was by far the more successful politician. He led the French government twice before the war and in 1931 was
Time
magazine's Man of the Year—“calm, magisterial and popular”—for shepherding France through the Great Depression.
²²
Mussert was already somewhat of a figure of fun to most Dutch people at the end of the 1930s; strutting around in black shirts was not the Dutch style.

Neither man wished for a German invasion of his country; they
were
nationalists, after all. In Laval's Man of the Year profile,
Time
magazine actually praised him for being tough on Germany. He made a short-lived pact, in 1935, with Britain and Italy, to stop German rearmament. Anything to avoid another war. Yet, when it happened, both Mussert and Laval saw German occupation as an opportunity, as though their finest hour had finally come. Mussert had visions of a new Europe, dominated by “Germanic peoples,” led by Hitler, to be sure, but with an autonomous National Socialist Netherlands under the leadership of Mussert himself. Fascist idealism held no attraction for Laval. But after having spent the last years of the 1930s in the political wilderness, he saw a role for himself as France's savior in difficult times. With the old Marshal Pétain as the patriarchal figurehead, Laval would negotiate the best terms he could for France. More than that: he, too, saw possibilities in the new Europe, with France as Germany's chief ally in purging the continent of that twin modern scourge: Anglo-Jewish capital and Russian bolshevism. As he said in a radio speech in 1942, in words that would come back to haunt him three years later: “I desire the victory of Germany, for without it, bolshevism would tomorrow install itself everywhere.”
²³

Before the war, neither Mussert nor Laval had shown any evidence of a personal animosity towards Jews. Mussert had few close friends, but one
of the few happened to be Jewish, and in the 1930s he encouraged Jews to become members of his movement. There were “good Jews,” in his thinking, and “bad Jews.” The bad ones were Jews who refused to join him, or criticized the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), and were thus “un-Dutch.” Unfortunately, Mussert's German comrades had more rigorous views on the matter, which was one of several issues of contention between him and the German SS. In 1940, he was obliged to expel the few remaining Jewish members from the NSB. For this, Mussert claimed deep regret. How deep is not clear, since he did develop a detailed plan in 1938 to move European Jews to Dutch, French, and British Guiana, a scheme that failed to interest either Himmler or Hitler. (What the British and French thought is unrecorded.) And Mussert had no scruples about enriching himself, as well as his friends and relatives, from robbed Jewish properties.
²⁴

Laval never shared the strong anti-Semitism of the French far right. He, too, had Jewish friends and worked closely with Jewish colleagues. Yet he was minister of state in 1940 when, unprompted by the Germans, the Vichy French
statut des juifs
(statute on Jews) deprived Jews of their civil rights. He later tried to save French-born Jews from deportation, but only at the price of delivering tens of thousands of foreign-born Jews into the maw of the Third Reich. This included naturalized French citizens who were deprived of their citizenship during the war.

By setting themselves up as saviors through collaboration, vainglorious figures like Mussert and Laval walked straight into a trap the Germans had laid for them, Mussert from a mixture of ideological delusion and vanity, and Laval from being morally obtuse and putting too much stock in his own cleverness. Neither of them realized that his nationalist illusions—France and the Netherlands as significant partners in the new Europe—hardly fit German plans for total domination. These patriotic quislings were useful to the Germans, as long as they took the heat for unpopular, indeed criminal, German enterprises. Bit by bit, they gave in, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes carelessly. Mussert incorporated his
storm troopers into the German SS and swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler, who was, in Mussert's cloudy imagination, the Führer not just of Germany but of all the “Germanic peoples.” Laval collaborated not only by handing over French workers to German industry in exchange for some French POWs, but also by establishing a militia against French partisans and sending large numbers of Jews to their deaths. It was Laval, not the Germans, who insisted that Jewish children should be deported to Poland with the adults in July 1942, ostensibly to keep families together.

As a result of their behavior, both men were despised and distrusted by the Germans as “bourgeois nationalists” and detested by their own countrymen as the embodiments of everything that was sordid and shameful about the occupation. They were hated even by the most ardently pro-German Nazis in their own countries, the kind of people who enthusiastically worked for Hitler's Reich. Since Mussert and Laval had so few people on their side, after Liberation they were the perfect candidates for trials and punishment. Making examples of the two most conspicuous faces of collaboration made millions who had not shown conspicuous courage themselves feel better.

Pétain was tried and sentenced to death as well, but age and distinction saved him. His trial was never part of de Gaulle's plans. The general would have much preferred for the old man to have stayed in Swiss exile. Pétain had requested the trial himself. If this proved to be an embarrassment, the French certainly could not bring themselves to shoot the hero of Verdun. So he was banished instead. Laval, in a sense, took his place as an object of blame. In the words of a popular French ditty of the time: “Pétain, to sleep / Laval to the stake / de Gaulle to work.”
Time
magazine, the very same journal that had praised Laval so effusively more than a decade before, wrote:

Last week Pierre Laval came to judgment. With him came none of the dreadful pity, the sense of terrible duty that had been in every Frenchman's heart during the trial, sentence and commutation to
life imprisonment of old Marshal Pétain. The elimination of Pierre Laval, a necessary chore, might have been a satisfying vengeance. He made it a shameful farce.
²⁵

This was a trifle unfair. The trial was a farce, to be sure, but Laval was not the main culprit. De Gaulle did not like the business of purges and trials, but had to get to work, as the ditty demanded, and wanted this one to be over with as quickly as possible. A referendum on the postwar constitution was scheduled for October 21, so Laval's verdict had to be in by then. Laval sat in his prison cell, smoking five packets of American cigarettes a day, fuming because he was denied access to the documents he had carefully accumulated for his defense. A note retrieved from his suitcase when he was flown back to France from his temporary refuge in Germany revealed his bitter state of mind: “It is a strange paradox. Here I am, obliged to justify myself before a court for policies and conduct which should have earned me the recognition of my country. Both before the war, and during those unhappy years of occupation, I know I fulfilled my duty.”
²⁶

Mussert, always prone to delusions, had found a new fantasy in his prison cell on the Dutch North Sea coast: he had designed a giant submarine vessel. Since, in his view, the Americans would surely wish to make full use of his invention, he was expecting to be sent to the United States. The last weeks of his life were spent learning English, another venture that ended in failure.

One of the blemishes on Laval's trial, which Laval himself was not slow to point out, was the fact that his judges and prosecutor had served the same Vichy regime that he did, and pledged their allegiance to Pétain as well. The attorney general, André Mornet, had even sat on a committee to denaturalize Jews. The jury was made up of members of parliament and of the resistance.

Jacques Charpentier, head of the Paris bar, sensing the ritual air of a fight to the death in a Spanish corrida, recalled: “Like Andalusian urchins
who leap into the arena, members of the jury insulted the accused and intervened in the proceedings. The court judged [Laval] without giving him a hearing . . . Just as they revitalized Robespierre to drag him to the scaffold, Laval's corpse was revived so they could throw a still living traitor to the lions of the people.”
²⁷

The dramatic high point of the trial was Laval's protest against the bias of the judges: “You can condemn me!” he shouted, banging the table with his briefcase engraved with his presidential title: “You can do away with me; but you do not have the right to vilify me!” Whereupon one of the jurors shouted: “Shut up, traitor!” Laval screamed in fury that he was a Frenchman who loved his country. And the jurors shouted back that he was a “bastard” (
salaud
) who “deserved twelve bullets” from the firing squad.
²⁸
Laval concluded that he would prefer to remain silent rather than be an “accomplice” in a “judicial crime.” When a juror shouted, “He'll never change!” Laval replied with as much truth and conviction: “No, and I never will.”
²⁹