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German collective guilt is the perceived, claimed, or existing collective guilt of Germany and the German people in relation to the initiation of World War II and the Holocaust.
The concept was familiar in Allied propaganda and thinking during World War II with ideas such as the Morgenthau plan being proposed to punish the German nation as a whole. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote an influential essay in 1945 about this concept as a psychological phenomenon, in which the German people would feel a collective guilt (Kollektivschuld) for the atrocities committed by their fellow countrymen, and so introduced the term into German intellectual discourse. To him, this was "for psychologists a fact, and it will be one of the most important tasks of therapy to bring the Germans to recognize this guilt."
The British and US occupation forces promoted the idea of shame and guilt with a publicity campaign; for example, displaying posters of concentration camps with the slogans such as "These Atrocities: Your Fault!" (Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuldt!).
The theologian Martin Niemöller and other churchmen accepted their shared guilt in the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis (Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt) of 1945. The philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers delivered lectures to students in 1946 which were published under the title The question of German guilt.
References
- Jeffrey K. Olick, Andrew J. Perrin (2010), Guilt and Defense, Harvard University Press, pp. 24–25, ISBN 9780674036031
- Jeffrey K. Olick (September 2003), "The Guilt of Nations?", Ethics & International Affairs, 17 (2): 109–117, doi:10.1111/j.1747-7093.2003.tb00443.x
- Tracy Isaacs, Richard Vernon (2011), Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing, Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–199, ISBN 9780521176118
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