4th January 2009
According to Wikipedia, Patrick Gordon-Walker is now best remembered for losing his parliamentary seat for the constituency of Smethwick, in the 1964 British general election. At a time when voters in most parts of Britain were swinging to Labour, Smethwick went the opposite way, as his Conservative opponent fought a racist campaign, exploiting fears among the local inhabitants of large numbers of immigrants moving into the area.
At the time, Patrick Gordon-Walker was expected to become Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s first Labour cabinet. Despite losing his seat in the House of Commons, he was still appointed Foreign Secretary and a by-election was arranged for the supposedly safe Labour seat of Leyton. He lost this election as well, resigned as Foreign Secretary and his political career never recovered from the setback, despite regaining the seat in the general election of 1966, and being briefly appointed to the cabinet as Minister of Education and Science. He retired from this position in 1968 and as a Member of Parliament six years later, in 1974.
Twenty years earlier, in 1945, Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. During the war he worked for the BBC, broadcasting regularly to Germany. In the last few months of the war he made two tours of occupied Germany, following the advancing British and American troops; the first from February 24th to March 1st and the second in the final days of the war, from April 16th to 22nd. He made several recordings on these tours, some of which were broadcast on the BBC or Radio Luxemburg (which was now under Allied control). He kept a diary on these tours, which was published later in 1945 as a short book with the title ‘The Lid Lifts.’
Before the war he had taught history at Oxford University. He spoke fluent German, having spent a year in the country in 1931. During the war, while working for the BBC, he met and became friends with many of the German socialist exiles in London, especially the members of the Neu Beginnen group, such as Richard Loewenthal. He first entered parliament in 1945, was soon appointed PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to Herbert Morrison, and in 1947 joined the government as a minister in the Commonwealth Relations Office. During the Labour party’s years in opposition from 1951 to 1964, he was principal spokesman on foreign affairs and shadow foreign secretary.
He entered the camp at Belsen on Friday April 20th, five days after its liberation on April 15th, and in ‘The Lid Lifts’ he described how that afternoon he recorded the first Jewish eve of Sabbath service held in the camp:
“A group of around a hundred or so, in the open air amidst the corpses. Two or three women sang duets and solos. The [Jewish] padre read the service in English and Hebrew. No eye was dry. Certainly not mine. Most of the celebrants were in floods of tears.”
The following day he returned to the camp and recorded the Sabbath morning service:
“During the service, singing and the reading of the traditional prayer for the dead – all round women and men burst into tears and cried openly. We were packed tight in a wooden hut – people standing to the walls.”
The following day, Sunday April 22nd, he recorded in his diary: “I was feeling very angry with Germans.” But in the final two chapters of ‘The Lid Lifts’ written a few weeks later, after time for reflection based on his experiences during the tour as a whole, he came to a different and broader set of conclusions.
The first of the two concluding chapters was titled 'The Challenge of the K.Z.' It was dated May 18th, nearly a month after the end of his second tour of Germany. He started by asking what was it that made the concentration camps unique and “one of the exclusive characteristics of our own age.” The only parallel he could think of was the holds of the slave ships. “And when I heard of the maintenance of orchestras in the worst concentration camps I was reminded of the fiddlers engaged by slave traders to keep their cargo quieter.” However, unlike the slave ships, the concentration camps were imposed by a European government on large numbers of its own citizens, who were deprived of their liberty and their most basic legal rights as human beings. “Here is the link with the slaves in the holds of the ships. Here, too, is the distinction. The slaves are now amongst your fellow citizens. The slave ships, driven from the Atlantic, have anchored at Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald, in the midst of Europe.”
A second factor which, in his view, made the camps unique, was their scale, mass-extermination, and the deliberate degradation of humanity. “Never have human beings been brought so low – deliberately and with calculation brought so low.”
What conclusions did he draw from this? He was concerned that the camps had changed standards of morality, not only in Germany, but in Britain and elsewhere as well: “They have raised our standards of horror to dizzy heights. Slaughter and torture must be on a colossal scale or achieved by a novel means it is to draw attention at all today. How many people must be gassed or burned alive to make the headlines today? … We used to turn away our eyes and shut our ears because we did not wish to know: we look away now because we know too much. Because Hitler has played hell with our standards.”
He continued by saying “we must be doubly careful how we react” and horror alone was not enough. “The first and easy reaction is dangerous – kill them all – let the Germans starve. Hitler will triumph from his grave if this is our only reaction.” Not only were there German victims in the camps “Jews and political opponents and homosexuals” but “even overlooking that, such a reaction of blind vengeance would ignore our own share of the guilt.”
In his view, there had been a “long descent into degradation” and loss of moral standards, from the British concentration camps of the Boer War, through the Spanish civil war, to the compromises made at Munich. But above all he was concerned by a trend he observed among people at home, which he described as a “readiness to follow the trend that led to Belsen and Buchenwald.” In his view, the desire for revenge made people believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. “Murder is often more convenient. Mass-murder often seems the convenient way out of intractable problems.”
The first step against this trend was to “restore our respect for death” and “no human life should be taken away without due formality.” Those responsible for the concentration camps would need to be punished, with the death penalty, but this should be done, not through using the same methods as the Nazis, but by following proper formal legal processes.
He believed that all German people had a special responsibility to face the implications of the existence of the camps “on a vast scale in the midst of Germany”. As “the most deliberate and logical development of the concentration camp so far happened in Germany, a development that plumbed the depths of the inhuman and the anti-human … Germans have a particular duty to face the question of their moral guilt. … We can demand of the Germans that they regard the Hitler era that produced these things with horror and loathing, which must be expressed in their laws, their poetry, their songs, their schools, their newspapers.”
But he ended the chapter by saying: “The road back from Belsen and Buchenwald is a road not only for the Germans, but for all of us.”
The chapter in ‘The Lid Lifts’ about Belsen is its most striking part, but by no means the whole of the book. Most of it describes what he found in the towns and cities of Germany, following Allied bombing and the advance of the British and American armies in the last six months of the war. Next week I’ll write about this, and his second concluding chapter titled 'Reflections in Tranquillity.'
References:
Patrick Gordon-Walker, The Lid Lifts, published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1945.
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