Unlike the case in World War I when we Germans did not need to admit specific crimes committed by one side only (a fact eventually recognized by scientific historic research even on the part of Germany’s enemies), today the crimes committed by the Nazi government—in Germany before the war, everywhere during the war—are evident.
Unlike the case in World War I when the war-guilt question was not decided against one side by the historians of all nations, this war was begun by Hitler Germany.
Unlike World War I, finally, this war really became a world war. It struck the world in a different situation and in a different knowledge. Its import, compared with earlier wars, entered another dimension.
And today we have something entirely new in world history. The victors are establishing a court. The Nuremberg trial deals with crimes.
The primary result is a clear delimitation in two directions:
First, not the German people are being tried here but individual, criminally accused Germans—on principle all leaders of the Nazi régime. This line was drawn at the outset by the American member of the prosecution. “We want to make it clear,” Jackson said in his fundamental address, “that we do not intend to accuse the whole German people.”
Second, the suspects are not accused indiscriminately. They are charged with specific crimes expressly defined in the statute of the International Military Tribunal.
At this trial we Germans are spectators. We did not bring it about and we are not running it, although the defendants are men who brought disaster over us. “Indeed the Germans—as much as the outside world—have an account to settle with the defendants,” Jackson said.
Many a German smarts under this trial. The sentiment is understandable. Its cause is the same which moved the other side to blame the whole German people for the Hitler régime and its acts. Every citizen is jointly liable for the doings and jointly affected by the sufferings of his own state. A criminal state is charged against its whole population. Thus the citizen feels the treatment of his leaders as his own, even if they are criminals. In their persons the people are also condemned. Thus the indignity and mortification experienced by the leaders of the state are felt by the people as their own indignity and mortification. Hence their instinctive, initially unthinking rejection of the trial.
The political liability we have to meet here is painful indeed. We must experience mortification if required by our political liability. Thereby, symbolically, we experience our utter political impotence and our elimination as a political factor.
Yet everything depends on how we conceive, interpret, appropriate and translate our instinctive concern.
One possibility is outright rejection of indignity. We look for reasons, then, to deny the right, the truthfulness, the purpose of the whole trial.
(1) We engage in general reflections: There have been wars throughout history and there will be more. No one people is guilty of war. Wars are due to human nature, to the universal culpability of man. A conscience which proclaims itself not guilty is superficial. By its very conduct such self-righteousness breeds future wars.
Rebuttal: This time there can be no doubt that Germany planned and prepared this war and started it without provocation from any other side. It is altogether different from 1914. Germany is not called guilty of war but of this war. And this war itself is something new and different, occurring in a situation unparalleled in the past history of the world.
This objection to the Nuremberg trial may be phrased in other ways, perhaps as follows: It is an insoluble problem of human existence that what must be settled by invoking the judgment of God, keeps pressing time and again for a decision by force. The soldier’s feelings are chivalrous, and even in defeat he has a right to be offended if treated in an unchivalrous manner.
Rebuttal: Germany, throwing all chivalry overboard and violating international law, has committed numerous acts resulting in the extermination of populations and in other inhumanities. Hitler’s actions from the start were directed against every chance of a reconciliation. It was to be victory or ruin. Now we feel the consequences of the ruin. All claims to chivalry—even though a great many individual soldiers and entire units are guiltless and themselves have always acted chivalrously—is voided by the Wehrmacht’s readiness to execute criminal orders as Hitler’s organizations. Once betrayed, chivalry and magnanimity cannot be claimed in one’s favor, after the fact. This war did not break out between opponents alike in kind, come to a dead end and chivalrously entering the lists. It was conceived and executed by criminal cunning and the reckless totality of a destructive will.
In the midst of war there is the possibility of inhibitions. Kant’s injunction, that nothing must happen in war which would make reconcilement flatly impossible, was first rejected on principle by Hitler Germany. As a result, force, essentially unchanged from time immemorial and with the measure of its destructive possibilities determined now by technology, is boundlessly with us. To have begun the war in the present world situation—this is the enormity.
(2) The trial is said to be a national disgrace for all Germans; if there were Germans on the tribunal, at least, then Germans would be judged by Germans.
Rejoinder: The national disgrace lies not in the tribunal but in what brought it on—in the fact of this régime and its acts. The consciousness of national disgrace is inescapable for every German. It aims in the wrong direction if turning against the trial rather than its cause.
Moreover: Had the victors named a German tribunal, or appointed Germans as associate judges, this would make no change at all. The Germans would not sit on the court by virtue of a German self-liberation but by the grace of the victors. The national disgrace would be the same. The trial is due to the fact that we did not free ourselves from the criminal régime but were liberated by the Allies.
(3) One counterargument runs as follows: How can we speak of crimes in the realm of political sovereignty? To grant this would mean that any victor can make a criminal of the vanquished—and the meaning and the mystery of God-derived authority would cease. Men once obeyed by a nation—in particular former Emperor William II and now “the Fuehrer”—are considered inviolable.
Rebuttal: This is a habit of thought derived from the tradition of political life in Europe, preserved the longest in Germany. Today, however, the halo round the heads of states has vanished. They are men and answer for their deeds. Ever since European nations have tried and beheaded their monarchs, the task of the people has been to keep their leaders in check. The acts of states are also the acts of persons. Men are individually responsible and liable for them.
(4) Legally we hear the following argument: There can be crimes only insofar as there are laws. A crime is a breach of these laws. It must be clearly defined and factually determinable without ambiguity. In particular—nulla poenasine lege—sentence can only be passed under a law in force before the act was committed. In Nuremberg, however, men are judged retroactively under laws now made by the victors.
Rebuttal: In the sense of humanity, of human rights and natural law, and in the sense of the Western ideas of liberty and democracy, laws already exist by which crimes may be determined.
There are also agreements which—if voluntarily signed by both sides—create such a superior law that can serve as a yardstick in case a contract is broken.
And the jurisdiction, which in the peaceful order of a state rests in the courts, can after a war rest only in the victor’s tribunal.
(5) Hence the further objection: Victorious might does not make right. Success cannot claim jurisdiction over right and truth. A tribunal which could investigate and judge war guilt and war crimes objectively is an impossibility. Such a court is always partisan. Even a court of neutrals would be partisan, since the neutrals are powerless and actually part of the victors’ following. To judge freely, a court would have to be backed by a power capable of enforcing its decisions against both disputants.
This argument, of the illusive nature of such justice, goes on to say that every war is blamed on the loser. He is forced to admit his guilt. His subsequent economic exploitation is disguised as restitution. Pillage is forged into a rightful act. If the right is not free, let us have naked force—it would be honest, and it would be easier to bear. In fact, there is nothing beside the victor’s power. Recrimination as such can always be made mutual; but only the victor can make his charges stick, and he does so ruthlessly and solely in his own interest. Everything else merely serves to disguise the actual arbitrary force of the powerful.
And: The tribunal’s illusive nature finally shows in the fact that the so-called crimes are prosecuted only if committed by a vanquished nation. In sovereign or victorious nations the same acts are ignored, not even discussed, much less punished.
Rebuttal: Power and force are indeed decisive realities in the human world, but they are not the only ones. To make them absolute is to remove all reliable links between men. While they are absolute, no agreement is possible. As Hitler actually said, agreements are valid only while they represent self-interest. (And he acted accordingly.) But this is opposed by a will which, admitting the reality of power and the effectiveness of the nihilistic view, holds them undesirable and to be changed at any cost.
For in human affairs reality is not yet truth. That reality, rather, is to be confronted with another. And the existence of this other reality depends upon the human will. Every man, in his freedom, must know where he stands and what he wants.
From this point of view it may be said that the trial, as a new attempt in behalf of order in the world, does not grow meaningless if it cannot yet be based on a legal world order but must still halt within a political framework. Unlike a court trial, it does not yet take place in the closed order of a state.
Hence Jackson’s frank satement that “if the defense were permitted to deviate from the strictly limited charges of the indictment, the trial would be prolonged and the court enmeshed in insoluble political disputes.”
This also means that the defense does not have to deal with the question of war guilt and its historical premises, either, but solely with the question who began this war. Nor does it have the right to adduce or judge other cases of similar crimes. Political necessity limits discussion. But this does not make everything untruthful. On the contrary, the difficulties, the objections, are candidly, if briefly, expressed.
There is no denying the basic situation: that success in combat, not the law alone, is the governing starting point. It is true in big as well as little things that—as ironically said of military offenses—you are not punished because of the law but because you got caught. But this basic situation does not make man unable to transform his power, after success and on the strength of his freedom, into a realization of the right. And even if this is not entirely accomplished, even if right ensues only to some extent, a great stride has been made on the way to world order. Moderation as such creates a zone of reflection and examination, a zone of clarity, and thereby makes men more fully aware of the lasting import of force as such.
For us Germans, the advantages of this trial are its distinction between the definite crimes of the leaders and its very failure to condemn the people as a whole.
But the trial means a great deal more. For the first time, and for all times to come, it is to make war a crime and to draw the conclusions. What the Kellogg-Briand pact began shall be realized for the first time. There is no more doubt of the greatness of this undertaking than of the good-will of many who have a hand in it. The undertaking may appear fantastic. But when the stakes become clear to us, the event makes us tremble with hope. The only difference is whether we gloat nihilistically, assuming that it could not but be a sham trial, or whether we passionately wish that it might succeed.
It all depends on how the trial is run, on its contents, its outcome, on the reasons adduced to the verdict—on the over-all impression of the proceedings, in retrospect. It depends on whether the world can admit the truth and the right of what was done there, on whether even the vanquished cannot help concurring, on whether history later will see its justice and truth.
Yet this will not be decided in Nuremberg alone. The essential point is whether the Nuremberg trial comes to be a link in a chain of meaningful, constructive political acts (however often these may be frustrated by error, unreason, heartlessness and hate) or whether, by the yardstick there applied to mankind, the very powers now erecting it will in the end be found wanting. The powers initiating Nuremberg thereby attest their common aim of world government, by submitting to world order. They attest their willingness really to accept responsibility for mankind as the result of their victory—not just for their own countries. Such testimony must not be false testimony.
It will either create confidence in the world that right was done and a foundation laid in Nuremberg—in which case the political trial will have become a legal one, with law creatively founded and realized for a new world now waiting to be built. Or disappointment by untruthfulness will create an even worse world atmosphere breeding new wars; instead of a blessing, Nuremberg would become a factor of doom, and in the world’s eventual judgment the trial would have been a sham and a mock trial. This must not happen.
The answer to all arguments against the trial is that Nuremberg is something really new. That the arguments point to possible dangers cannot be denied. But it is wrong, first, to think in sweeping alternatives, with flaws, mistakes and failings in detail leading at once to wholesale rejection, whereas the main point is the powers’ trend of action, their unwavering patience in active responsibility. Contradictions in detail are to be overcome by acts designed to bring world order out of confusion. It is wrong, secondly, to strike an attitude of outraged aggressiveness and to say no from the start.
What happens in Nuremberg, no matter how many objections it may invite, is a feeble, ambiguous harbinger of a world order, the need of which mankind is beginning to feel. This is the entirely new situation. The world order is not at hand by any means—rather, there are still huge conflicts and incalculable perils of war ahead of its realization—but it has come to seem possible to thinking humanity; it has appeared on the horizon as a barely perceptible dawn, while in case of failure the self-destruction of mankind looms as a fearful menace before our eyes.
Utter lack of power can only cling to the world as a whole. On the brink of nothingness it turns to the origin, to the all-encompassing. So it is precisely the German who might become aware of the extraordinary import of this harbinger.
Our own salvation in the world depends on the world order which—although not yet established in Nuremberg—is suggested by Nuremberg.
For crimes the criminal is punished. The restriction of the Nuremberg trial to criminals serves to exonerate the German people. Not, however, so as to free them of all guilt—on the contrary. The nature of our real guilt only appears the more clearly.
We were German nationals at the time when the crimes were committed by the régime which called itself German, which claimed to be Germany and seemed to have the right to do so, since the power of the state was in its hands and until 1943 it found no dangerous opposition.
The destruction of any decent, truthful German polity must have its roots also in modes of conduct of the majority of the German population. A people answers for its polity.
Every German is made to share the blame for the crimes committed in the name of the Reich. We are collectively liable. The question is in what sense each of us must feel co-responsible. Certainly in the political sense of the joint liability of all citizens for acts committed by their state—but for that reason not necessarily also in the moral sense of actual or intellectual participation in crime. Are we Germans to be held liable for outrages which Germans inflicted on us, or from which we were saved as by a miracle? Yes—inasmuch as we let such a régime rise among us. No—insofar as many of us in our deepest hearts opposed all this evil and have no morally guilty acts or inner motivations to admit. To hold liable does not mean to hold morally guilty.
Guilt, therefore, is necessarily collective as the political liability of nationals, but not in the same sense as moral and metaphysical, and never as criminal guilt. True, the acceptance of political liability with its fearful consequences is hard on every individual. What it means to us is political impotence and a poverty which will compel us for long times to live in or on the fringes of hunger and cold and to struggle vainly. Yet this liability as such leaves the soul untouched.
Politically everyone acts in the modern state, at least by voting, or failing to vote, in elections. The sense of political liability lets no man dodge.
If things go wrong the politically active tend to justify themselves; but such defenses carry no weight in politics. For instance, they meant well and had the best intentions—Hindenburg, for one, did surely not mean to ruin Germany or hand it over to Hitler. That does not help him; he did—and that is what counts. Or they foresaw the disaster, said so, and warned; but that does not count politically, either, if no action followed or if it had no effect.
One might think of cases of wholly non-political persons who live aloof of all politics, like monks, hermits, scholars, artists—if really quite non-political, those might possibly be excused from all guilt. Yet they, too, are included among the politically liable, because they, too, live by the order of the state. There is no such aloofness in modern states.
One may wish to make such aloofness possible, yet one cannot help admit to this limitation. We should like to respect and love a non-political life, but the end of political participation would also end the right of the non-political ones to judge concrete political acts of the day and thus to play riskless politics. A non-political zone demands with-drawal from any kind of political activity—and still does not exempt from joint political liability in every sense.
Every German asks himself: how am I guilty?
The question of the guilt of the individual analyzing himself is what we call the moral one. Here we Germans are divided by the greatest differences.
While the decision in self-judgment is up to the individual alone, we are free to talk with one another, insofar as we are in communication, and morally to help each other achieve clarity. The moral sentence on the other is suspended, however—neither the criminal nor the political one.
There is a line at which even the possibility of moral judgment ceases. It can be drawn where we feel the other not even trying for a moral self-analysis—where we perceive mere sophistry in his argument, where he seems not to hear at all. Hitler and his accomplices, that small minority of tens of thousands, are beyond moral guilt for as long as they do not feel it. They seem incapable of repentance and change. They are what they are. Force alone can deal with such men who live by force alone.
But the moral guilt exists for all those who give room to conscience and repentance. The morally guilty are those who are capable of penance, the ones who knew, or could know, and yet walked in ways which self-analysis reveals to them as culpable error—whether conveniently closing their eyes to events, or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced or bought with personal advantages, or obeying from fear. Let us look at some of these possibilities.
(a) By living in disguise—unavoidable for anyone who wanted to survive—moral guilt was incurred. Mendacious avowals of loyalty to threatening bodies like the Gestapo, gestures like the Hitler salute, attendance at meetings, and many other things causing a semblance of participation—who among us in Germany was not guilty of that, at one time or another? Only the forgetful can deceive themselves about it, since they want to deceive themselves. Camouflage had become a basic trait of our existence. It weighs on our moral conscience.
(b) More deeply stirring at the instant of cognition is guilt incurred by a false conscience. Many a young man or woman nowadays awakens with a horrible feeling: my conscience has betrayed me. I thought I was living in idealism and self-sacrifice for the noblest goal, with the best intentions—what can I still rely on? Everyone awakening like this will ask himself how he became guilty, by haziness, by unwillingness to see, by conscious seclusion, isolation of his own life in a “decent” sphere.
Here we first have to distinguish between military honor and political sense. For whatever is said about guilt cannot affect the consciousness of military honor. If a soldier kept faith with his comrades, did not flinch in danger and proved himself calm and courageous, he may preserve something inviolate in his self-respect. These purely soldierly, and at the same time human, values are common to all peoples. No guilt is incurred by having stood this test; in fact, if probation here was real, unstained by evil acts or execution of patently evil commands, it is a foundation of the sense of life.
But a soldier’s probation must not be identified with the cause he fought for. To have been a good soldier does not absolve from all other guilt.
The unconditional identification of the actual state with the German nation and army constitutes guilt incurred through false conscience. A first-class soldier may have succumbed to the falsification of his conscience which enabled him to do and permit obviously evil things because of patriotism. Hence the good conscience in evil deeds.
Yet our duty to the fatherland goes far beneath blind obedience to its rulers of the day. The fatherland ceases to be a fatherland when its soul is destroyed. The power of the state is not an end in itself; rather, it is pernicious if this state destroys the German character. Therefore, duty to the fatherland did not by any means lead consistently to obedience to Hitler and to the assumption that even as a Hitler state Germany must, of course, win the war at all costs. Herein lies the false conscience. It is no simple guilt. It is at the same time a tragic confusion, notably of a large part of our unwitting youth. To do one’s duty to the fatherland means to commit one’s whole person to the highest demands made on us by the best of our ancestors, not by the idols of a false tradition.
It was amazing to see the complete self-identification with army and state, in spite of all evil. For this unconditionality of a blind nationalism—only conceivable as the last crumbling ground in a world about to lose all faith—was moral guilt.
It was made possible, furthermore, by a misinterpretation of the Biblical warning: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”—a warning completely perverted by the curious sanctity appertaining to orders in military tradition. “This is an order”—in the ears of many these words had and still have a ring of pathos as if voicing the highest duty. But simultaneously, by shrugging off stupidity and evil as inevitable, they furnished an excuse. What finally turned this conduct into full-fledged moral guilt was the eagerness to obey—that compulsive conduct, feeling itself conscientious and, in fact, forsaking all conscience.
Many a youth nauseated by Nazi rule in the years after 1933 chose the military career because it seemed to offer the only decent atmosphere uninfluenced by the Party. The army, mentally against the Party, seemed to exist outside and without the Party as though it were a power of its own. It was another error of conscience; eventually, with all the independent generals in the old tradition eliminated, the consequences appeared as moral decay of the German officer in all positions of leadership—notwithstanding the many likable and even noble soldierly personalities who had sought salvation in vain, misled by a betraying conscience.
The very fact that honest consciousness and good-will were our initial guides is bound to deepen our later disillusionment and disappointment in ourselves. It leads us to question even our best faith; for we are responsible for our delusions—for every delusion to which we succumb.
Awakening and self-analysis of this delusion are indispensable. They turn idealistic youths into upright, morally reliable, politically lucid German men acquiescing in their lot as now cast.
(c) By partial approval of National-Socialism, by straddling and occasional inner assimilation and accommodation, moral guilt was incurred without any of the tragic aspects of the previous types.
The argument that there was some good to it, after all—this readiness to a supposedly unbiased appraisal—was widespread among us. Yet the truth could be only a radical “either-or”: if I recognize the principle as evil, everything is evil and any seemingly good consequences are not what they seem to be. It was this erring objectiveness, ready to grant something good in National-Socialism, which estranged close friends so they could no longer talk frankly. The same man who had just lamented the failure of a martyr to appear and sacrifice himself for the old freedom and against injustice was apt to praise the abolition of unemployment (by means of armament and fraudulent financial policies), apt to hail the absorption of Austria in 1938 as the fulfillment of the old ideal of a united Reich, apt to cast doubts on Dutch neutrality in 1940 and to justify Hitler’s attack, and apt, above all, to rejoice in the victories.
(d) Many engaged in convenient self-deception. In due time they were going to change this evil government. The Party would disappear again—with the Fuehrer’s death at the latest. For the present one had to belong, to right things from within. The following conversations were typical:
An officer speaks: “After the war we’ll finish National-Socialism on the very basis of our victory; but now we must stick together and lead Germany to that victory—when the house burns down you pour water and don’t stop to ask what caused the fire.”—Answer: “After victory you’ll be discharged and glad to go home. The SS alone will stay armed, and the reign of terror will grow into a slave state. No individual human life will be possible; pyramids will rise; highways and towns will be built and changed at the Fuehrer’s whim. A giant arms machine will be developed for the final conquest of the world.”
A professor speaks: “We are the Fronde within the Party. We dare frank discussion. We achieve spiritual realizations. We shall slowly turn all of it back into the old German spirituality.”—Answer: “You are deceiving yourselves. Allowed a fool’s freedom, on condition of instant obedience, you shut up and give in. Your fight is a mirage, desired by the leaders. You only help to entomb the German spirit.”
Many intellectuals went along in 1933, sought leading positions and publicly upheld the ideology of the new power, only to become resentful later when they personally were shunted aside. These—although mostly continuing positive until about 1942, when the course of the war made an unfavorable outcome certain and sent them into the oppositionist ranks—now feel that they suffered under the Nazis and are therefore called for what follows. They regard themselves as anti-Nazis. In all these years, according to their self-proclaimed ideology, these intellectual Nazis were frankly speaking truth in spiritual matters, guarding the tradition of the German spirit, preventing destructions, doing good in individual cases.
Many of these may be guilty of persisting in a mentality which, while not identical with Party tenets and even disguised as metamorphosis and opposition, still clings in fact to the mental attitude of National-Socialism and fails to clear itself. Through this mentality they may be actually akin to National-Socialism’s inhuman, dictatorial, unexistentially nihilistic essence. If a mature person in 1933 had the certainty of inner conviction—due not merely to political error but to a sense of existence heightened by National-Socialism—he will be purified only by a transmutation which may have to be more thorough than any other. Whoever behaved like that in 1933 would remain inwardly brittle otherwise, and inclined to further fanaticism. Whoever took part in the race mania, whoever had delusions of a revival based on fraud, whoever winked at the crimes then already committed is not merely liable but must renew himself morally. Whether and how he can do it is up to him alone, and scarcely open to any outside scrutiny.
(e) There is a difference between activity and passivity. The political performers and executors, the leaders and the propagandists are guilty. If they did not become criminals, they still have, by their activity, incurred a positively determinable guilt.
But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner indifference toward the witnessed evil—that is moral guilt.
(f) The moral guilt of outward compliance, of running with the pack, is shared to some extent by a great many of us. To maintain his existence, to keep his job, to protect his chances a man would join the Party and carry out other nominal acts of conformism.
Nobody will find an absolute excuse for doing so—notably in view of the many Germans who, in fact, did not conform, and bore the disadvantages.
Yet we must remember what the situation looked like in, say, 1936 or ’37. The Party was the state. Conditions seemed incalculably permanent. Nothing short of a war could upset the régime. All the powers were appeasing Hitler. All wanted peace. A German who did not want to be out of everything, lose his profession, injure his business, was obliged to go along—the younger ones in particular. Now, membership in the Party or its professional organizations was no longer a political act; rather, it was a favor granted by the state which allowed the individual to join. A “badge” was needed, an external token without inner assent. A man asked to join in those days could hardly refuse. It is decisive for the meaning of compliance in what connection and from what motives he acquired his membership in the Party; each year and every situation has its own mitigating and aggravating circumstances, to be distinguished only in each individual case.
Morality is always influenced by mundane purposes. I may be morally bound to risk my life, if a realization is at stake; but there is no moral obligation to sacrifice one’s life in the sure knowledge that nothing will have been gained. Morally we have a duty to dare, not a duty to choose certain doom. Morally, in either case, we rather have the contrary duty, not to do what cannot serve the mundane purpose but to save ourselves for realizations in the world.
But there is within us a guilt consciousness which springs from another source. Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such—an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.
I quote from an address* I gave in August 1945: “We ourselves have changed since 1933. It was possible for us to seek death in humiliation—in 1933 when the Constitution was torn up, the dictatorship established in sham legality and all resistance swept away in the intoxication of a large part of our people. We could seek death when the crimes of the régime became publicly apparent on June 30, 1934, or with the lootings, deportations and murders of our Jewish friends and fellow-citizens in 1938, when to our ineradicable shame and disgrace the synagogues, houses of God, went up in flames throughout Germany. We could seek death when from the start of the war the régime acted against the words of Kant, our greatest philosopher, who called it a premise of international law that nothing must occur in war which would make a later reconcilement of the belligerents impossible. Thousands in Germany sought, or at least found death in battling the régime, most of them anonymously. We survivors did not seek it. We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away; we did not scream until we too were destroyed. We preferred to stay alive, on the feeble, if logical, ground that our death could not have helped anyone. We are guilty of being alive. We know before God, which deeply humiliates us. What happened to us in these twelve years is like a transmutation of our being.”
In November 1938, when the synagogues burned and Jews were deported for the first time, the guilt incurred was chiefly moral and political. In either sense, the guilty were those still in power. The generals stood by. In every town the commander could act against crime, for the soldier is there to protect all, if crime occurs on such a scale that the police cannot or fail to stop it. They did nothing. At that moment they forsook the once glorious ethical tradition of the German Army. It was not their business. They had dissociated themselves from the soul of the German people, in favor of an absolute military machine that was a law unto itself and took orders.
True, among our people many were outraged and many deeply moved by a horror containing a presentiment of coming calamity. But even more went right on with their activities, undisturbed in their social life and amusements, as if nothing had happened. That is moral guilt.
But the ones who in utter impotence, outraged and despairing, were unable to prevent the crimes took another step in their metamorphosis by a growing consciousness of metaphysical guilt.
If everything said before was not wholly unfounded, there can be no doubt that we Germans, every one of us, are guilty in some way. Hence there occur the consequences of guilt.
(1) All Germans without exception share in the political liability. All must cooperate in making amends to be brought into legal form. All must jointly suffer the effects of the acts of the victors, of their decisions, of their disunity. We are unable here to exert any influence as a factor of power.
Only by striving constantly for a sensible presentation of the facts, opportunities and dangers can we—unless everyone already knows what we say—collaborate on the premises of the decisions. In the proper form, and with reason, we may appeal to the victors.
(2) Not every German—indeed only a very small minority of Germans—will be punished for crimes. Another minority has to atone for National-Socialist activities. All may defend themselves. They will be judged by the courts of the victors, or by German courts established by the victors.
(3) Probably every German—though in greatly diverse forms—will have reasons morally to analyze himself. Here, however, he need not recognize any authority other than his own conscience.
(4) And probably every German capable of understanding will transform his approach to the world and himself in the metaphysical experiences of such a disaster. How that happens none can prescribe, and none anticipate. It is a matter of individual solitude. What comes out of it has to create the essential basis of what will in future be the German soul.
Such distinctions can be speciously used to get rid of the whole guilt question, for instance like this:
Political liability—all right, but it curtails only my material possibilities; I myself, my inner self is not affected by that at all.
Criminal guilt—that affects just a few, not me; it does not concern me.
Moral guilt—I hear that my conscience alone has jurisdiction, others have no right to accuse me. Well, my conscience is not going to be too hard on me. It wasn’t really so bad; let’s forget about it, and make a fresh start.
Metaphysical guilt—of that, finally, I was expressly told that none can charge it to another. I am supposed to perceive that in a transmutation. That’s a crazy idea of some philosopher. There is no such thing. And if there were, I wouldn’t notice it. That I needn’t bother with.
Our dissection of the guilt concepts can be turned into a trick, for getting rid of guilt. The distinctions are in the foreground. They can hide the source and the unity. Distinctions enable us to spirit away what does not suit us.
Having separated the elements of guilt, we return in the end to the question of collective guilt.
Though correct and meaningful everywhere, the separation carries with it the indicated temptation—as though by such distinctions we had dodged the charges and eased our burden. Something has been lost in the process—something which in collective guilt is always audible in spite of everything. For all the crudeness of collective thinking and collective condemnation we feel that we belong together.
In the end, of course, the true collective is the solidarity of all men before God. Somewhere, everyone may free himself from the bonds of state or people or group and break through to the invisible solidarity of men—as men of goodwill and as men sharing the common guilt of being human.
But historically we remain bound to the closer, narrower communities, and we should lose the ground under our feet without them.
First to restate the fact that all over the world collective concepts largely guide the judgment and feelings of men. This is undeniable. In the world today the German—whatever the German may be—is regarded as something one would rather not have to do with. German Jews abroad are undesirable as Germans; they are essentially deemed Germans, not Jews. In this collective way of thought political liability is simultaneously justified as punishment of moral guilt. Historically such collective thought is not infrequent; the barbarism of war has seized whole populations and delivered them to pillage, rape and sale into slavery. And on top of it comes moral annihilation of the unfortunates in the judgment of the victor. They shall not only submit but confess and do penance. Whoever is German, whether Christian or Jew, is evil in spirit.
This fact of a widespread, though not universal, world opinion keeps challenging us, not only to defend ourselves with our simple distinction of political liability and moral guilt but to examine what truth may possibly lie in collective thinking. We do not drop the distinction, but we have to narrow it by saying that the conduct which made us liable rests on a sum of political conditions whose nature is moral, as it were, because they help to determine individual morality. The individual cannot wholly detach himself from these conditions, for—consciously or unconsciously—he lives as a link in their chain and cannot escape from their influence even if he was in opposition. There is a sort of collective moral guilt in a people’s way of life which I share as an individual, and from which grow political realities.
For political conditions are inseparable from a people’s whole way of life. There is no absolute division of politics and human existence as long as man is still realizing an existence rather than perishing in eremitical seclusion.
By political conditions the Swiss, the Dutch have been formed, and all of us in Germany have been brought up for ages—we to obey, to feel dynastically, to be indifferent and irresponsible toward political reality—and these conditions are part of us even if we oppose them.
The way of life effects political events, and the resulting political conditions in turn place their imprint on the way of life. This is why there can be no radical separation of moral and political guilt. This is why every enlightenment of our political consciousness proportionately burdens our conscience. Political liberty has its moral aspects.
Thus, actual political liability is augmented by knowledge and then by a different self-esteem. That in fact all the people pay for all the acts of their government—quidquid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi—is a mere empirical fact; that they know themselves liable is the first indication of their dawning political liberty. It is to the extent of the existence and recognition of this knowledge that freedom is real, not a mere outward claim put forth by unfree men.
The inner political unfreedom has the opposite feeling. It obeys on the one hand, and feels not guilty on the other. The feeling of guilt, which makes us accept liability, is the beginning of the inner upheaval which seeks to realize political liberty.
The contrast of the free and the unfree mental attitude appears, for instance, in the two concepts of a statesman. The question has been raised whether nations are to blame for the leaders they put up with—for example, France for Napoleon. The idea is that the vast majority did go along and desired the power and the glory which Napoleon procured. In this view Napoleon was possible only because the French would have him; his greatness was the precision with which he understood what the mass of the people expected, what they wanted to hear, what illusions they wanted, what material realities they wanted. Could Lenz have been right in saying, “The state was born which suited the genius of France”? A part, a situation, yes—but not the genius of a nation as such! Who can define a national genius? The same genius has spawned very different realities.
One might think that, as a man must answer for his choice of the beloved to whom marriage binds him in a lifelong community of fate, a people answers for whomever it meekly obeys. Error is culpable; there is no escape from its consequences.
Precisely this, however, would be the wrong approach. The unconditional attachment to one person which is possible and proper in a marriage is pernicious on principle in a state. The loyalty of followers is a non-political relationship limited to narrow circles and primitive circumstances. In a free state all men are subject to control and change.
Hence there is twofold guilt—first, in the unconditional political surrender to a leader as such, and second, in the kind of leader submitted to. The atmosphere of submission is a sort of collective guilt.
All the restrictions concerning our liberation from moral guilt—in favor of mere political liability—do not affect what we established at the beginning and shall now restate:
We are politically responsible for our régime, for the acts of the régime, for the start of the war in this world-historical situation, and for the kind of leaders we allowed to rise among us. For that we answer to the victors, with our labor and with our working faculties, and must make such amends as are exacted from the vanquished.
In addition there is our moral guilt. Although this always burdens only the individual who must get along with himself, there still is a sort of collective morality contained in the ways of life and feeling, from which no individual can altogether escape and which have political significance as well. Here is the key to self-improvement; its use is up to us.
We feel something like a co-responsibility for the acts of members of our families. This co-responsibility cannot be objectivized. We should reject any manner of tribal liability. And yet, because of our consanguinity we are inclined to feel concerned whenever wrong is done by someone in the family—and also inclined, therefore, depending on the type and circumstances of the wrong and its victims, to make it up to them even if we are not morally and legally accountable.
Thus the German—that is, the German-speaking individual—feels concerned by everything growing from German roots. It is not the liability of a national but the concern of one who shares the life of the German spirit and soul—who is of one tongue, one stock, one fate with all the others—which here comes to cause, not as tangible guilt, but somehow analogous to co-responsibility.
We further feel that we not only share in what is done at present—thus being co-responsible for the deeds of our contemporaries—but in the links of tradition. We have to bear the guilt of our fathers. That the spiritual conditions of German life provided an opportunity for such a régime is a fact for which all of us are co-responsible. Of course this does not mean that we must acknowledge “the world of German ideas” or “German thought of the past” in general as the sources of the National-Socialist misdeeds. But it does mean that our national tradition contains something, mighty and threatening, which is our moral ruin.
We feel ourselves not only as individuals but as Germans. Every one, in his real being, is the German people. Who does not remember moments in his life when he said to himself, in opposition and in despair of his nation, “I am Germany”—or, in jubilant harmony with it, “I, too, am Germany!” The German character has no other form than these individuals. Hence the demands of transmutation, of rebirth, of rejection of evil are made of the nation in the form of demands from each individual.
Because in my innermost soul I cannot help feeling collectively, being German is to me—is to everyone—not a condition but a task. This is altogether different from making the nation absolute. I am a human being first of all; in particular I am a Frisian, a professor, a German, linked closely enough for a fusion of souls with other collective groups, and more or less closely with all groups I have come in touch with. For moments this proximity enables me to feel almost like a Jew or Dutchman or Englishman. Throughout it, however, the fact of my being German—that is, essentially, of life in the mother tongue—is so emphatic that in a way which is rationally not conceivable, which is even rationally refutable, I feel co-responsible for what Germans do and have done.
I feel closer to those Germans who feel likewise—without becoming melodramatic about it—and farther from the ones whose soul seems to deny this link. And this proximity means, above all, a common inspiring task—of not being German as we happen to be, but becoming German as we are not yet but ought to be, and as we hear it in the call of our ancestors rather than in the history of national idols.
By our feeling of collective guilt we feel the entire task of renewing human existence from its origin—the task which is given to all men on earth but which appears more urgently, more perceptibly, as decisively as all existence, when its own guilt brings a people face to face with nothingness.
As a philosopher I now seem to have strayed completely into the realm of feeling and to have abandoned conception. Indeed language fails at this point, and only negatively we may recall that all our distinctions—notwithstanding the fact that we hold them to be true and are by no means rescinding them—must not become resting places. We must not use them to let matters drop and free ourselves from the pressure under which we continue on our path, and which is to ripen what we hold most precious, the eternal essence of our soul.