Both we ourselves and those who wish us well are ready with ideas to alleviate our guilt. There can be no question of nullifying such guilt as we, distinguishing and reassembling, have developed here; but there are points of view which, by suggesting a more lenient judgment, simultaneously sharpen and characterize the type of guilt referred to at each time.
Germany under the Nazi régime was a prison. The guilt of getting into it is political guilt. Once the gates were shut, however, a prison break from within was no longer possible. Any discussion of what responsibility and guilt of the imprisoned remained and arose thereafter must consider the question what they could do at all.
To hold the inmates of a prison collectively responsible for outrages committed by the prison staff is clearly unjust.
It has been said that the millions—the millions of workers and the millions of soldiers—should have resisted. Since they did not, since they worked and fought for the war, they are considered guilty.
We may say in rebuttal that the 15,000,000 foreign workers worked just as well for the war as did the German workers. There is no evidence that more sabotage acts were committed by them. Only in the final weeks, with the collapse already under way, the foreign workers seem to have become active on a larger scale.
Large-scale actions are impossible without organization and leadership. To ask a people to rise even against a terrorist state is to ask the impossible. Such rebellion can only be a scattered, disconnected occurrence, generally anonymous, subsequently unknown—a quiet submersion in death. Only a few exceptions were publicized by special circumstances, and these only orally and in narrow limits (as the heroism of the two students, Scholls, and of Professor Huber in Munich).
This being so, we marvel at some accusations. Franz Werfel, in an unmerciful indictment of the whole German people written shortly after the collapse of Hitler Germany, says that “only the one Niemoeller resisted.” In the same article he mentions the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the concentration camps—why? Surely because they resisted, although for the most part only by word. The ineffective disappearance of these anonymous martyrs underlines the impossibility. After all, concentration camps were a purely domestic affair until 1939, and even after that they were filled largely with Germans. In every month of 1944 the number of political arrests exceeded 4,000. The fact that there were concentration camps until the very end proves that there was opposition in the country.
At times we seem to hear a pharisaical note in the charges, from those who perilously made their escape but finally—measured by suffering and death in concentration camps, and by the fear in Germany—lived abroad without terrorist compulsion, though with the sorrows of exile, and now claim credit for their emigration as such. This note we deem ourselves entitled to reject, without anger.
Some righteous voices have indeed been raised precisely in discernment of the terror apparatus and its consequences. Thus Dwight Macdonald wrote in the magazine Politics in March 1945: “The peak of terror and of guilt enforced by terror was achieved with the alternative, Kill or be killed,” and he added that many commanders assigned to executions and murders refused to take part in the cruelties and were shot.
Thus Hannah Arendt wrote about the participation and the complicity of the German people in the crimes of the Fuehrer as the result of organized terror. Family men, simple jobholders, whom nobody would ever have suspected of being capable of murder and who always had done their duty, now obeyed the orders to kill people and to commit other atrocities in the concentration camps with the same sense of duty.*
We distinguish between cause and guilt. An exposition showing why things happened as they did, and why indeed they could not but so happen, is automatically considered an excuse. A cause is blind and involuntary. Guilt is seeing and free.
We usually deal in like fashion with political events. The causal connection of history seems to relieve a people of responsibility. Hence their satisfaction if, in adversity, effective causes seem to make inevitability plausible.
Many tend to accept and stress their responsibility when they talk of their present actions whose arbitrariness they would like to see released from restraints, conditions and obligations. In case of failure, on the other hand, they tend to decline responsibility and plead allegedly inescapable necessities. Responsibility had been a talking point, not an experience.
All through these years, accordingly, one could hear that if Germany won the war the victory and the credit would be the Party’s—while if Germany lost, the losers and the guilty would be the German people.
But actually, in the causal connections of history, cause and responsibility are indivisible wherever human activity is at work. As soon as decisions and actions play a part in events, every cause is at the same time either credit or guilt.
Even those happenings which are independent of will and decision still are human tasks. The effects of natural causes depend also on how man takes them, how he handles them, what he makes out of them. Cognition of history, therefore, is never such as to apprehend its course as flatly necessary. This cognition can never make certain predictions (as possible, for instance, in astronomy), nor can it retrospectively perceive an inevitability of general events and individual actions. In either case it sees the scope of possibilities, only more richly and concretely in the case of the past.
In turn, this cognition, historic-sociological insight and the resulting picture of history, affects events and is to this extent a matter of responsibility.
Chiefly named as premises independent of freedom—and thus of guilt and responsibility—are the conditions of geography and the world-historical situation.
Germany has open borders all around. To maintain itself as a nation, it must be militarily strong at all times. Periods of weakness have made it a prey to aggression from the West, East and North, finally even from the South (Turks). Because of its geographical situation Germany never knew the peace of an unmenaced existence, as England knew it and, even more so, America. England could afford to pay for its magnificent domestic evolution in decades of impotence in foreign politics and military weakness. It was by no means conquered for that reason; its last invasion took place in 1066. A country such as Germany, uncemented by natural frontiers, was forced to develop military states to keep its nationhood alive at all. This function was long performed by Austria, later by Prussia.
The peculiarity and military style of each state would mark the rest of Germany and yet would always be felt also as alien. It took an effort to gloss over the fact that Germany either had to be ruled by something which, though German, was alien to the rest, or would in the impotence of a scattered whole be left at the mercy of foreign nations.
Thus Germany had no lasting center, only transient centers of gravity, with the result that none could be felt and recognized as its own by more than a part of Germany.
Nor, indeed, was there a spiritual center, a common meeting ground for all Germans. Even our classic literature and philosophy had not yet become the property of our whole people. They belonged to a small, educated stratum, though one extending as far as German was spoken, beyond the borders of the German state. And of unanimity in acknowledging greatness there is no trace here, either.
We might say that the geographical situation not only compelled German militarism with its consequences—the prevalence of authority-worship and servility, the lack of libertarianism and a democratic spirit—but also made a necessarily transient phenomenon of every organized state. To last awhile, any state required favorable circumstances and superior, unusually prudent statesmen, while a single irresponsible political leader could permanently ruin Germany and the state.
Yet however true this basic trait of our reflections may be, it is important for us not to interpret it as absolute necessity. In what direction the military develop, whether or not wise leaders appear—these things are in no way to be blamed on the geographical situation.
In a similar situation, for example, the political energy, solidarity and prudence of the Romans produced quite different results—a united Italy and later a world empire, although one which in the end crushed liberty, too. The study of republican Rome is of great interest as showing how a military development and imperialism led a democratic people to the loss of liberty and to dictatorship.
If geographical conditions leave a margin of freedom, the decisive factor beyond guilt and responsibility is generally said to be the “natural” national character. This, however, is a refuge of ignorance and an instrument of false evaluations—whether appreciative or depreciative.
There probably is something in the natural foundation of our vital existence which has effects extending to the peak of our spirituality—but we may say that our knowledge of it is virtually nil. The intuition of direct impression—as evident as it is deceptive, as compelling for the moment as it is unreliable at length—has not been raised to the level of real knowledge by any racial theory.
In fact, we always describe national character in terms of arbitrarily selected historical phenomena. Yet these in turn have always been caused by events, and by conditions marked by events. At every time they are one group of phenomena, appearing only as one of many types. Other situations might bring entirely different, otherwise hidden character traits to the fore. A distinct natural character complete with talents may very well exist, but we simply do not know it.
We must not shift our responsibility to anything like that. As men we must know ourselves free for all possibilities.
The position of Germany in the world, world events at large, the others’ conduct toward Germany—all this is the more important for Germany since its defenseless central geographical location exposes it more than other countries to influences from outside. This is why Ranke’s assertion of the primacy of foreign over domestic politics is true of Germany but not of history in general.
The political connections of the last half-century—especially of the events and modes of conduct since 1918, since the Allies’ first victory over Germany—will not be presented here, although they were certainly not immaterial to the developments which became possible in Germany. I shall glance only at an inner, spiritual world phenomenon. Perhaps—but who could dare assert real cognition here?—we may say this:
What broke out in Germany was under way in the entire Western world as a crisis of faith, of the spirit.
This does not diminish our guilt—for it was here in Germany that the outbreak occurred, not somewhere else—but it does free us from absolute isolation. It makes us instructive for the others. It concerns all.
This world-historical crisis is not simply defined. The declining effectiveness of the Christian and Biblical faith; the lack of faith seeking a substitute; the social upheaval, due to technology and production methods, which in the nature of things leads irresistibly to socialist orders in which the masses of the population, that is everyone, comes to his human right—these upheavals are under way. Everywhere the situation is more or less so as to make men call for a change. In such a case the ones who are hardest hit, most deeply aware of their lack of contentment, incline to hasty, untimely, deceptive, fraudulent solutions.
In a development which has seized the world, Germany danced such a fraudulent solo to its doom.
Whoever has not yet found himself guilty in spontaneous self-analysis will tend to accuse his accusers. For instance, he may ask whether they are better than the ones they censure, or whether they do not share the guilt of events, because of acts which could not but promote such possibilities.
Among us Germans the tendency to hit back at present indicates that we have not yet understood ourselves. For the first thing each of us needs in disaster is clarity about himself. The foundation of our new life must come from the origin of our being and can only be achieved in unreserved self-analysis.
This does not mean, however, that we must close our eyes to the facts and to truth in regarding the other nations, to which Germany owes its final liberation from the Hitler yoke and to whose decision our future is entrusted.
We must and we may elucidate to ourselves how the others’ conduct has made our situation more difficult, on the domestic and on the foreign scene. For their past and future actions come from the world in which we, entirely dependent on it, are to find our way. We must shun illusions and come to a correct overall evaluation. We must yield neither to blind hostility nor to blind hope.
If we use the words, “guilt of the others,” it may mislead us. If they, by their conduct, made events possible, this is political guilt. But in discussing it we must never for a moment forget that this guilt is on another level than the crimes of Hitler.
Two points seem essential: the political acts of the victorious powers since 1918, and their inactivity while Hitler’s Germany was organizing itself.
(1) England, France and America were the victorious powers of 1918. The course of world history was in their hands, not in those of the vanquished. The victor’s responsibility is his alone, to accept or to evade. If he evades it, his historical guilt is plain.
The victor cannot be entitled simply to withdraw to his own narrower sphere, there to be left alone and merely watch what happens elsewhere in the world. If an event threatens dire consequences, he has the power to prevent it. To have this power and fail to use it is political guilt. To be content with paper protests is evasion of responsibility. This inaction is one charge that may be brought against the victorious powers—although, of course, it does not free us from any guilt.
In discussing this further, one may point to the peace treaty of Versailles and its consequences, and then to the policy of letting Germany slide into the conditions which produced National-Socialism. Next, one may bring up the toleration of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria—the first act of violence which, if successful, was bound to be copied—and the toleration of Mussolini’s act of violence, the Ethiopian campaign of 1935. One may deplore the policy of England which in Geneva defeated Mussolini through the League of Nations and then let its resolutions stay on paper, lacking the will and the strength required to destroy Mussolini in fact, but also lacking the clear radicality to steer an opposite course, to join him and, while slowly changing his regime, stand with him against Hitler to insure peace. For Mussolini then was ready to side with the Western powers against Germany; as late as 1934 he mobilized his forces and delivered a threatening, since forgotten speech as Hitler wanted to march into Austria. The result of these half-measures was the alliance of Mussolini and Hitler.
However, it must be pointed out here that no one knows what further consequences different decisions might have had. And above all: British policy also has moral aspects—a fact which National-Socialism actually included in its calculations, as British weakness. The British cannot unrestrainedly make any decision that is politically effective. They want peace. They want to utilize every chance of preserving it before they take extreme measures. They are not ready to go to war until war is obviously inescapable.
(2) There is a solidarity not only among fellow-citizens but also among Europeans and among mankind. The responsibility of the inactive bystander ranges from the mutual one of fellow-citizens to one that is universally human.
Rightly or wrongly, once the gates had shut on our German prison we were hoping for European solidarity.
As yet we had no idea of the last horrible consequences and crimes. But we saw the utter loss of liberty. We knew that now the arbitrary tyranny of those in power was given free rein. We saw injustice, saw outcasts, though all of it was still harmless in comparison with later years. We knew about concentration camps, though ignorant still of the cruelties going on there.
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?
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.
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 good-will.
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?
They would reject any warnings from us wicked wretches. They would fail to understand, perhaps, and might even find it presumptuous if Germans should worry over the course of history—which is their business, not that of the Germans. And yet, we are oppressed by one nightmarish idea: if a dictatorship in Hitler’s style should ever rise in America, all hope would be lost for ages. We in Germany could be freed from the outside. Once a dictatorship has been established, no liberation from within is possible. Should the Anglo-Saxon world be dictatorially conquered from within, as we were, there would no longer be an outside, nor a liberation. The freedom fought for and won by Western man over hundreds, thousands of years would be a thing of the past. The primitivity of despotism would reign again, but with all means of technology. True, man cannot be forever enslaved; but this comfort would then be a very distant one, on a plane with Plato’s dictum that in the course of infinite time everything that is possible will here or there occur or recur as a reality. We see the feelings of moral superiority and we are frightened: he who feels absolutely safe from danger is already on the way to fall victim to it. The German fate could provide all others with experience. If only they would understand this experience! We are no inferior race. Everywhere people have similar qualities. Everywhere there are violent, criminal, vitally capable minorities apt to seize the reins if occasion offers, and to proceed with brutality.
We may well worry over the victors’ self-certainty. For all decisive responsibility for the course of events will henceforth be theirs. It is up to them to prevent evil or conjure up new evil. Whatever guilt they might incur from now on would be as calamitous for us as for them. Now that the whole of mankind is at stake, their responsibility for their actions is intensified. Unless a break is made in the evil chain, the fate which overtook us will overtake the victors—and all of mankind with them. The myopia of human thinking—especially in the form of a world opinion pouring over everything at times like an irresistible tide—constitutes a huge danger. The instruments of God are not God on earth. To repay evil with evil—notably to the jailed, not merely the jailers—would make evil and bear new calamities.
In tracing our own guilt back to its source we come upon the human essence—which in its German form has fallen into a peculiar, terrible incurring of guilt but exists as a possibility in man as such.
Thus German guilt is sometimes called the guilt of all: the hidden evil everywhere is jointly guilty of the outbreak of evil in this German place.
It would, indeed, be an evasion and a false excuse if we Germans tried to exculpate ourselves by pointing to the guilt of being human. It is not relief but greater depth to which the idea can help us. The question of original sin must not become a way to dodge German guilt. Knowledge of original sin is not yet insight into German guilt. But neither must the religious confession of original sin serve as guise for a false German confession of collective guilt, with the one in dishonest haziness taking the place of the other.
We feel no desire to accuse the others; we do not want to infect them as it were, to drag them onto our path of doom. But at the distance and with the anxiey of those who stumbled onto it and now come to and reflect, we think: if only the others might not walk in such ways—if only those among us who are of good-will might be able to rely on them.
Now a new period of history has begun. From now on, responsibility for whatever happens rests with the victorious powers.