The Question of German Guilt

Karl Jaspers

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823220632
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Shortly after the Nazi government fell, a philosophy professor at Heidelberg University lectured on a subject that burned the consciousness and conscience of thinking Germans. "Are the German people guilty?" These lectures by Karl Jaspers, an outstanding European philosopher, attracted wide attention among German intellectuals and students; they seemed to offer a path to sanity and morality in a disordered world. Jaspers, a life-long liberal, attempted in this book to discuss rationally a problem that had thus far evoked only heat and fury. Neither an evasive apology nor a wholesome condemnation, his book distinguished between types of guilt and degrees of responsibility. He listed four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among one's friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities).
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) took his degree in medicine but soon became interested in psychiatry. He is the author of a standard work of psychopathology, as well as special studies on Strindberg, Van Gogh and Nietsche. After World War I he became Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, where he achieved fame as a brilliant teacher and an early exponent of existentialism. He was among the first to acquaint German readers with the works of Kierkegaard. Jaspers had to resign from his post in 1935. From the total isolation into which the Hitler regime forced him, Jaspers returned in 1945 to a position of central intellectual leadership of the younger liberal elements of Germany. In his first lecture in 1945, he forcefully reminded his audience of the fate of the German Jews. Jaspers's unblemished record as an anti-Nazi, as well as his sentient mind, have made him a rallying point center for those of his compatriots who wish to reconstruct a free and democratic Germany.

Differentiation of German Guilt

THE CRIMES

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.

POLITICAL GUILT

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-polit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the 2000 Edition
• “Ladies and Gentlemen”
• Introduction
• Scheme of Distinctions
• The German Questions
• Differentiation of German Guilt
• Possible Excuses
• Our Purification
• Footnotes