Volume 8, Number 3 · February 23, 1967
Crimes beyond Punishment
By A.J.P. Taylor
The Trial of the Germans: Nuremberg 1945-1946
by Eugene Davidson
Macmillan, 636 pp., $12.50
Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt
by Bernd Naumann, Introduction by Hannah Arendt, by Hannah Arendt
Praeger, 433 pp., $7.95
Death in Rome
by Robert Katz
Macmillan, 334 pp., $6.95
Nothing is stranger in the human conscience than its attitude to war. War involves killing people. That is what war is about. In ordinary times, killing is regarded as the worst of crimes, often as the only crime which justifies counter-killing or, as it is fancifully called, capital punishment. When states fall out, killing becomes noble and patriotic and the greatest killers are the most admired. The killing must still be done according to rule. At one time, only combatants could be killed. Nowadays, it is all right to kill civilians so long as it is done indiscriminately and with some pretense that it is weakening the other side's will or ability to go on fighting. Move one further down the ladder of morality, and we reach reprisals—a method used by every occupying or, as it usually claims to be, civilizing Power. At the bottom is the planned killing of defenseless civilians, because they belong to the wrong creed, class, or race. This, too, has often been practiced by supposedly civilized peoples. No American loses sleep over the extermination of the Red Indians. No Englishman worries about the systematic starvation of the Irish in 1846 or over the sepoys blown from the mouth of cannon after the Indian Mutiny.
Review, 2338 words
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