Winning the Peace Part 2

‘There’s a famous slogan in the United Kingdom…From after the Second World War -

That is that we have to "win the peace"And that's what we must do now'

Sir Keir Starmer, at the press conference after his meeting with Donald Trump

in the White House February 27th 2025

This is the second of a short series looking at how the peace was won after the Second World War through the eyes of a Nuremberg prosecutor who went on to champion and draft the ECHR. These blogs look forward to commemorative performances of Sue Casson’s Dreams of Peace & Freedom which will remember its birth from the ashes of a decimated Europe and celebrate the protections of the Convention in this its 75th anniversary year.

Sue Casson describes Dreams of Peace & Freedom, and how it tackles the period that is explored in this blog:

‘Dreams of Peace & Freedom is an intimate telling of epic events – what steps were taken in the messy aftermath of World War II to return order to chaos – through the eyes of one who was not only there, but had a seat at the table in deciding what the future would look like. David Maxwell Fyfe left behind papers and letters exchanged with his wife Sylvia that enable us now to understand how this took shape. The way he, and those in the UK and Europe who he worked alongside, ultimately ‘won the peace’ peace that we have now enjoyed for 80 years, was not with a single grand gesture, but with a series of incremental steps that boiled down to practical logistics, all recorded here.

A self-confessed romantic of the law, literature and poetry flows through David’s conscious and unconscious mind in his letters, but often his speeches, as he expresses what he is seeking to achieve. This natural poetic affinity was the springboard for our song cycle, and is nowhere more apparent than in his only speech, made towards the end of the trials at Nuremberg, where he quotes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to make vivid the horrors the court has witnessed – alongside what he hopes to see ‘in place of the Nazi spirit’ – a return to the untroubled, bucolic world conjured in Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier. To visualise a world protected from war he first sets out in detail what went so catastrophically wrong. As such, The Soldier in this speech is the fulcrum of his journey from Nuremberg to Strasbourg.’

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The final words of David Maxwell Fyfe’s speech during the closing of the case against the organisations of the Nazi state at IMT Nuremberg evoked an English idyll. He summoned the words of Rupert Brooke from his War Sonnet, The Soldier which ends:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

He turned to this vivid comfort after describing its exact anthesis – the nature, character and evil of the Nazi state, which he had spent several hours forensically examining.

He described how the Nazis sought to possess the German people, to forge ‘a controlled but fanatical police state geared for military aggression. And he listed the attributes of their tyranny:

Speed of government, denunciation, absence of free thought and speech, internal suppression, external trained and calculated force. These are the eternal interlocked weapons without which tyranny cannot flourish.

He explored each of these in a little more detail. Speed of government requires:

a quick method of registering your laws and decrees. For this you need a pliant and complacent Cabinet with full legislative powers.

He confirms the need for:

…the quick suppression of any signs of opposition or freedom of thought, and a complete check and control, of public opinion. This latter is provided by the pressure of a fanatical corps of political leaders on a propaganda-soaked public.

To possess the people you must have:

a spreading executive hand which will grasp the population in its clutch of physical training and mental preparation for war, and a Praetorian guard who will rid you not only of any “turbulent priest” but of any person with creed of his own.

Finally, you require:

an instrument to turn your existing military forces to your purposes; to make them ready to commit any act, even if it is contrary to military tradition and repugnant to soldier-like qualities.

To illustrate the sense of power drawn from this executive excess, David quotes one of the Nazi’s own maxims:

“Fight? Why do you always talk of fighting? You have conquered the State and if something does not please you then just make a law and regulate it differently!”

Later he turns on the character of the Nazi leaders, many of whom he had recently confronted in cross-examination:

If men use society merely as a means to their own ends, then society is justified in putting them outside society. The immensity of the problem does not excuse its non-solution. These men, of all men, knew their leader to be a callous murderer, yet for years they had met in conference after conference to sit at his feet and listen to his words.They fed his lust for power and enslavement with the best of their professional skin. When that star was rising in victory, they had hailed it and ignored the blood-red colour of the clouds from which it rose.

He described how the leaders and their witnesses were in deep denial, and how the denial led to the repetition of shared lies:

The public, down to the last man, realizes that political drives like those of 9 November (Krystalnacht) were organized and directed by the Party, ‘whether this is admitted or not’. When all the synagogues burn down in the night, it must have been organized by the Party.

He continues:

“Whether this is admitted or not!” Can you find one single man among the 102 witnesses that have been called on behalf of the Party organizations who is prepared to admit it – or anything like it? Can you find one word of admission from among the affidavits that have been submitted by over 312,000 members of these Party organizations? You may be reminded of the words of a great Irishman: “Falsehood has a perennial spring.” (Edmund Burke)

Maxwell Fyfe’s harshest criticism is reserved for the judges who failed to maintain the rule of law, or any sense of natural law. He said:

Let me conclude by reminding you of the opinion of the Supreme Court. Of the murders committed during the 1938 demonstrations by Hoheitstraeger (bearers of sovereignty) and members of the SA and SS it was pleaded that, I quote, “in such cases as when Jews were killed without an order or contrary to orders, ignoble motives could not be determined.” The purpose of those proceedings in the Party Court were, I quote again, “to protect those Party comrades who, motivated by decent National Socialist attitude and initiative, had overshot their mark.” In those few lines you have the secret of all the death and suffering, the horror and tragedy, that these defendants and the members of these organizations have brought upon the world. You see to what depths of evil they corrupted the human conscience. No ignoble motive – the murder of women and children through “decent National Socialist attitude and initiative.” The Court’s explanation of slaughter as reasonable, reveals the abyss that had grown between fair judgement and monstrous justification. The evil was clear to all, except those who could not see because of indoctrination into the power of sovereignty and a subsequent capacity to judge wrong as right. All born from fear.

At the end of the speech David, like many others at the Tribunal, tried to describe the consequences of the Nazi weakness, brutality and evil. The world would take decades to process the scale of the horror, but the Nuremberg Courtroom had explored the evidence. They knew.

I am deeply conscious that one of the greatest difficulties, and not the least of the dangers, of this Trial is that those of us who have been engaged day in and day out for 9 months have reached the saturation point of horror. Shakespeare attempted to picture that saturation point in the memorable lines:

“Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war; All pity chok’d through custom of fell deeds.” (Julius Caesar)

It is only when we stand a little apart from what has been our daily companion for 40 weeks that we realize that the “domestic fury and fierce civil strife,” the results of which Mark Antony was prophesying, are an inconsiderable bagatelle beside the facts which we have had to consider. It is not merely the quantity of horrors – although these organizations have been the instruments of death for 22,000,000 people it is the quality of cruelty which produced the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the routine shooting of Jewish children throughout A continent claiming to be civilized.

But this was not his final word, because he was determined to find a hope growing in the wasteland. As a self-confessed romantic of the law, he placed his faith in the restoration of natural justice. He believed that the law could match and overcome the horror.

The law is a living thing. It is not rigid and unalterable. Its purpose is to serve mankind, and it must grow and change to meet the changing needs of society. The needs of Europe today have no parallel in history.

And then offered this clarion call of natural law to Europe and beyond:

It may be presumptuous for lawyers, who do not claim to be more than the cement of society, to speculate or even dream of what we wish to see in its place. But I give you the faith of a lawyer. Some things are surely universal: tolerance, decency, kindliness. It is because we believe that there must be a clearance before such qualities will flourish in peace that we ask you to condemn this organization of evil. When such qualities have been given the chance to flourish in the ground that you have cleared, a great step will have been taken. It will be a step towards the universal recognition that

“…sights and sounds all happy as her day, And laughter learnt of friends, and gentleness, And hearts at peace….”

are not the prerogative of any one nation. They are the inalienable heritage of mankind.

And there was the Brooke. David will have read:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

He will have seen that the evil could be ‘shed away’, and that restoration was possible. Later he was to write:

In one sense Nuremberg did express a triumph of the human spirit – to the extent that it stated what humanity could not tolerate and more gropingly some things for which humanity stands.

Bearing in mind that he was a Scot, he took the English idyll and claimed it for humanity to describe some of the things for which humanity stands. A few years later when he wrote an early draft of the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Europe (ECHR) what rights would David enumerate to buttress that idyll and make it real?

It is, after all, a ‘heart at peace’ that allows us to look and appreciate the ‘sights and sounds’ around us, to dream and allow the wellspring of laughter to erupt And a ‘heart at peace’ requires an absence of fear, a sense of security, and a certainty of the freedom in our own space, and in the space we share with those we love. And when things go wrong, the certainty of a fair trial and justice.

It was for that David was striving with the rights he listed in the Convention: the right to life, liberty, security, privacy and the right to marriage. These are truly the rights of spring, as they provide the protection of all humanity against the tyrannical diktat of a government seeking not to serve its people but to possess them.

Conclusions drawn from Nuremberg led directly to the framing of the ECHR, or as David put it:

I do not want to be a boring ‘proud father’, but I think that I am entitled to be glad that I have done something positive as well as negative in regard to tyranny, which so many of my generation in the twentieth century have accepted without a murmur.

The risk today is that tyranny is once again taking a grip around the world. Exhibiting new characteristics to meet the demands of the digital age, the fundamental nature of the dictator remain the same. As David described them, they are ‘men using society merely as a means to their own ends’ and as such ‘society is justified in putting them outside society. The immensity of the problem does not excuse its non-solution.’

We must now face the problem.

The Convention would also include a series of licences and freedoms, which we will consider in Summer of Freedoms, part 3 of our Winning the Peace series of blogs