Judge Dennis Davis
Judge Dennis Davis in Conservation with Philippe Sands on his New Book, “The Ratline”
Judge Dennis Davis in Conversation with Philippe Sands on his New Book, The Ratline
- Welcome to a very special event of the Lockdown University. It’s my very great pleasure to introduce Philippe Sands, who is going to be interviewed by Judge Dennis Davis. So we’re going to have an eminent QC, human rights lawyer being in interviewed by a judge. Now, Philippe has written two brilliant books. The first one, “East West Street,” is the story of lawyers two, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, who of course were responsible for those phrases, crimes against humanity and genocide. Also, woven into the story is Philippe’s own family, and also Hans Frank the governor of Poland, who was also, of course, a lawyer. So that’s the first book. Tonight he’s going to be talking mainly about his new book, “Ratline.” The paperback edition has just come out. It’s a brilliant book.
Again, it goes back to that time in history and it tells the story of a Nazi, a Nazi called von Wachter, who was a member of the SS. He was a brigadefuhrer. He was responsible, he controlled territory where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. After the war, he escaped. He was hidden for three years by his wife, and then he managed to make it to Rome where he was hidden by an Austrian bishop called Alois Hudal. The story is not just that story, but it’s also the story of his children coming to terms, and the whole issue of memory, and what you do with these kind of legacies. So straight away, may I go over to Philippe and Dennis. And Philippe, welcome very much to Lockdown University.
Okay, thank you very much, Trudy. And before I begin, just let me give the sort of order of business in the sense that we have about 45 minutes because Philippe had kindly given us, not because it’s his fault, but I’ll leave it in there. We got 45 minutes, I don’t want to waste time. It’s an absolute pleasure to do this again. I had the great privilege of interviewing Philippe on “East West Street,” back in Franschhoek which was our preeminent book festival in South Africa. And I do want, if I may, Philip, I know we are going to talk about “Ratline,” but I just want to come back, if I may, right, to a couple of points with regard to “East West Street”
You are the judge, Dennis, you are the boss. It’s lovely to be on this.
Oh my goodness.
Let’s see if we can squeeze
flattery will get you, flattery will get everywhere.
Squeeze a few more minutes beyond the allotted time.
Okay, well, you’ll tell me when it’s time. But I wonder whether I could start by asking you this, because when I look at the two books together, putting them together, in a way it starts off as very much the personal, you exploring your family and rediscovering it, but it also has this enormous set of political implications. And I was wondering two things. One was, did you realise when you began that you’d have to sort of negotiate the personal with the political, and to what extent did the broad political consequences sort of hit you only when you were into-
Sure.
exploring your family?
Sure, well, can I just firstly say thanks to Trudy, how amazing the numbers on this call. I’m not quite sure how Trudy does it, but it’s mightily impressive. And Dennis, it’s been wonderful. Our interactions have been wonderful, and I’m so very pleased to be with you. I mean, I think I, the truth is I stumbled across this whole story. It’s now lasted 10 years. As you know, it begins with me going to do a lecture in this Ukrainian city of Lviv. And I really went for personal reasons. I wanted to know who my grandfather was. I knew him very well. We spent 37 years of overlapping lives, but he never talked to me about anything that happened before 1945. And I wanted to know that. And I wanted to know, because it would allow me to know more about who he was, and that would allow me more to know about who I was and who I am. These are books about identity very largely. But as you know from “East West Street,” I then stumbled almost miraculously across this, you know, fact that the originators as Trudy said, of crimes against humanity and genocide, and the principal perpetrator all passed through the city of Lviv, Luvov, Lemberg. So in a sense, I don’t think I can take credit, I stumbled across it, but I was motivated principally by personal matters.
And I’ll come back to, I mean, and yet, I suppose let me just say this right up front. When you read “East West Street,” you get a conception. And I want to sort of draw some parallels out from “Ratline” of the understanding of international law. I mean, in a way, I know you’re an international lawyer of great distinction, but in a sense, what starts off as a family exploration goes into, in a way a whole range of issues, which essentially lawyers and those of us who are interested in international law, whether lawyers or not, realise that this. Because the concept of identity comes in the division, in the sense between Lemkin and Lauterpacht, the two great lawyers that you explore.
Yes, but I wasn’t looking for that. I mean, the distinction, as you know so well, between crimes against humanity and genocide, is that crimes against humanity is about the protection of human beings as individuals. They’re inherent human qualities as individuals. Genocide is about the protection of human beings because they’re a member of a group. And I had obviously encountered this in my work. The cases that I’d done, I knew the distinctions, but the truth is, until I went to Lviv in 2010 and came across the work of Lauterpacht and Lemkin and the origins, I’d never really put my mind to the origins of these two concepts. And it was almost a miracle to discover that there were these two guys with essentially the same origins who were faced with the same question. How can the law enhance wellbeing at the international level? And they came up with different answers.
I find that fascinating. But as you’ve rightly intimated, it’s a deeply personal thing. For every single one of the unbelievably 1,500 people on this call, we all ask ourselves the question, who am I? How do I define myself? Do I define myself by my family relations, by my religion, by my nationality, by my colour, by my sexual orientation, blah, blah, blah. And who am I? And that’s essentially the question that is at the heart of this tension between the two concepts invented by these two guys. I say of course, it’s a tension I don’t know, I mean, neither those two guys take credit for inventing it in a sense, and, nor certainly I don’t. But if you go back, for example, to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the “Matthew Passion,” that tension is inherent in that extraordinary piece of musical work. So this is something that goes to the core of human identity and it’s universal across the world.
And I want to come back to that if I have time, because I want to move on to “Ratline,” ask you this to start. So it turns out that, that it’s because of Niklas Frank, that you meet Horst Wachter, and I suspect had you not met Niklas Frank, we wouldn’t have had “Ratline.”
[Philippe] No.
So let me ask you this to start with, how do you explain the difference between, I mean, you’ve kind of, I dunno if I’ve described your relationship with Horst, but I’ll leave that to you. But I’m curious because when I interviewed you about Niklas Frank and I didn’t, obviously “Ratline” hadn’t come out by then. You know, he comes across as, from my perspective, as very, very impressive in the man who had sort of, if you wish, come to terms with an awful goddamn past that he had with a father like that, like Frank. But Horst is in a sense, although he introduces you to him, is in fact totally different.
Well, I mean, as you know, I met Niklas first because I was interested in his father, because his father was, in a sense, the glue-like figure who connected my grandfather, Lauterpacht and Lemkin. Frank was in the dark in Nuremberg for killing their entire families and millions of other families, and was hanged at Nuremberg for it. And Niklas, the son, had written a book about his father called “Der Vater” when it was published in Germany. I’m very pleased to say I’ve managed to introduce him to an English language publisher, and it will now be published in England and other parts of the world for the first time in July. And it’s an extraordinary book because as you’ve indicated, it describes literally his hatred for his father.
The first time I met Niklas, he said to me, “Philippe, you have to understand I’m against the death penalty in all cases, except in the case of my father, he was a criminal and he deserved to die.” These are very strong words for a son. Now, at a certain point, early on in our friendship, and we have become close friends, Niklas said, “You are interested in Lemberg, your grandfather was from Lemberg. My father had a deputy called Otto Wachter, would you like to meet Wachter’s son? He’s different from me. He tries to love his father and I tried to hate my father.” And if I had not met Niklas back in 2011, I would not have been introduced to Horst. We would not, I would not have written the article about Horst in the Financial Times back in 2013, and then made a film “My Nazi Legacy,” which you can watch on iTunes and Amazon.
Yes, I have, and the podcast.
“What Our Fathers Did,” which is my relationship with Niklas and Horst. And in the filming in Lemberg, Lviv, there was a moment where Niklas lets it slip out that he thinks Horst could be a new kind of Nazi. Actually, I disagree. I don’t think Horst is a Nazi. He’s not a racist, he’s not an anti-Semite. He’s just trying to find the good in his father in a deluded way, I would say. But nevertheless, it’s not a dishonourable thing that he’s doing. And Horst was very upset and said, “I’m not a Nazi, Philippe. How do I prove that I’m not an Nazi?” Now you are actually a judge, you know that proving a negative is a darn difficult thing to do.
And I thought about this and I said, “Well, you’ve got all these family documents, 10,000 pages, your mother and father’s letters, their diaries, their photo albums. Why don’t you give ‘em to the Holocaust Museum in Washington because Nazis don’t give these kinds of documents to those kinds of museums. And he said, "Terrific idea, would you like a copy?” And he sent me a USB and that was in summer of 2014. And I, you know, looked at it on my computer, overwhelmed by the sheer volume, but realising straight away this was an extraordinary trove of material. And eventually with Lisa Jardine, sadly no longer with us, and some wonderful doctoral and graduate students, we went through the entire trove of material, and told the story of the Wachters, which is an interesting, painful, complex story.
But you’ve described it in some ways in, because for this particular interview, I have the benefit of listening to quite a number of your other interviews, and you’ve described it, I don’t know if that’s correct, as almost a love story between Charlotte and Otto Wachter in a way, of course, there are many other themes in the book. But you do, you pose the question yourself in this regard. “What is it about Horst and his family that captures my imagination,” you asked. And you say, “No simple answer. I pondered the question a couple of months ago during my other job sitting at the National Court of Justice in the Hague listening to Aung San Suu Kyi,” et cetera. Not going to read the whole. Did you come to an answer?
Well, I think I have come to an answer. I mean, the book does a number of different things. Horst’s father, Otto was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Pols. He was indicted for mass murder, for genocide, for crimes against humanity, in effect. But he escaped and he was never caught. He was never tried, he was never convicted, and he was never sentenced. And he died, as Horst says, “An innocent man.” And so one way of looking at this book is that it is the judgement that was never handed down in respect to the crimes that I believe he committed. And that’s a very personal element. I would not have written it, I suspect, if this man had not heaped so much misery on my grandfather’s family, along with his colleague, Hans Frank. But it’s not just that because one has to recognise that ghastly as Otto and Charlotte are, they cannot simply be described or characterised as monsters. And this is the difficulty. You go through the material and you see that whilst the killings are going on, they are also capable of humanity, and decency, and warmth, and love, and generosity. And that, I think goes to the fundamentals of the human condition. How can people who are highly educated, highly intelligent, cultured, how can they get involved in such things? And that’s what I wanted to explore.
And it is a love story. There is an element of the relationship between Horst and Otto that fascinates me. It’s a 20 year relationship. He pulls the strings for the first 15 years, and then the war ends, and he goes into hiding, and she pulls the strings. But it’s a love story. Now, my American editor, my wonderful American editor, Vicky Wilson, did not want the word love in the subtitle. And the American edition does not have that word. And that’s her call. In the end, she knows the American audiences better than I do. But I am happy with the English and South African subtitle, “Love, Lies and Justice,” because it is a love story. And I think, you know, it’s like that extraordinary film, which I’ve watched many times about the last days of Adolf Hitler called “Downfall.”
[Dennis] Oh yes.
Which is controversial in the eyes of many, because it is said that it humanises Adolf Hitler. I don’t think it does. I think it shows him in the round, and that’s how we have to understand him. I’m not, maybe it comes from the work that I do in international courts. I’m not comfortable simply putting the label on someone’s forehead monster. It’s always more complicated than that and that’s our job.
But that, I accept that because as a judge, you know, I haven’t dealt with people who’ve committed crimes against humanity, but I have dealt with people who commit the most egregious rapes and murders. And on a long trial, you suddenly have to catch yourself to realise that relating to them somewhat differently to what perhaps people on this call who haven’t had that experience would think. But I suppose the point is, how does someone like Horst, he consistently, as you say in the book, dreams up excuses every time you put empirical evidence to him. I mean, how do you account for him?
I have my explanation, you know, but I’ve been assisted, and there are probably a number on this Zoom call, by a number of wonderful psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. When I went with my friend David Evans to film in Lviv with Niklas and Horst, David and I were a little concerned about Horst because we worried about his state of wellbeing, that this was a big issue. Niklas had, had years coming to terms with this, Horst had not. And one of the psychoanalyst’s said to us, “Look, you’ve got to understand, Philippe, Horst is like the schloss in which he lives. I mean, he’s absolutely impecunious. He lives in this huge building, 15th century or something. The walls are ginormous, you know, like three metres thick. And it looks, as the psychoanalyst said to me, "The walls are absolutely solid and it looks impregnable, but the moment you step inside, you’ll see that it’s on the verge of collapse.” And that I think is Horst. Horst has constructed a narrative for himself about his relationship with his parents, which is largely driven by his love for his mother. I don’t think, he says to me, “I don’t love my father, I love my mother, and my mother loved my father, and therefore, it is my duty as a son to find the good in the father.” And the mother, I mean, you know, for those who haven’t read the book, Wachter dies in mysterious circumstances in 1949. He was either poisoned or taken out by a Jewish hit squad, depending on which version of history you prefer to go with.
I tend towards the poison, towards the, sorry, he was either, he either died of a disease, leptospirosis, liver disease, caught swimming in the river Tiber, my theory. Or Horst’s theory that he was poisoned either by the Soviets, or by Simon Wiesenthal, or other Jews who didn’t like him. But Charlotte lived on for another 36 years, and she devoted those 36 years to restoring the reputation of her husband, and the children would’ve been subject to that. And so they went through essentially, a sort of lengthy exercise in brainwashing. There were six children, Horst had five siblings. I think, two are still alive, And there are 23 grandchildren. And, of course, the drama of Charlotte and Otto’s lives is that the children and the grandchildren continue to have to deal with what has happened. And that’s very painful to observe. I know some of the grandchildren, I’ve had engagements with them. They engage with it all very differently and the children deal with it differently also. But it’s very, very complex. And where I’ve ended up is I think of Horst as a young child who has been deeply damaged and traumatised by his experience, who is struggling to make sense of his life. And this is his way of surviving. It’s a survival mechanism.
And just then looking at, you know, leaving him aside for the moment, going back to your earlier point with regard to Charlotte and Otto, I understand the point that there. I’m trying to battle to describe this, is sort of humanity, which was very restricted to their category of people, but showing no empathy for anybody else, so I would suspect. And the question therefore is how do you then evaluate people like that? I mean-
Look, you’ve lived-
You are coming to grips with this. You are in your book confronting evil in a-
Yeah.
Controversial term-
I mean-
It’s hard to think otherwise.
You will, in some ways maybe are better placed than I am. You’ve lived through this in your adult life and your younger life in South Africa, you know about a world of them and us, and you know what it leads to. And that was Otto Wachter’s world and Charlotte Wachter’s. They were both deeply anti-Semitic. The anti-Semitism stemmed from different things, but for them, Jews were not human. It was, you know, and so it was okay basically to mistreat them and kill them. And there’s, you know, these lines that come in the book where, you know, Charlotte is waxing lyrical about the wonderful walls that her husband has built around the Krakow ghetto. And the Jews have absolutely nothing to complain about, had marvellous conditions. I mean, that will be familiar to you. That’s the kind of thing that is familiar. I think these tales though, are very, very complex. I have only now because of cases that I’m involved in, come to really confront, for example, Britain’s colonial past, Britain’s engagement with race, Britain’s engagement with slavery. And Britain is not a country that has come to terms with its past.
And it has constructed a narrative which allows it to glory in its past without looking at the mayhem that it has created. And I think that has led to some of the difficulties that Britain faces right now in relation to, relations between different communities, them and us. So at the heart of it is a structure which, you know, we tend to look at governmental structures, but I suppose what I’m doing with the “Ratline” is saying it always begins with the family. The family is where you have to go. You know, the “East West Street” begins with a quotation from these two extraordinary Hungarian psychoanalysts, “That we are haunted by the gaps left within us by the secrets of others, of our ancestors, the things people won’t talk about.” And that begins at the family level. And I think I’ve come to realise that the family is the receptacle into which so many of these issues, you know, arise and ferment and cause long-term difficulties. And I’ve seen that with the Wachters. They have not been able to grapple with their family history, and that is the heart of the book.
So you raised the interesting issue by inviting me to consider South Africa, and you did right to do that. And in fact, last night I interviewed two very critical people in our transitional phase to democracy, Joel Marcus and Wolf Mayer. It struck me talking to them and now the point made by you in relation to that, is what culpability there is of people who in a sense are in that, if you wish, the broader kind of community which has perpetrated the horrendous conditions. So in other words, would Charlotte Wachter be somebody in your view who should have been held responsible under international law?
I mean, this is a huge question. Charlotte was absolutely complicit. Not only did she know what her husband was up to, but she actively encouraged him and egged him on. There’s an absolutely pivotal moment. You see, one of the things here is we are not in the realms of speculation because Horst, and it is a supreme act of generosity in a certain sense and transparency, because he gave me these 10,000 pages, and because we spent five years going over every single page, we have all her letters and all her diaries, we know what she was thinking. We know what she was hiding from her husband. We know what went on. We know that on the 15th of March, 1938, because she wrote up what happened, she stood with her husband and Adolf Hitler on the balcony of the Heldenplatz.
That image is very well known to many people who’ll be on this call. And after the public events were over, they went indoors. And I dunno if you’ve been to the Hofburg Palace, but you go off the balcony and you go down there, and there’s this extraordinary grand marble, white marble staircase, and they get to the bottom of the staircase. And as she records in her diaries, “Otto turned to me and said, 'My darling, I now have a choice to make. I can carry on with my lucrative career as a lawyer, or I can accept the offer made to me by our friend Arthur Seyss-Inquart,’ who will be hanged in Nuremberg seven years later, ‘and go into the government as a state secretary responsible for removing all Jews from public office. What should I do?’” Charlotte just doesn’t bat an eyelid. She says, “Do it, take the job, politics,” She wanted the baubles, she wanted to get rid of the Jews. She was utterly committed to his career for reasons of the deepest sense of, you know, ambition, desire for baubles, and houses, and artworks, and their burning hatred of the Jews. And it’s all there in black and white, except that’s not how she writes about it. She presents it in a different way, but it’s there very subtly.
So can I talk just on the, from the book, there are other people who’re complicit in all of this. So we take the Catholic Church for example. And you talk about that in the book. And Bishop Hudal who seems an absolutely awful character, I mean, just-
Awful.
He’s, but what does this say about, you know, the complicity of the Catholic Church, the fact that he was able to get away with what he got away with?
Well, look, I mean, Dennis, I mean, you always can’t invent the story I stumbled across. For those who’ve not yet read the book, Otto Wachter on the 9th of May, 1945 escapes. He’s indicted, he’s wanted for mass murder. He disappears off the face of the earth. And he does not reappear for another four years and three months when he turns up dead in a Rome Vatican-run hospital, the Santo Spirito in July, 1949. But magically now because of the documents Horst has given, we know what happened in those 4 ½ years. We know how he escaped. We know who helped him. We know what his wife did, we know what others did. We know he hid in the mountains with a young Waffen-SS soldier called Burkhardt Rathmann, who at some point I said to Horst, tell me about this Burkhardt Rathmann, what was he like and what motivated him? And Horst gave me one of his nice smiles and said, “Well, Philippe, I can answer all of your questions about Burkhardt Rathmann or we could telephone him.” Okay, that was a weird moment. That was 2016, 71 years-
And you went to see him.
after the end of the war.
And I went to see Burkhardt Rathmann who was still worried that he was going to be arrested for the crimes he’d committed in Italy and Yugoslavia. He’s no longer with us now. I mean, it was a strange meeting with the photograph of Adolf Hitler on his bookshelf in January, 2017. But Burkhardt said that while they hid in the mountains for three years, Otto decided he would go on the reich migratory route, which is the ratline, the escape route taken by Mengele, and Eichmann, and Priebke, and others with, at its epicentre, the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal, helping these characters to escape. Now it’s complex in a number of levels. Firstly, I’m very careful not to put the shoulder of blame on the Catholic church or the Vatican. We don’t know if Hudal was a sort of lone operator off on a frolic of his own. I doubt it, but I don’t know. Or whether, you know, he was being helped by his old mate past the 12th. They went back into the 30s. They knew each other very, very well. So it’s, the way I describe him, I describe it as the assistance given to Wachter and others by a Vatican bishop, but not the Vatican. Again, it’s back to the individual and the group. I don’t want to put the label. I mean, Pius XII’s regime is a complex one. There were some good things, there were some not good things. It’s not exactly black and white. I don’t buy the line that Pius XII was Hitler’s pope. I don’t think that’s right. It’s much more subtle and complex than that. But there’s another issue that I came across, which again, really did absolutely shock me, was that the ratline was basically supported by the Americans and the British.
[Dennis] Yeah.
And it was a recruiting tool. And this was deeply shocking. You remember, there’s a bit in the book where I’m so shocked by this, I go and see my next door neighbour who is the great writer John le Carre, because he knows about the Cold War. He knows about, you know, the anti-Soviet effort and so on and so forth. I go and see him. And the first thing he says to me is, “Philippe, I was there in 1949.” And I said, “What do you mean you were there in 1949?” He said, “I was an 18-year-old British soldier and I was responsible for interrogating Germans.” And I said, “For what purpose, to prosecute them if they’d committed crimes?” He said, “No, the very opposite, to recruit them even if they had committed crimes.” And this was shocking. This was, he said it was shocking. He said, “You know, I’ve been told,” this is him speaking, “for my entire life that the Nazis were the worst of the worst, but now they were our friends against the new enemy, the Soviets.” So it’s a story that is complex, shall we say.
Before I get to asking about, I can’t help, but I’ll ask you about John le Carre. That would be ridiculous not to, but I’ll get there. But just before I get there, this really shows, doesn’t it, the problematic of our area that is international law and human rights law, that it’s so pliable, the hands of victors, I mean, the way the Americans, in a sense turned a blind eye to what the Nazis are doing, if they could get their Nazis into America. I mean, that’s a seriously devastating set of consequences that you reach.
But you know as well as I do, Dennis, nothing changes in the world. Look at-
Yeah,
look at what’s going on right now. Look at how esteemed leaders’ desire to hold out the hand of friendship to various people around the world. I’m thinking in particular of the fellow who runs Saudi Arabia, who killed Mr. Khashoggi. I mean, I suppose I should say who is, it’s the evidence would appear to suggest that he killed Mr. Khashoggi.
Okay, fair enough.
I think it seems pretty clear that he did. The Americans have come to that conclusion on the basis of a pretty detailed report. So nothing changes. You know, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and we make sacrifices. We’re seeing it right now, frankly, in relation to aspects of Chinese foreign policy. I mean, you know, what’s happening in Hong Kong is appalling. What’s happening to the Uyghurs is appalling. But our countries want trade deals with China, and they want China’s money, and they want China’s investments, and they’re going to tread lightly on the horrors that are being perpetrated because we want their money. And what does that tell us about ourselves and about our societies? We’ve got to confront it. We can’t run away from it. I mean, it comes back to the question you asked before, what is our own complicity in these matters? I mean, do we just remain silent about it or do we belly ache about it? And if we belly ache about it, how do we belly ache about it? Most people aren’t interested, most people don’t want to know. So what is our responsibility? These are big questions. But each of us individually is responsible for asking that question. We each come to our own answers. But these are difficult issues right now.
So this does circle me back. I’ve got a couple of other questions and I’m looking at the clock so, but what I wanted to do is, I was going to ask later, but let me ask them now. When I look at the debate between Lemkin and Lauterpacht, which you canvas wonderfully in “East West Street,” this issue about crimes against humanity and genocide. Now, in a sense, comes up in a way now, and in all sorts of ways. When I read “East West Street,” would I have been right to say that you were more sympathetic to the Lauterpacht crime against humanity?
Yes.
And less sympathetic to the idea of the group concept of genocide?
Yes, I mean, and that continues to be the case. Although, as you know, I end “East West Street” feeling rather sympathetic to Lemkin’s idea because I end the book standing next to a mass grave in which Lauterpacht’s family and my family still are present today killed because they happen to be a member of the wrong group at the wrong time. And so I understand completely what Lemkin was doing. My concern is that the invention of the concept of genocide has had many nefarious consequences. It has reinforced the sense of group identity, and it has probably in that way caused the very thing it was intended to prevent, namely more mass killing by one group of another group. The other thing that it’s done, and it’s in a sense, you know, it’s credit to Lemkin for inventing such an extraordinary word. Crimes against humanity doesn’t quite have the ring. You know, last weekend, President Biden made a big announcement. He said what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was a genocide. If he had said what happened was a crime against humanity, no one would’ve paid the blindest bit of attention. It’s because he used the G word.
And I went on Fareed Zakaria’s television programme on CNN to talk about this. And I said, “Well, it’s obviously an important moment. It’s a political moment.” He’s used the G word because he knows that, that really upsets the Turks. It really makes the Armenians happy. Lemkin called it a genocide. It meets all the criteria of genocide. The problem is, it happened in 1915, 34 years before the convention on genocide was adopted, and there’s a real issue of retroactivity. And that raises the question, how far back do you go? I mean, do you go back to slavery? Do you go back to, you know, the Middle Ages, what is and is not a genocide? And that becomes a big issue. But what we now see is that the use of the word genocide has been weaponized. And I think it’s been weaponized right now in relation to the Uyghurs. A lot of people say what’s happened to the Uyghurs at the instance of the Chinese is a genocide. And that is largely driven by a political set of objectives, not an assessment of the legalities of the situation. Because on the basis of the evidence that’s publicly available, it’s certainly a crime against humanity what’s going on.
It’s certainly torture and violations of human rights on a massive scale. But is it the intention to destroy a group in whole or in part? And the convention puts a very high threshold. And so the word has been weaponized. And I think we need to understand that weaponization is taking place and it has all sorts of consequences. You know, I serve on an advisory group for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a wonderful organisation in Britain, which every year commemorates the holocaust in January of each year. And marks other acts of mass killing. And up until recently it has done so only by reference to acts that have been called a genocide by an international court. And I remember attending one meeting and saying, “Okay, let me see if I’ve understood this correctly.” The mass killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men at Srebrenica you will commemorate because it’s been called a genocide by the Yugoslav Tribunal. Correct. But the killing of 3 million or more human beings in the Democratic Republic of Congo at around the same time, because that’s only a war crime or a crime against humanity, you will pass in silence on. Correct. And so the question becomes why do we give a priority to one group rather than another group? I mean, you know, that’s been the consequence of genocide and crimes against humanity being invented in the way they have. And I worry about those consequences.
I appreciate that, but let me ask you this. When you said to me earlier, you know, that the problem by genocide is it sort of reinforces the idea of groups. Isn’t it so that in the present situation, it’s more populous politics that’s reinforcing a question of we and they, and they are a group that we are prepared to train our guns on both literally and figuratively?
Well.
And then what happens then? How do we deal with that?
As you know from “East West Street,” Lemkin invented the word genocide in 1944, he published a book in November 1944. The New York Times wrote a big, quite positive book review about it. And then in early 1945, he receives a letter from another academic who has taken refuge, another Austrian academic, who’s taken refuge in Britain, Leopold Kohr, K-O-H-R, political scientist, extraordinary individual. The guy who actually invented the concept small is beautiful. That was not EF Schumacher, it was EF Schumacher’s teacher, who invented that concept. And he writes a letter to Lemkin and he says, “I understand why you’ve invented this word genocide, but let me tell you, it adopts the same path which leads to Hitler. You have adopted a biological approach to the characterization of human activity as a crime.
And it’s very dangerous.” And I think he’s right. I think the concept will tend to reinforce those incipient, nationalistic, and populist sentiments, which we are seeing coming to the fore again right now. And that’s why when President Biden, I’m sure for the best of reasons, points to what happened in 1915 and says, “That’s a genocide.” What I said on Fareed Zakaria was what would be a lot more interesting would be if President Biden said, you know what? Our treatment of Native Americans, that’s a genocide. Our treatment of blacks, the lynchings, that’s a genocide, or a crime against humanity or whatever. It’s always easier to point the finger at others. And in Britain, let me say, we’re very good at doing that and less good at coming up with our own responsibilities.
And in my own country, we still live with the dreadful consequences of what was done to the life chances of black people right across the board to this day.
Well, you know-
Where they-
It’s a big issue for me right now.
[Dennis] Question.
This is a big issue for me right now. I’m giving a lecture on the 21st of May in Jamaica. Well, actually, I’ll be sitting in Camden, North London, but it will be in Jamaica, on the question of reparations for slavery. And the question-
Yeah.
that I’ve been asked to addressed is whether there is an argument under international law that the wrongs that occur today for acts of long ago that were not internationally unlawful when they occurred, i.e. slavery, whether there is an argument that reparation can be due. Now, of course, the reality is that is what happened to my family. My mom gets reparation, my granddad, my beloved granddad, got reparations from the Germans for acts that were not internationally unlawful when they were carried out because these concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity were effected retroactively. They did not exist in the 1930s or before the summer of 1945. So where there’s a political will, where a country or countries want to do the right thing, they find a way to do it. There’s no inherent barrier in being able to make reparation. But these are big and complex questions.
So Philippe, I’ve got two final questions for you. One again, going back to the book directly, this is what you write at the point you say, “Horst and I are bonded by a sense of dislocation into events distant in time and place, our points of departure were different, opposite sides of a shared story, yet our paths crossed and we arrive at an endpoint. It’s a curious loss, a constant movement, a double act in which each seeks to lead and persuade the other, what emerges are secrets, and questions of lies, justice, and love.” So there is a sense in which there’s an inextricable link here between, in the sense what happened to your family and in a sense what happens to Horst’s family.
Absolutely, and I wonder, just as you say this, I’m thinking back to a moment, many years ago, more than two decades ago, I remember going over to my mother’s house one day, and she had a group of people there. And one of the people there was a son of Martin Bormann. And I remember just being, whoa, you know, like, whoa, what are you doing here? And it must have opened a door in my mind somehow that led eventually some years later. You know, I grew up in a household in which we as children were not allowed to have any German objects or items, you know, that was, it was pretty anti-German for understandable reasons. I don’t criticise that. I understand the motivation for that. And yet somehow my mother at some point, and she was a hidden child and had really suffered on, really been on the receiving end, somehow felt that speaking and talking was a helpful and a positive thing to do. And I think that must have opened a door for me. And I think that is the start, and that’s the spirit in which I’ve engaged with Horst. I don’t share his interpretation of the facts, I’m troubled by some of his interpretations, but he’s a decent person who is struggling. I mean, I thought about this first in relation to Niklas Frank. Can you imagine what it is like?
[Dennis] Yeah.
To have a father who is hanged for the murder of 4 million human beings. How do you live, how do your children live? How can you live with that burden? It’s overwhelming. And for that reason, I cut Horst some slack because it’s almost impossible for me to try to put myself in his position to imagine what life must have been like living with that terrible burden and those silences. And my ability to do that, I think comes from the fact in part, like you, I’m a courtroom lawyer, we know these things are complex. We know that shouting and screaming at people tends not to get you very far, but trying to understand, trying to engage. I’ve been partly criticised in a nice way for perhaps being too gentle with Horst, but I think I’ve done it in the right way. He doesn’t like the book. We continue to have exchanges. He’s upset with aspects of it, fine, but at least we continue to engage. And I think that’s incredibly important.
So my last question to you, as much as I had about 143 other questions to ask.
There’ll be plenty more occasions, Dennis.
Yeah, no, no, no, as I said, I’ve got a legitimate expectation to have a second round. But the last question is this, it struck me when I read the books that Otto Frank and Otto von Wachter, for that matter, had a conception of law, which ultimately was the preservation of the nation as they saw it. You as a very distinguished human rights lawyer, let me disassociate myself entirely within your school, believe in a much more cosmopolitan view of what law can do, or at least try to protect. And I’m concerned that, I’d just like your view just briefly, are we now at a particular point in time where your version, if I could counter pose it to Otto and Hans Frank, is really under serious threat from people who, that the law should only save the nation and that nation is very, I mean, we just have to look at what’s going on within the Republican party as an example.
Yeah, yeah, but you and I know Dennis, that the nation is an entirely artificial construct.
[Dennis] Yeah.
I mean there’s nothing natural about the United States, or the United Kingdom, or Germany, or South Africa, or Argentina. They’re socially constructed entities. And the idea that we should somehow give primacy to this artifice above every other value, it’s essentially what Lauterpacht said. You know, Lauterpacht’s most significant mind, in the context of a world which says international law is about the rights and obligations of states. He said, “No, it’s not. International law is about the rights and obligations of individual human beings. Ultimately, the function of the law is to protect the wellbeing of individual human beings.” And he’s right and that’s my conception. And I think it is going through a tough period now. But as I say to my students, it’s a long game. These things go in ebbs and flows. And whatever difficulties we have now, particularly for my students who might be feeling a bit more despondent about what’s going on. I mean in Britain, you know, which has left the European Union, and frankly turned itself into an individual state floating like flotsam around the world, cutting off its relevance, dramatically. It’s absolutely tragic because all of a sudden the generation that I teach, which for 40 years was able to imagine working across Europe, that’s just gone. And not only has it gone, but I’m going to posit here, my theory about what’s happening, the country is on the cusp of imploding. I think there is a very real chance that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will not exist in 10 years.
Northern Ireland is plainly heading for the exit door, as it should. It is a colonial construction. As for Scotland, there is a fair chance that this Thursday it will vote. It’s a very, very important election. And I’m torn about it, you know. There’s a part of me that loves the United Kingdom. But if I was Scottish, there’s no question that I would vote for independence. There’s no question. Why would I want to be governed by these people down in Westminster? When I see how Ireland is managing it. So the constructs are artificial. And I think the United Kingdom is about to pay a very, very big price for imagining that somehow it could reconceive the world of glorious days of the 1930s, which is what it’s about. Britain helped make the world in 1945. Britain negotiated the UN Charter. Britain drafted the Nuremberg Charter and the Nuremberg statute. And the people who are in government today have turned their backs on that act of construction. And I think it’s tragic.
It’s a great way to end. I just want to say before I hand over to Carly, that if I look at the two books, they’re luminous illustration of precisely what you’ve just said. A reminder of what happens when you go down that awful rabbit hole. And a sense, counterposing that to Lemkin and Lauterpacht, however, we debate that, is in fact the counter position that we’ve got to think of.
But I’m an optimist, I’m an optimist. These are difficult times for the United Kingdom, but there will be good times in there.
We need hope. We need hope, Philippe. Philippe, as always, it’s an privilege to interview you. One of the easiest tasks that I do when I have to interview is to interview you. So thank you so, so much for this.
Thank you, Dennis. Thank you so much.
And we’ve got to have a second instalment. The last couple of comments about Great Britain can’t go past without having a serious debate, but there we are. Carly, I know that Philippe has got time constraints so I’m handing over to you.
Sure. Thank you very much, Philippe. And as a fellow Brit, I’m glad you managed to find some hopefulness right at the end there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve got to. There’s some good people around on all sides and we’ve got to sort this out, but it’s, what a miserable situation.
Yeah, Dennis, wow, that was a fantastic conversation. And Philippe, on behalf of Wendy, really thank you so much for joining us today. Your body of work, and particularly the spotlight on your newest novel, which I am very much looking forward to reading. As someone who studied the Rwandan genocide in depth, this was a really fascinating discussion, and one which I’m sure could have continued for hours. And I’m afraid you’ve earned yourself a second spot to do part two.
You know what I’m going to suggest, I’m going to suggest I do that with Niklas Frank when his book comes out in English after July, because your wonderful audience needs to hear from Niklas because he is a remarkable human being.
That sounds like a special combination.
That’s a date.
And I’m sure Dennis is all ready to sign you up.
Dennis, I think we should sort that out.
We’ll do that. I’ll email you separately.
Yeah.
Perfect. So Dennis, thank you as always for your insightful and engaging questions, and for leading us on a fascinating discussion. I’m not often jealous of the people you get to interview ‘cause I get some pretty special ones too, but tonight you certainly made me jealous, and we’re going to enjoy having you back in July. And Philippe in exploring family identity and legacy, you really have weaved a riveting narrative for us all to learn from and to really engage with how you bring these poignant questions about the human condition to the fore. So thank you very much and we’re going to let you go and we are very grateful to both of you for this evening.
Thank you, Carly.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for your organisation, hugely appreciated it.
Bye.
Be well, be safe.
Thanks very much. Thanks Philippe. Take care everybody.
Bye.