Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

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.

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.

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.

Almost nobody knows about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing

> 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

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/647492.Ordinary_Men

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...

> 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)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16891.Masters_of_Death

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.

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.

https://www.amazon.com/Choice-Dr-Edith-Eva-Eger/dp/150113079...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_B%C3%B6ll

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?

One can only hope that apologies like these will never again be necessary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I just doubt it would be what you think, considering your views on "German/European guilt".

It's from 1985, Germany was already divided for 36 years.