The Question of German Guilt

Certainly all of us in Germany were jointly guilty of getting into this political situation, of losing our freedom and having to live under the despotism of uncivilized brutes. But at the same time we could say in extenuation that we had been victimized by a combination of veiled illegalities and open violence. As in a state the victim of crime is accorded his rights by virtue of the state order, we were hopeful that a European order would not permit such crimes on the part of a state.

I shall never forget a talk in May 1933, in my home, with a friend who later emigrated and now lives in America. Longingly we weighed the chances of quick action by the Western powers: “If they wait another year, Hitler will have won; Germany, perhaps all Europe, will be lost.…”

It was in this state of mind, touched in the marrow of our bones and therefore clairvoyant in some respects and blind in others, that we felt increasing dismay at events like the following:

In the early summer of 1933 the Vatican signed a concordat with Hitler. Papen handled the negotiations. It was the first great indorsement of the Nazi régime, a tremendous prestige gain for Hitler. It seemed impossible, at first, but it was a fact. It made us shudder.

All nations recognized the Hitler regime. Admiring voices were heard.

In 1936 the world flocked to Berlin for the Olympic Games. Grimly we watched the appearance of every foreigner, unable to suppress a painful feeling that he was deserting us. But they did not know any better than many Germans.

In 1936 Hitler occupied the Rhineland. France let it happen.

In 1938 the London Times published an open letter from Churchill to Hitler, including sentences like the following (I remember it myself but quote from Roepke): “Were England to suffer a national disaster comparable to that of Germany in 1918, I should pray God to send us a man of your strength of mind and will.…”

In 1935, through Ribbentrop, England signed a naval pact with Hitler. This was what it meant to us: The British abandon the German people for the sake of peace with Hitler. They care nothing about us. They have not yet accepted European responsibilities. They not only stand by, as evil grows here—they meet it halfway. They allow a terrorist military state to engulf the Germans. For all the strictures of their press they do not act. We in Germany are powerless, but they might still—today, perhaps, still without excessive sacrifices—restore freedom among us. They are not doing it. The consequences will affect them, too, and exact vastly greater sacrifices.

In 1939 Russia made its pact with Hitler and thus, at the last moment, put Hitler in position to make war. And when war came, all neutral countries stood aside. The world failed utterly to join hands for one common effort, for the quick extinction of the devilry.

In Roepke’s book on Germany, published in Switzerland, the overall situation of the years between 1933 and 1939 is characterized as follows:

“The present world catastrophe is the gigantic price the world must pay for playing deaf to all the warning signals which ever more shrilly, from 1930 until 1939, portended the hell to be loosed by the satanic forces of National-Socialism—first upon Germany, and then on the rest of the world. The terrors of this war correspond exactly to those which the world permitted to happen in Germany while maintaining normal relations with the National-Socialists and joining them at international festivals and conventions.

“Everyone should realize by now that the Germans were the first victims of the barbaric invasion which swamped them from below, that they were the first to succumb to terror and mass hypnosis, and that whatever had to be suffered later in occupied countries was first inflicted on the Germans themselves—including the worst of fates: to be forced or tricked into serving as tools of further conquest and oppression.”

The charge that we, under terrorism, stood by inactively while the crimes were committed and the regime was consolidated is true. We have the right to recall that the others, not under terrorism, also remained inactive—that they let pass, if they did not unwittingly foster, events which, as occurring in another country, they did not regard as their concern.

Shall we admit that we alone are guilty?