The Question of German Guilt

Yes—if the question is who started the war; who initiated the terrorist organization of all forces for the sole purpose of war; who, as a nation, betrayed and sacrificed its own essence; and furthermore, who committed peculiar, un paralleled atrocities. Dwight Macdonald says that all sides committed many atrocities of war but that some things were peculiarly German: a paranoiac hatred without political sense; a fiendishness of agonies inflicted rationally with all means of modern science and technology, beyond all medieval torture tools. Yet there the guilty were a few Germans, a small group (plus an indefinite number of others capable of cooperating under orders). German anti-Semitism was not at any time a popular movement. The population failed to cooperate in the German pogroms; there were no spontaneous acts of cruelty against Jews. The mass of the people, if it did not feebly express its resentment, was silent and withdrew.

Shall we admit that we alone are guilty?

No—if we as a whole, as a people, as a permanent species, are turned into the evil people, the guilty people as such. Against this world opinion we can point to facts.

Yet all such discussions jeopardize our inner attitude unless we constantly remember what shall now be repeated once more:

(1) Any guilt which can be placed on the others, and which they place on themselves, is never that of the crimes of Hitler’s Germany. They merely let things drift at the time, took half-measures and erred in their political judgment.

That in the later course of the war our enemies also had prison camps as concentration camps and engaged in types of warfare previously started by Germany is secondary. Here we are not discussing events since the armistice, nor what Germany suffered and keeps on suffering after the surrender.

(2) The purpose of our discussion, even when we talk of a guilt of the others, is to penetrate the meaning of our own.

(3) In general, it may be correct that “the others are not better than we.” But at this moment it is misapplied. For in these past twelve years the others, taken for all in all, were indeed better than we. A general truth must not serve to level out the particular, present truth of our own guilt.

GUILT OF ALL?

If we hear the imperfections in the political conduct of the powers explained as universal inevitabilities of politics, we may say in reply that this is the common guilt of mankind.

For us, the recapitulation of the others’ actions does not have the significance of alleviating our guilt. Rather, it is justified by the anxiety which as human beings we share with all others for mankind—mankind as a whole, which not only has become conscious of its existence today but, due to the results of technology, has developed a trend toward a common order, which may succeed or fail.

The basic fact that all of us are human justifies this anxiety of ours about human existence as a whole. There is a passionate desire in our souls, to stay related or to reestablish relations with humanity as such.

How much easier we should breathe if, instead of being as human as we are, the victors were selfless world governors! With wisdom and foresight they would direct a propitious reconstruction including effective amends. Their lives and actions would be an example demonstrating the ideal of democratic conditions, and daily making us feel it as a convincing reality. United among themselves in reasonable, frank talk without mental reservations, they would quickly and sensibly decide all arising questions. No deception and no illusion would be possible, no silent concealment and no discrepancy between public and private utterances. Our people would receive a splendid education; we should achieve the liveliest nationwide development of our thinking and appropriate the most substantial tradition. We should be dealt with sternly but justly and kindly, even charitably, if the unfortunate and misguided showed only the slightest goodwill.

But the others are human as we are. And they hold the future of mankind in their hands. Since we are human, all our existence and the possibilities of our being are bound up with their doings and with the results of their actions. So, to us, to sense what they want, think and do is like our own affair.

In this anxiety we ask ourselves: could the other nations’ better luck be due in part to more favorable political destinies? Could they be making the same mistakes that we made, only so far without the fatal consequences which led to our undoing?