Revenge

3rd June 2010

I seem to remember being taught, at school and at home, that it was (morally) wrong to take revenge. Just because someone hurt you, didn’t mean that it was right for you to hurt them. Even if someone tried to kill you, or killed a person you knew and loved, this didn’t mean it was right for you to kill them.

There seems to be something of a fashion nowadays for saying it is or was (morally) OK to take revenge; maybe not right, but not wrong either.

For example, in my own field, researching British people in Occupied Germany after World War Two, I came across the following in Richard Bessel’s book, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (for more on this, see last week’s post). He devoted a whole chapter in the book to the subject of ‘Revenge’ writing, amongst other things that:

‘As the war ended in central Europe, taking revenge against Germans was socially acceptable and widely expected.’

Socially acceptable?

No doubt he was right that it was ‘widely expected’, by British and US forces at the end of the war, that some groups of people who had suffered in Nazi Germany would take revenge after they were liberated. For example General Templer, Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government in the British zone, wrote in an article in the British Zone Review on the chaos of ‘The Early Days’ of the occupation, that the actions of some of the liberated ‘Displaced Persons’ or forced labourers in Nazi Germany were ‘not surprising’:

‘Over this grim scene there swarmed a milling mass of displaced persons, drunk with liberation and in some cases alcohol, looting, raping and killing. Considering the history of the past five years, this was not surprising.’

Of course, it is possible to argue (though Richard Bessel does not do this one way or the other) that there may be cases where taking revenge is not only ‘widely expected’ or ‘understandable’ but morally or culturally justifiable, for example as a deterrent to prevent someone committing a similar crime again.

But there is a difference between something being ‘widely expected’, ‘understandable’ or ‘not surprising’ and it being ‘socially acceptable’, which seemed to me an odd phrase to use. I’m not sure what it means. ‘Socially acceptable’ to whom, in which society or to which group of people: anyone who suffered in Nazi Germany; the victims of war crimes and atrocities; their friends and relations then and now; the victorious British, American, Russian, French and other occupation forces; or the community of historians who write about the subject nowadays?

In his book, Richard Bessel also wrote that the scenes US and British soldiers witnessed at the end of the war in the concentration camps provoked a desire for revenge. He quoted the example of US forces in Dachau, where ‘Germans were gunned down while surrendering; captives were shot at the slightest provocation…’ and claimed that the liberation of Bergen-Belsen had a similar effect on the British.

I’m not sure this is true. As far as I can tell from my own research, British soldiers felt hatred for the enemy, which was intensified when they learnt of the atrocities committed in the camps, but as far as I know, this was not translated into concrete acts of revenge. For example, one young soldier, whose memories of the war and its aftermath are held in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, said that they were always hearing rumours of SS atrocities, having shot prisoners, or murdered Americans, which made the British soldiers angry:

'But when you see a person face to face and he’s unarmed you lose this anger and wildness, and just take them prisoner or whatever.' The only two prisoners he took personally were a couple of 16 year old lads who ‘came out of a wood with their hands up. They were just terrified…’

I wrote in a previous post on this blog about a debate on Feeling sorry for the Germans, in the letters pages of the British Zone Review, which showed quite clearly the differences between two schools of thought among the British occupiers: on the one hand ‘The Germans deserve all they get’ and on the other: ‘Humanity and justice cannot be based upon hatred and revenge.’

Even those British people who witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp appear to have felt anger, that extended to all German people collectively, but this, as far as I am aware, was not translated into concrete acts of revenge.

Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and I wrote, in another post on this blog, about his book The Lid Lifts, which described his response. In summary, his conclusion was ‘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.’

He was concerned by a trend among people he observed back home in Britain. The desire for revenge made them believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. In his view, those who committed crimes should be punished, with the death penalty, but it was necessary to ‘restore our respect for death’ and ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality.’

Fortunately, the situation now is very different from what it was then, but I am still reminded of these words of his that ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality’ whenever I read, for example this story yesterday, about more recent targeted killings by Intelligence Agencies, outside the rule of law.

References

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

‘The Early Days’, British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, November 1945

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Ronald Mallabar, accession no. 11211

Patrick Gordon Walker, The Lid Lifts (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945)

Comments

[Chris Knowles]

I've no religious views myself, but after writing this post on 'revenge' two months ago, I was interested to hear that Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, said yesterday that there was now a 'culture of vengeance' in the United States and that many Americans were more interested in retribution than justice.

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE67703P20100808