Book Review - Sword and Swastika

• Author: Lieutenant Colonel H. Wayne Elliott
• Pages: 06

256 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 156

SWORD AND SWASTIKA1

REVIEWED BY LIEUTENANT COLONEL H. WAYNE ELLIOTT2

In July 1938 General Ludwig Beck wrote of his fellow generals in the German army, "[t]heir duty of soldierly obedience finds its limit when their knowledge, conscience and responsibility forbid the execution of an order."3 Seven years later, World War II in Europe at an end, the limits of soldierly obedience were at the core of the war crimes trials taking place in Germany. The trials dealt with the individual guilt of the top Nazi leadership. But there were broader questions which the Nuremberg Tribunal could not really answer. What had gone wrong in Germany? How had a group of sociopaths like the Nazis managed to take charge of such a sophisticated country? What was the role of the German military establishment in the Nazi accession to power? Could it have been prevented?

Fifty years have now passed since the end of World War II. Sword and Swastika was written by Telford Taylor in 1952 and published the same year. Taylor was the chief American prosecutor at the "subsequent proceedings,"4 the American trials which followed the trial of the highest ranking Nazis before an international tribunal. At the end of the trials, he left active duty as a Brigadier General and went on to become an accomplished professor of law at Columbia University. He has written several books. His 1992 book, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, is an in-depth exploration of the international trial of the top German leadership.

It is impossible to study war crimes and their punishment without a firm understanding of the events which culminated in the trials at Nuremberg. The German generals and Nazi officials who are the subjects of Sword and Swastika are no longer household names. Nonetheless, their perception of duty unquestionably had an impact on world history. It was at the core of both the prosecution and defense cases in the post war trials. These largely forgotten generals played a major, though for them undesired, role in the development of international criminal law. Few today

would argue that the soldier can not be held criminally responsible for obvious violations of the law of war simply because a superior officer ordered them.5

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia has again focused attention on war crimes. The renewed attention paid to war crimes and the desire to commemorate the post war trials led to republication of Sword and Swastika in 1995. As Telford Taylor wrote in the preface, "we are scanning here a past which is part and parcel of the present."6 That is as true today as when it was written almost forty-five years ago. An international tribunal has been established at The Hague to try war criminals from the conflict in Yugoslavia. Because of the huge number of violations of the law of war in Yugoslavia, the court "should aim at higher officials who have guided or at least benefited from the atrocities that anger the world."7 Several generals from the war in Yugoslavia have been indicted for their part in war crimes. One general was actually taken into custody.8 It can be expected that as trials get underway for this latest crop of war criminals many will plead, "I was only following orders." That prospect makes this book once again worthy of study and review.

Sword and Swastika is actually about two periods in post World War I Germany. First, the fifteen years from the end of the war until Hitler's assumption of power. During those fifteen years the German army's attention was devoted to maintaining itself as a viable military force. Like many peacetime armies it was confronted with manpower, supply and equipment problems. But, unlike most armies, the solution to these problems often had to be undertaken in secret. At the same time that the army was fighting for its material existence, its leadership, schooled in the pr

war image of the Prussian soldier, strove to maintain the historic role of the officers corps as the custodian of the German geist (spirit). The use of the word sword in the book's title is an indication of the importance of the army during this period.

After Hitler's assumption of power in 1933...