Foreign News: Molotov Cocktail

Out of a dusty file in the Kremlin, Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Mikailovich Molotov last week fished a nine-month-old document. It was a note from nine Governments in Exile telling him about Nazi atrocities in Occupied Europe (no news) and Comrade Molotov had not bothered to answer it. But Comrade Molotov’s chief, Joseph Stalin, had a special reason for wanting it answered now.

The British Lord Chancellor (Lawyer John Simon) and the U.S. President (Lawyer Franklin Roosevelt) had just announced that they were going to set up a United Nations Court of Justice to try all criminals-of-war—after the war. Molotov’s answer (addressed, not to Britain and the U.S., but to the nine little Governments in Exile): Why not set up the court at once? To his Molotov cocktail the Foreign Commissar added a Stalin stinger: And why not begin by trying, and hanging, Nazi Arch-Criminal Rudolf Hess?

The British Foreign Office was in a tizzy. Well it knew that, whereas Germany and most of her enemies are bound by the Geneva Convention to treat their prisoners according to certain rules, Russia’s nonadherence to the Convention leaves both Germany and Russia free to treat Russian and German prisoners as brutally as they please. If Britain were to execute Hess, Germany would probably denounce the Convention, would certainly kill hundreds of British prisoners in reprisal.

The Foreign Office hastily revised the status of Prisoner Hess from that of prisoner of state to that of prisoner of war. As such, Hess was safe from trial except for crimes committed as a prisoner.

To London and Washington, however, it looked as if Comrade Stalin were doing more than having a little grim fun with his allies and trying to toughen up the war.* Stalin, they suspected, had not forgotten that Hess went to Britain to seek an ally against Bolshevism. Perhaps Stalin, brooding over the shortcomings of his allies (TIME, Oct. 12), feared that Hess might be exerting some influence in Britain.

Well-founded were these suspicions. This week the Communist Party newspaper Pravda delivered itself of a stinging editorial: “It must be finally established who Hess is now—a criminal subject to trial and punishment, or a plenipotentiary representative in England of the Hitler Government who enjoys inviolability.”

* Said Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox this week: “The war has descended to the lowest levels of barbarism. A few days ago a marine at Guadalcanal sought to succor a wounded Japanese, only to be killed by the man he tried to help. Navy pilots, bailing out, have been machine-gunned by the enemy on the way down. Next day, Japanese military spokesmen said captured American airmen, who had allegedly taken part in the April 18 raid on Japan, would be “severely punished in accordance with international law for inhuman acts.”