"Guilt is, like innocence, not collective, but personal...The vast majority of today's population were either children then or had not been born. They cannot profess a guilt of their own for crimes that they did not commit. No discerning person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans. But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past."
Just to be sure that the passage is not misinterpreted (not saying you do, OP): This was not said to excuse the Germans from the responsibility of facing their history.
I can personally be not guilty and yet, by being part of a society that builds on a troubled past, bear the responsibilities that come with that past (responsibility to do better, reparations, making amends, and alike).
And in this spirit, Weizaecker continued: "No discerning person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans. But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories."
This point can imv be applied to many historical failings and their long lasting legacies.
> This point can imv be applied to many historical failings and their long lasting legacies.
Feels particularly resonant at this point in the United States. I've heard the argument before that slavery was abolished long ago, so it's time to move on. Unfortunately to the contrary: the effects are still with us. That doesn't mean us white folks have to assume personal guilt as if we held slaves ourselves, but we should be active in making amends.
The Black Lives Matter protests have spawned a number of interesting conversations with my kids. One is on the difference between "fault" and "responsibility". They are similar: both imply an obligation to make amends or otherwise fix a problem.
"Fault" means you are responsible because you caused the problem. You break it, you fix it.
But as we get older and take on a greater share of the burdens and rewards of social connections and community, we become responsible for things that are not our fault. If my stove breaks, I am responsible for fixing it. I didn't break it—stuff just breaks on its own sometimes—but I own it, and ownership comes with that responsibility.
I see many people who, maybe from a lack of maturity, don't understand you can carry responsibility without fault. I think part of the pushback against Black Lives Matter is that when you tell white Americans that they are now responsible for systemic racism and the injustices of America's past, they hear that as "you should feel guilty for these". They get angry because they don't think it's fair that they should feel bad for something that isn't their fault.
Black Lives Matter is not about saying that most white people today personally caused most of the problems black people face (though there are certainly a minor of awful racist people who do). It's about acknowledging that having ownership of all of the many many benefits of being a white American today comes with some responsibilities as well. If life is a videogame, it's like we're playing the game in easy mode and we spawned with a bunch of free loot. It's not our fault that others didn't spawn so lucky, but we do have the loot and it carries the responsibility that we use it to help lift up others.
Our privilege is not supposed to be a source of guilt or shame, but a duty and opportunity to use it to help others.
The US also needs at some point to acknowledge it's past evils. Perhaps no penance is needed, but it is need to acknowledge the evils of the confederacy (and many other things like redlining, but I feel those are widely believed as wrong today).
We as a country need our own truth and reconciliation commission.
Short story: Having confederate monuments and the way history is thought in schools in some places is for sure a start. We need to get away from the south did nothing wrong, and of course put focus on what the north did wrong as well. There is a reason Minnesota is not the best place to live for black people.
To put a more cynical twist on it for those less emotionally inclined, the contradiction between a US that believes in equality between humans and 30% of its population suffering from the legacy of slavery will eventually tear US society apart. It doesn't matter if you don't personally feel guilt or the need to fix this racial inequality, if this issue doesn't get fixed there may not be a US in the future. Responsibility means dealing with the problems of life even if you don't want to and wish it didn't exist before those problems spiral out of control.
This: "For us, the 8th of May is above all a date to remember what people had to suffer. It is also a date to reflect on the course taken by our history. The greater honesty we show in commemorating this day, the freer we are to face the consequences with due responsibility. For us Germans, 8 May is not a day of celebration. Those who actually witnessed that day in 1945 think back on highly personal and hence highly different experiences. Some returned home, others lost their homes. Some were liberated, whilst for others it was the start of captivity. Many were simply grateful that the bombing at night and fear had passed and that they had survived. Others felt first and foremost grief at the complete defeat suffered by their country. Some Germans felt bitterness about their shattered illusions, whilst others were grateful for the gift of a new start."
The honesty and bravery of the speech is remarkable - that a leader can tell those he leads painful and difficult truths - rather than tell them merely what will appease them. Everyday we see evidence of how easy it is to appeal to base and superficial feelings, rather than what is noble and honest.
There is so much we can learn from both the causes of the tyranny and how the aftermath was handled, politically, personally and socially.
Just a little background from a German perspective: Weizsäcker here is not the physicist but Richard von Weizsäcker, his brother.
Richard von Weizsäcker was President of Germany from mid 80s to mid 90s. The President of Germany is, simply put, like British Monarchy. In practice he has mostly a representative role. As a president Weizsäcker was well popular in Germany and neither was reclusive nor caused any scandals, which cannot be said about later presidents.
Except unlike the British Monarchy, one is not born into the position and cannot expect to gain the position purely by blood. The position itself may be largely ceremonial, but the holder of the post is recognised as an elder statesperson in their own right for their career prior to the presidency.
You can still get duffers in such jobs as often a candidate is put forward who's agreeable all parties and as such can be the lowest common denominator who won't rock the boat.
Which is interesting, because those aren't common in Germany. For the Bundespräsident, they have another interesting thing: there are no limits on how many terms you serve, you just can't serve more than two in a row.
But that's also true for e.g. the US and russian presidents, no? Except those actually hold real power.
In practise, most german presidents will just be way too old four years after they leave office to be a viable candidate, and it looks a bit absurd for them to be pushed back into the office, exactly because there's very little real power.
I don't think it's possible for the US president, they are limited to 10 years (two terms + two years if they were vice president and became acting president) which, afaik, is per life-time.
I agree though, it's not an issue, precisely because the German president has historically not acted partisan (even though he's usually a member of a party) and not be involved in day-to-day politics, so it's not too hard to find somebody that everybody can agree on. This may change if the office becomes more politicized, but I doubt we'll see somebody get re-elected after having paused for a term.
That's correct - a US president cannot serve more than two terms. If they were already acting as President for two or more years, they can only be elected to the position once. This was codified in the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution.
Since we're on the topic of Germany WWII. I read a couple books about Treblinka over the weekend. The atrocities that happened there were sickening. To read about what these people were forced to do there in this death camp is painful.
The Germans and Ukrainians who did these horrific acts of murder and torture were unaffected by it, as told by two authors who survived.
It leaves me with more questions than answers. How can people do this to others, it takes so little to motivate people to turn into savage murders, and why did then not teach us about these death camps in school. Everyone knows about Auschwitz but they skipped over the pure death camps and focused more on the rah-rah we're winning battles than observing the suffering that took place. It all makes me sad. It makes me sad knowing what some people in America the "free" country were going through during this time too.
It's extremely difficult to look at that suffering. The mind can't handle it, so we put filters between ourselves and it.
I recently read a memoir by a woman who survived Auschwitz and eventually became a psychotherapist in the US. (Hint: if that sounds like Viktor Frankl, it's not by coincidence.) Her story is astonishing. But the chapters about the camp and the death march after it are not easy. I had to pause a lot.
A few years back we did a tour of Auschwitz - the excellent Polish guide gave us his personal view that there is nothing about Germans that made them prone to such acts and that many countries to this day routinely plan for far greater acts of slaughter and somehow we think this is normal.
Interesting. I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the author makes the opposite case: the German people, due to their founding mythology and geopolitical history, were susceptible to ideas of authoritarianism and racial superiority. Hegel and Nietszche provided a popular philosophical backing for the supremacy of the state and the view of individuals as primarily agents of the state rather than free actors in their own right.
Hitler saw this and built a political movement around it.
In Indonesia in the 60s several hundred thousands people categorized as communists were deported, tortured killed and often massacred (with the active support of the USA). Nobody was punished for that or asked for repentance, ever.
There is a documentary were some old guys tell and show, while laughing, how they throated children, raped women, etc. They're happy old people still boasting about their horrible crimes 55 years later.
You may want to read the wartime letters of the German writer Heinrich Böll. A rather unique perspective on WWII by a conscripted soldier who would later become a Nobel prize winner.
i don't know where you are from, but the education about the holocaust i received was especially memorable because it went through great detail explaining how the holocaust was different from the millenia of bloodshed and genocide that happened before. (European history is drowned in blood and suppresion sadly).
The holocaust is especially horrifying because it turned killing into an abstract process that made apathy the "silent killer" so to speak.
The holocaust was possible because step by step, the dehumanization and abstraction of the process resulted in people being able to be apathetic to it.
Speaking of dehumanisation and abstraction, Roberto Begnini's "math problem" scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LhuGKejDq8&t=116
came to mind during March-era discussions of possible Covid responses.
> "The holocaust was possible because step by step, the dehumanization and abstraction of the process resulted in people being able to be apathetic to it."
Abstraction of the process is not required nor is a process of dehumanization if it's already culturally ingrained. It is rarely spoken of but the Japanese occupation of Asia immediately preceding and during WWII caused nearly triple the deaths of the Holocaust (the vast majority being civilian) with as much or greater brutality in many cases and was not neatly confined to camps but widespread across all of Japan's occupied territories.
If you are interested in the topic read - Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
> Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews
> The first mass murder takes place in a Polish town called Jozefow. The commander of the unit was teary-eyed and choked up when he gave the order to his men. Accounts hold that he even gave them a way out, stating that if any man didn’t think they were up for the challenge (of murdering thousands of Jews on that day), they were free to step down. About twelve men (among hundreds) decided to step down and opt out of the killing.
> Ultimately, these bakers, salesmen, and police officers were directly responsible for the deaths of 38,000 men, women and children through mass-shootings, and another 45,200 through collecting people from the ghettos and forcing them onto trains for Treblinka (a Nazi extermination camp).
> Browning offers up a variety of reasons that these ordinary men participated in genocide, some more pertinent than others. Among those reasons are deference to authority, psychological need for conformity, fear of a brutal regime, fear of looking “weak” in front of other members of the battalion, detachment from the people they were killing, and indoctrination via the Nazi propaganda machine. None of these individual reasons would have been enough to drive ordinary men to mass murder, but altogether, the reasons became enough for many of them.
Also Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust is a good detailed telling of logic of events that lead to invention of extermination camps (it was easier on the consience of Einsatztruppen)
PS. Also reading president Weizsäcker's speech kep in mind that Germany and Austria actively opposed justice upon perpetrators of Holocaust and other war crimes in the East.
"In our country, a new generation has grown up to assume political responsibility. Our young people are not responsible for what happened over forty years ago. But they are responsible for the historical consequences. We in the older generation owe to young people not the fulfilment of dreams but honesty. We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive. We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not one-sidedly, without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance.
From our own history we learn what man is capable of. For that reason we must not imagine that we are now quite different and have become better. There is no ultimately achievable moral perfection – for no individual and for no nation. We have learned as human beings, and as human beings we remain in danger. But we have the strength to overcome such danger again and again.
Hitler's constant approach was to stir up prejudices, enmity and hatred. What is asked of young people today is this: do not let yourselves be forced into enmity and hatred of other people, of Russians or Americans, Jews or Turks, of alternatives or conservatives, blacks or whites. Learn to live together, not in opposition to each other."
There is for example, no such thing in modern Turkey over the extermination of the native peoples of Anatolia which led to the formation of the Turkish state with a uniform religious/ethnic composition. On the contrary, that is a source of national pride these days.
Other examples abound (India, Pakistan, China, etc)
That's how it looks if you oversimplify history and do it with only one sentence. Turks started to migrate into Anatolia about 600 AD. However, the most defining moment and the most known turning point is the Battle of Menzikert in 1071. This puts at least 1000 years of slow demographic change.
We can argue a lot of details about how it happened. But it is better to stick to your main argument that the guilt over past crimes is mainly a Western thing. That could not be further than the truth. That's where I object mainly. Such demographic changes happened much faster and more brutal in the West by the Western people. Both North and South American continents that are tens of times larger areas than Anatolia has seen genocidal change for a much shorter period of time for much bigger population. It is estimated that the populate in North America was comparable to that of Europe when "discoveries" started. I do not see such guilt proportional to what happened.
You may think that those are a bit in the past. How about French and Belgian colonialism. The crimes committed by Belgian in Kongo pales even that of Germans. The most conservative figure is that Belgians killed 10 Million people. The upper estimate is about 40M. Why we do not hear about those crimes as much as about what Germans did ? Kongolese are not human? or this much emphasis serve a political agenda?
Regardless of when the first Turk appeared in Anatolia, it does not change the fact that the native populations were completely wiped out mostly in recent history. Is the state organized extermination of Armenians taught to Turkish schools like the crimes of colonialism are in major western former colonial powers? How about the current treatment of Kurds in Turkey and even in neighboring countries?
It is you oversimplifying and throwing around numbers to over-justify.
I stand by my main claim the revisiting past crimes of nationhood, is mainly a western thing.
I am deliberately avoiding the Armenian issue not to overlook it but not to lose focus. I wanted to reply to your "mainly a Western thing" argument. All my examples were only to enforce the argument and not to divert the attention. That is why I am not dignifying other threads by replying since they are doing exactly what they accuse me of.
It was probably my mistake not to make my point clear enough. I would like to restate my argument is that we only hear German war crimes at this high amplitude and frequency but almost never about the crimes committed by French or Belgian or any other Western nation. Not on the front page of HN nor on NYTimes. French and Belgian atrocities were also a nation-state crime including the one committed in the Americas.
> But it is better to stick to your main argument that the guilt over past crimes is mainly a Western thing. That could not be further than the truth. That's where I object mainly.
Well.. I mean, Turkey has a few more recent genocidal episodes that regularly lead to diplomatic issues because it's taboo to mention.
I'd agree with "mainly Western" though certainly not "only Western".
> You may think that those are a bit in the past. How about French and Belgian colonialism.
That's pretty text book What-Aboutism, but I from all I hear from French friends, French colonialism is very much public knowledge and is taught in schools. Not quite as focused as in Germany where the Nazi era is the main focus of history in schools, but certainly not anywhere close to unheard of.
I'm not. I'm just stating the sad fact that acknowledgement of past crimes is mostly done in western democracies.
I've never seen, for example, a similar speech by a Turkish, Chinese or Pakistani politician about the crimes committed in the name of their nation state and the collective myths used to keep it all together.
Those nations also haven't lost a war in which the rest of the world told them, "hey, stop, you're being really evil and you're wrong."
There's probably nothing special about Western Europeans/Germany in this regard except for the fact that they were forced to come to terms with their crimes.
> Those nations also haven't lost a war in which the rest of the world told them, "hey, stop, you're being really evil and you're wrong."
The Ottoman Empire did, they were allied with Germany in WW1, lost and Turkey was all that remained of the empire. It hasn't change the tune, though. Japan did as well, and they're also ahead of the world average, but I believe it's still quite a way off from the Western approach. They have become more pacifist than Western countries though.
> There's probably nothing special about Western Europeans/Germany in this regard except for the fact that they were forced to come to terms with their crimes.
I don't think that's accurate. The US, France or the UK did not lose a war either, yet they very much did look at their past atrocities. Not enough, I'm sure some will argue, but still a lot more than the world average.
I am not sure if this question directed to my comment above since you did not ask it under that thread. But if it were a mistake I am happy to answer and it is a big NO. Please read my comment again.
Only a conservative political leader who was a captain on the Eastern Front telling the nation that it was time to acknowledge the past and look to the future could be heard.
"Yet with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime."
"What is asked of young people today is this: do not let yourselves be forced into enmity and hatred of other people, of Russians or Americans, Jews or Turks, of alternatives or conservatives, blacks or whites. Learn to live together, not in opposition to each other."
It's educational how Germany's East / West division reverberates in this speech with the special relation to the USSR. The apologetic tone, appeasement, justification.
One can only hope that this would no longer be necessary nowadays.
The USSR ethnically cleansed Germany in response? What? Or do you mean something else?
Had Nazi Germany prevailed, it is estimated about 30 million of all Slavs in Eastern Europe would have been cleansed, as per the stated goals of Generalplan Ost [1]. Getting rid of "undesirables" and "surplus population" on one of the widest scales mankind had ever seen was one of the main goals of Nazi expansion. They started to carry out this plan, but thankfully losing the war put a stop to that.
On the other hand, the USSR did prevail, and made East Germany into a puppet state. We can see the results without speculation. Indeed this resulted in repression and suppression and execution of political dissidents, let's not mince words here. But there are still Germans alive, aren't there? Had Nazi Germany prevailed, there would be few, if any, Slavs -- Russians, Poles or whatever -- alive today.
In particular, postwar Poland basically moved west: the Soviet Union kept the 77.6 thousand square miles of Polish territory it had captured when both Germany and Russia partitioned it in 1939, while Poland was given 48.1 thousand miles of German territory. The Soviet-backed Polish government cleansed the formerly-German territories of ethnic Germans.
Given the far worse behaviour of Germany during the war (I believe most Germans survived the ethnic cleansing committed by Poland, while the goal of Nazi Germany was extermination of the Poles), it can be a bit difficult to care about the suffering of Germans. But consider that IIRC roughly two million Germans died in the expulsions from Poland and other countries, and no doubt at least a few of those were innocent women and children (as, of course, were many of Nazi Germany's victims). Two wrongs do not make a right, and mass murder of innocent civilians is always wrong.
> Two wrongs do not make a right, and mass murder of innocent civilians is always wrong.
Fully agreed. It's hard to see the two events as similar, though. The scale (and intent) alone is mind-boggingly different. The Germans intended to wipe out Slavs (and other undesirables), and you couldn't opt out of this by swallowing the party line or swearing allegiance to Germany (just as you couldn't opt out of being a Jew -- Nazis didn't care about your religious beliefs, if any; they considered Jewishness a "race" to be exterminated). At best you could hope for their bullshit racial policies to deem you "Germanic", if you looked white enough and weren't Jewish.
Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan to ethnically cleanse them to make room for Soviet citizens in German land.
Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan to ethnically cleanse them to make room for Soviet citizens in German land.
The USSR declared Germans in the annexed territories illegal residents. Going by Wikipedia, in 1947/48, officially, 102,125 Germans got shipped from East Prussia to the Soviet Zone, though only 99,481 arrived there (one reason for this was that food wasn't always provided on a journey that took 4-7 days by train). The GDR attributed this discrepancy to a 'calculation error'.
There's also the issue of German orphans that were left behind (which are known as 'Wolskinder'). The lucky ones got adopted (eg by Lithuanian farmers), changed their names, and pretended not to be German. The unlucky ones were exploited as cheap labour, starved or got killed. His criticism of the treatment of German civilians was one of the things that got Solzhenitsyn arrested.
I understand all of this. However, again look at the numbers and planned genocide: the Nazis aimed at killing -- murdering, not expelling, mind you -- most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe. About 30 million people would have been killed, both through starvation and shooting/gassing if they didn't die fast enough, because they were deemed vermin and "surplus" population. And this wasn't even retaliation for anything, it was planned in cold blood.
Did the Soviets exterminate all Germans in their sphere of influence once they won the war? What were the Nazi plans had they won (and which they partially implemented during the war)?
This doesn't excuse even a single German civilian killed by the Soviets. But the scale and planning are tremendously different, which is why the comparison makes little sense. I think the latter day equivocation that both sides were more or less the same is a regrettable artifact of Cold War thinking.
Yes, I'm familiar with the massacre. As horrific as it was, these weren't cases of ethnic cleansing. There was no intent to remove Germans from the face of the Earth, like Generalplan Ost was in regards to Slavs.
We know this. How? Because the Nazis stated they wanted Slavs killed, but when the Soviets took over East Germany, they didn't wipe out all Germans (as they would have done, had they been bent on racial genocide as the Nazis were).
This is the one example were we can clearly compare plans and see outcomes, and how they differed. Even the scales are orders or magnitude different!
Perhaps I should have been more precise. You're absolutely right about being apologetic for the atrocities committed.
I was referring to trying to justify Soviet Union's attacks on Poland and Finland as well as annexation of parts of Romania. E.g.'The Soviet Union was prepared to allow
other nations to fight one another so that it could have a share of the spoils'.
It was not 'other nations' fighting and Soviet-German alliance provided room for Soviet expansionism.
"Hitler's constant approach was to stir up prejudices, enmity and hatred. What is asked of young people today is this: do not let yourselves be forced into enmity and hatred of other people, of Russians or Americans, Jews or Turks, of alternatives or conservatives, blacks or whites. Learn to live together, not in opposition to each
other."
I couldn’t read the whole thing, but as a Jew whose relatives and culture was murdered by the Germans, I found it did not adequately address the reality that many Germans knew about the camps (to say nothing of the progroms and humiliations that preceded them) and that the people who perpetrated the Holocaust were in large part incorporated unreformed into German society after the war.
The speech reads
> Yet with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime.
Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985, I can’t know. But the historical fact is (just to take an example) the post war German government was staffed with individuals who served at high positions in the Nazi regime and surely believed in, or at least we’re comfortable with, the Nazi cause. I’m sure in the private sector there were even more unreformed Nazis.
It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. Both the camps and the progroms and public humiliations visited upon Jews and others.
EDIT: I take the criticism of some of the commenters below that not all Germans knew the full extent of the mass murder.
So the whole speech rings hollow to me, and it’s purpose mostly seems to be to assuage the guilt of an entire population responsible for truly horrific acts. Which, yeah, the Germans would need that in order to be able to move forward, but the comments here are definitely not understanding the speech in that critical light.
Saying that the German people all knew of what was being done is not historical, nor the experience of my family. When my great grandparents were taken from their home in 1943 along with all the other Jews in town (other than my Grandmother who was married to a non-Jew, and my mother) they had no idea where they were being taken. Of course they all died but no one had any idea until after the war was over and even today we can only speculate exactly where. My grandmother later survived a year in a camp, and my mom hid in a basement for year as a child. No one in their small town had any inkling of what was happening inside Germany other than what the propaganda was telling them, although there were people with hidden radios in town, even the Allies did not say anything useful.
To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything.
History is bad enough without changing it just because we have moved beyond, nor is forgetting its lessons and winding up in the same boat again. Guilt belongs to the guilty not the collective; it's up to the collective to ensure it never happens again and keep the guilty from getting away.
> To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything.
I agree with this point and take your criticism that I painted with too broad a brush in terms of who could know what.
Careful now. Everybody knew the Jews were persecuted, had their rights and belongings taken away and were rounded up in ghettos and camps, from where they eventually were "evacuated to the East". What civilians could justifiably claim is they didn't know where or how the killing happened. Information about this was kept vague. While the concentration camps where public knowledge, the extermination camps were kept secret. So German civilians could say they didn't know about Babi Yar or Treblinka and the gas chambers - but that is a far cry from saying they didn't know about the persecution and genocide.
It should also be noted that the T4 euthanasia program was scaled back due to public protests. This shows not only that people actually knew it happened (even if it was kind-of secret) but also that protest could actually work. The Nazi party actually cared a great deal about public opinion which is why propaganda was so important to them. One of the reasons the extermination camps were kept secret is they feared protests.
There were also the Rosenstrasse protests, where (non-Jewish) wives of Jewish men protested against deportation of their men. This actually caused the men to be released.
So "we didn't know and couldn't have done anything anyway" is ahistorical. I can understand why people cling to it, but it is a dangerous myth.
That's interesting, and I can certainly see your point.
But back then the speech was considered to be brave, not preaching to the choir.
Throughout the sixties and seventies Germans had a tendency to paint themselves the victims. Maybe not as much as the Jews, but still, the Allied Occupation was so terrible, Red Armists raping every woman, woe be us.
Weizsäcker drew lots of criticism for articulating the point that the Third Reich wasn't some pretty well-functioning state with just the little side-effect of mass murder. That the Allies shouldn't have been so harsh, why couldn't they just remove the concentration camps and let society go on?
He saw the Nazi rule as an imposition on the German people, not in way of exculpation, but as a way to accept the defeat and move on, trying to build a better world.
You're right that most Germans knew about the atrocities. Research is very clear on that point. But it wasn't really emotionally accepted, especially in conservative circles. That speech was one little turning point, as was Brandt's fall to his knees (tabloids labelled him a traitor, for something that seems obviously right now).
I suppose he could have been more direct. But I suspect he and his people had gauged the public sentiment very well. Say too much, and nobody cares about what you said. Say too little, and you're not doing anything. The speech had a huge impact, and I guess that proves it right, maybe not from an absolute ethical point of view, but from a political and contemporary point of view.
You need to ask what would you have done before condemning the German people. It's easier to believe the "safe" truth even if you have doubts about it than set yourself up for a knock on the door and a trip to a concentration camp as happened to very many Germans, both before and during the war. Most of us are cowards and wouldn't intervene if someone was being mugged on a public street. How much more courage does it take to stand up to a totalitarian regime.
>It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on.
On this point, as someone whose grandparents lived through the German side of WW2, I am convinced it's allied propaganda used to justify the collective guilt of the German people.
I don't doubt it was well known to the Jewish population in America at the time, but any news of that nature would have been easy to dismiss as the other side's slander to the German on the ground. People today barely know what happened in Abu Graib, and that's with modern communications technology.
Why would anyone dismiss it as slander? Eradication of Jews had been the stated goal of the Nazi party from the beginning. Progroms like kristallnacht was used as propaganda for the Nazi party. The Nuremberg laws was a matter of public record.
Because in WW1 the English and French governments manufactured propaganda that claimed all sorts of preposterously horrible things were perpetrated by the germans. After the war (WW1) it became obvious they were mostly extremely exaggerated lies.
That's why in WW2 it was initiallly very hard to start discussion about this. "You know, in last war we claimed the germans were commiting inhuman acts of horror? And we were kind of ... lying? Well, this time its totally true! Please believe us"
It's the case of boy crying wolf... and then wolf comes.
Yes but the comment was about people inside Germany. I can understand if people outside Germany who hadn't been exposed to Nazi propaganda could believe it was run-of-the-mill wartime slander of the enemy.
I think you are approaching this from a position of afterwisdom.
Case in point: Think how hard it was for the general american to realize the police in their country actually has pathological violent tendencies and blacks actually are in a weak position. If modern state is able to treat their minorities in that way in our enlightened age for a long time, think about what the chances the public had in WW2 Germany to have a clue.
Generally, Germans trusted their government. The Nazi propaganda was astoundingly enticing (there were excellent books on WW1 propaganda that the Nazi:s studied from in earnest so they learned from existing knowledge).
How good was the Nazi propaganda? People are still today falling in love with the concept, even though the Nazi idealism was proven evil and non-functional, and fascism itself inserted to modern day would be extremely anachronistic.
Think about it. People are falling in love with a brand and ideology created by people who died 70+ years ago.
Now imagine these same people are running a country. Portraying themselves as glorious leaders, and saying to all germans - hell yes, we will triumph, love us. And love they did.
They have total pulse on the public sentiment. They control the mass media (they have mass media! Which is itself a novelty!). They control the public image of the state and they control the public mindset. They control the public news and what people are concerned off.
I presume the public sentiment was along the lines of "So, they are moving those jews somewhere? Oh, better in some 'jewtown' rather than here in that ghetto, I'm glad I don't have to see them again". But I doubt they had in mind the slaughterhouse.
It was horror what happened. But it is very hard to convince me the average german would have had any clue.
I'm not sure I understand your argument, but are you suggesting the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda and media control as justifying that people didn't know? Because that is totally backwards. Persecution of Jews was not some kind of secret agenda kept hidden from the people. Rather the hate and persecution of Jews and other "undesired groups" was a core part of Nazi propaganda.
"hate and persecution of Jews and other "undesired groups" was a core part of Nazi propaganda."
Hate and persecution of all minorities in europe was the expected status quo even after the war. Only after 60's you are seeing minority group rights becoming a thing, and they are still problematic in places.
Nazi's total genocide was the thing that was completely out of bounds of accepted civilized behaviour circa 1940. Not racism.
"Everyone did it" is not an excuse, but on basic expectations most of europe was racist and oprressive of minorities. German people were not worse than anyone else.
I'm not saying that this excuses anything, but the claim that "on average, they weren't worse than anyone else" holds.
The guilt for the genocide should be mostly on the shoulders of the administration and the officers who carried it out, not the average German citizen.
Progroms like Kristallnacht were widely publicized by Nazi media (the word "Kristallnacht" itself was coined by Nazi propaganda). So it is not like you only knew about the persecutions if you had Jewish neighbors. The party itself made sure everybody knew about the persecutions.
Again, that does not ring true given the conversations I've had with people alive at the time. Jewish people were scapegoated for the destruction of the German economy. Not everyone who accepted that narrative would have believed death was a just response. Any competent propagandist would have left the question of what a proper response was open so people would have imagined that what they thought was proper would happen.
The closest modern equivalent I can think of would be Occupy Wall Street. If the leaders of OWS had formed their own political party in the wake of the 2008 bailouts and ridden a wave of public anger into office, they would have probably had the political capital to seize all bankers' assets as stolen goods and hold them to await trial. It would have taken an order of magnitude more political capital to simply start executing them without trial.
>Have you considered that these people might have an interest in downplaying how much they knew?
Certainly, and I've also considered that an army which killed civilians during the war would be interested in playing up how much the civilians knew. I've listened to both sides and made my decision which story sounds more plausible.
>You should be ashamed of yourself for making that comparison.
If I wasn't clear, I was talking about the conditions that gave rise to the ideology, not the ideologies themselves. We are very lucky that racial and economic resentments have stayed mostly decoupled since the second world war. I am not remotely ashamed for describing how similar a modern example is to half of that wicked formula.
To me, taking responsibility for my ancestors has nothing to do with paying blood money and everything to do with remaining vigilant to familiar precursors. I'd be ashamed for staying silent if I see a modern parallel.
You are comparing the blaming bankers who were actually responsible for the financial crisis to the scapegooating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and this was the closest modern example you could think of in a world where e.g., there are concentration camps on the American-Mexican border.
The majority of issues with Nazis in government positions and industry had been addressed (partly of course, best effort ...) during the student revolts 1968-197x.
There was one case where an activist slapped a politician in the face and many similar things.
That generation became teachers from 1975 on, and public education was intensely focused on the history 1933-1945, sometimes to the exclusion of other periods. (I find that U.S. people are much better informed about Roman history than I am.)
> Maybe this rang true to many Germans of 1985.
It did, the speech was largely preaching to the choir.
Could you cite the claim that the broad German population knew about the extermination camps qua extermination camps before spring 1945?
Of course the average German would have been familiar with the idea of concentration camps, because Germany had begun to put Communists into such camps already in the 1930s and this was well-publicized. But when the Nazi leadership adopted the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference in early 1942 and concentration camps became extermination camps, Germany was already under heavy wartime press censorship. The people living around the camps would have known that something was up, but the camps were deliberately constructed to be out of sight and out of mind of the bulk of the German population.
This is not to let the German people off the hook. Germans were aware of the 1930s events like Kristallnacht and one can argue that they should have known that apathy in the face of these smaller atrocities would only encourage larger atrocities. But for most of Germany’s population, an awareness of the camps could only have come through this supposition or through rumour and innuendo, and not firm factual knowledge of their existence and operation.
It is a famous and well written speech, made at a time when Germany was still a cohesive country and WWII criminals were still alive.
I don't see the relevance when we face completely different issues nowadays. European/German guilt has been used to justify a lot of measures that strangely enough always benefited the upper class and the stock market.
German Guilt is in someways the modern day equivalent of the "Dolchstosslegende" after WWI. It either something to frown upon, for the right, as Germany didn't do anything wrong, the Russians would have attacked anyway, blabla. Or to pay of by becoming an idealistic pacifist society, going along with everything just to pay back on the world in general.
Both points are wrong so. And lately it is mostly used by the right to attack any non-nationalistic policy. Weizsaecker called that out, didn't he? With the passage of individual guilt and accepting legacy.
I have German citizenship but have not lived in Germany since my teens, so I'm a bit ignorant of the political situation these days. How would you summarize GP's views on German/European guilt?
Overall, Germany profited greatly from the EU and the Euro. Also average workers. There is a group of employees in very precerious conditions, heritage of Agenda 2020. Nothing taboo to talk about, in fact ALG 2 and such are quite often discussed and challenged.
Both factors have nothing to do with "German Guilt", implying that is a right wing thing. And not grounded in reality.
Given that Weizsaeckers speach was all about accepting history, tolerance and so on, it would be fair to say if anything he would call for unity against racism, nationalism and so on.
No such thing has been implied, but you are only attacking straw men in this subthread (Dolchstosslegende, really?),
European guilt (countries fighting each other since the beginning of time) has been used as a justification for the European Union.
German guilt has been used as a justification for the Euro.
The theory that average workers benefit from the Euro is false, and usually only propagated by those in cozy government positions, like bureaucrats or teachers who are isolated from reality.
> implying that is a right wing thing.
And there we go, such a position is literally fascist.
Yes. Anything that isn't praise and "we'll all be better off" is taboo, and it doesn't matter what party, what your other positions are, it's sacrilegious.
It's not only immigration though, the same is true for e.g. European political integration. It's considered to be the only thing that keeps us from certain war, so any skepticism is understood as hyper nationalistic and willing to risk peace in Europe.
> Anything that isn't praise and "we'll all be better off" is taboo, and it doesn't matter what party, what your other positions are, it's sacrilegious.
Are you sure that you're not mixing up that position being wrong with it being taboo? It seems to have become very popular these days, especially among the alt right, to blame the ridicule and ignoring of their opinions on the "PC mainstream" having labelled them as taboo or "censoring" them. Projecting snowflakes like they've time and time been shown to be.
> Perhaps we can get to the bottom of this. What are the consequences of being wrong in public on this issue?
Someone living in Germany would be better suited to answer this, but, from my limited experience: the same as being wrong on a bunch of other things. Your statements are not considered sacrilegious, they're merely considered wrong and not worth listening to. For good reason, in my opinion.
Nuanced debate, like how inequality is on the rise in Europe, how to deal with some eastern European countries failing to secure a free press, corruption, etc, is always welcomed. Blanket statements like in the comment I replied to, not so much.
German national, but still take it just my personal opinion. I would say maybe, of course not officially. Depends on your public profile, if you tending towards the extremes it would have a greater impact. Same would go for being on the extreme left, so. It also depends on the company you apply to.
Just being a known, but bot very outspoken member, wouldn't have too much of an impact.
Immigration is recent and secondary (but also a factor). The Euro and eastern expansion of the EU came first. The Euro was directly justified with historical references and allegedly a precondition for the German reunification.
The Euro made companies rich and the population poor.
