Suppose that Adolph Hitler failed to commit suicide in 1945 but instead was tried along with other Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg in 1946. Pretend further that The New York Times printed an editorial on Dec. 29, 1946 that looked just a little bit like one that actually did run sixty years later on Dec. 29, 2006. Substitute the name of Adolph Hitler in 1946 for the name Saddam Hussein in 2006 and change the name of some nations and minority groups. By changing only about 15 words, here is how that 1946 editorial might have read:
Fictional New York Times editorial as it might have read on Dec. 29, 1946
The Rush to Hang Adolph Hitler
The important question was never really about whether Adolph Hitler was guilty of crimes against humanity. The public record is bulging with the lengthy litany of his vile and unforgivable atrocities: genocidal assaults against the Jews; aggressive wars against Poland, France, Holland, Britain, Russia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Saar, and many European neighbors; use of internationally banned weapons like nerve gas; systematic torture of countless thousands of political prisoners.
What really mattered was whether a Germany freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in a Germany long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions.
It could have, but it didn’t. After a flawed, politicized and divisive trial, Mr. Hitler was handed his sentence: death by hanging. This week, in a cursory 15-minute proceeding, an appeals court upheld that sentence and ordered that it be carried out posthaste. Most Germans are now so preoccupied with shielding their families from poverty that they seem to have little emotion left to spend on Mr. Hitler or, more important, on their own fading dreams of a new and better Germany.
What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After six years of war and thousands of American, Russian, French, German, British, Polish, Italian and German deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Germany.
This week began with a story of British and German soldiers storming a police station that hid a secret dungeon in Frankfort. More than 100 men, many of them viciously tortured, were rescued from almost certain execution. It might have been a story from the final days of Nazi rule in March 1945, when British and American troops entered Frankfort believing they were liberating the subjugated south. But it was December 1946, and the wretched men being liberated were prisoners of the new German authorities.
Toppling Adolph Hitler did not automatically create a new and better Germany. Executing him won’t either.
