Justice over Mercy

In the House of Lords, five days before Palm Sunday, up rose the Church of England's foremost humanitarian, the Archbishop of York. Said the gentle, 70-year-old Most Reverend and Right Honorable Cyril Forster Garbett: there should be no sensational public trials of "the master war criminals Hitler and Himmler and their gang who have corrupted Germany and ordered these hideous crimes"; as soon as their identity is established "those who catch them should at once put them to death."

The Allies, he said, could then concentrate on trying and punishing "the subordinates, who could have refused to give orders for these crimes and [yet who] have sometimes carried them out on their own initiative with enthusiasm and delight. . . . I am thinking of the horrible tortures in concentration camps, of the burning of women and children in that church in southern France where the whole population was massacred, of crimes which no man ought to commit, however strong the order given to him. . . . Some share of guilt [must go to] the whole German people. We cannot entirely distinguish [them] from the Nazis. . . .

"It would, of course, be much more pleasant for me to plead for mercy, but sometimes justice has to take precedence over mercy, just as righteousness has to take precedence over peace."

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