The Question of German Guilt

When it comes to political liability and criminal guilt, however, everyone has the right among fellow-citizens to discuss facts and their judgment, and to measure them by the yardstick of clear, conceptional definitions. Political liability is graduated according to the degree of participation in the régime—now rejected on principle—and determined by decisions of the victor, to which the very fact of being alive logically forces all to submit who wish to survive the disaster.

DEFENSE

Wherever charges are raised, the accused will be allowed a hearing. Wherever right is appealed to, there is a defense. Wherever force is used, the victim will defend himself if he can.

If the utterly vanquished cannot defend himself and wants to stay alive, there is nothing left to him but to accept and bear the consequences.

But where the victor cites reasons and passes judgment, a reply can be made even in impotence—not by any force but by the spirit, if room is given to it. A defense is possible wherever man may speak. As soon as the victor puts his actions on the level of right, he limits his power. The following possibilities are open to this defense:

(1) It can urge differentiation. Differentiation leads to definition and partial exculpation. Differentiation cancels totality and limits the charges.

Confusion leads to haziness, and haziness in turn has real consequences which may be useful or noxious but in any event are unjust. Defense by differentiation promotes justice.

(2) The defense can adduce, stress and compare facts.

(3) The defense can appeal to natural law, to human rights, to interntional law. Such a defense is subject to restrictions:

(a) A state which has violated natural law and human rights on principle—at home from the start, and later, in war, destroying human rights and international law abroad—has no claim to recognition, in its favor, of what it refused to recognize itself.

(b) Right, in fact, is with him who has the power to fight for it. In total impotence, the sole remaining possibility is a spiritual appeal to the ideal right.

(c) The recognition of natural law and human rights is due only to the free will of the powerful, the victors. It is an act of insight and idealism—mercy shown to the vanquished in granting them right.

(4) The defense can point out where the indictment is no longer a true bill but a weapon used by the victor for other purposes, political or economic—by confusing the guilt concepts, by planting false opinion in order to win assent and ease one’s conscience. Thus measures are justified as right which otherwise would remain obvious actions of the victor in the situation of vae victis. But evil is evil even when inflicted as retribution.

Moral and metaphysical charges as means to political ends are to be rejected absolutely.

(5) The defense can reject the judge—either because there is reason to believe him prejudiced, or because the matter as such is beyond the jurisdiction of a human tribunal.

Punishment and liability—reparation claims—are to be acknowledged, but not demands for repentance and rebirth which can only come from within. Such demands can only be met by silent rejection. The point is not to forget the actual need for such an inner regeneration when its performance is wrongly demanded from without.

There is a difference between guilt consciousness and recognition of a worldly judge. The victor is as such not yet a judge. Unless he himself discards the attitude of combat and by confinement to criminal guilt and political liability actually gains right instead of mere power, he claims a false legality for actions which themselves involve new guilt.

(6) The defense can resort to countercharges. It can point to acts of others which helped to cause the calamity; it can point to acts of others similar to those which the vanquished are deemed, and indeed are, crimes; it can point to general world trends that bespeak a common guilt.

The German Questions

The guilt question received its universal impact from the charges brought against us Germans by the victors and the world. In the summer of 1945, when in all towns and villages the posters hung with the pictures and stories from Belsen and the crucial statement, “You are the guilty!” consciences grew uneasy, horror gripped many who had indeed not known this, and something rebelled: who indicts me there? No signature, no authority—the poster came as though from empty space. It is only human that the accused, whether justly or unjustly charged, tries to defend himself.