Perpetrator people
The catchphrase offender people refers to the thesis of collective guilt , which says that a people as a whole is morally responsible for the criminal acts of part of its members. This term describes a people as the perpetrator of their immoral, inhuman deeds committed in their own name. The term is classified as demagoguery - propagandistic misleading of the population - and was voted unword of the year 2003 in Germany.
The term and its distribution
The “perpetrator discussion” in 2003 in the German-speaking area was sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book: “Hitler's willing executors” . This book, which is about National Socialism, has been the subject of heated and contradicting discussions for years across all social classes due to its blanket accusation of anti-Semitism and its blame against all ethnically German people ( Germans ). The book by Julius H. Schoeps : “A people of murderers” is an example of how to deal with and understand the subject . Schoeps collected comments from journalists, historians and professors in the US, UK and Germany.
The "word" perpetrator people spread in political parlance after 1996 and was later taken up by historians such as Ernst Nolte and others. The majority of historians who research the time of National Socialism no longer use the negative term.
When the speech on the Day of German Unity on October 3, 2003 by Martin Hohmann , then CDU Bundestag member , became known, there was a broad social debate about the term perpetrator people .
At the end of 2003, “perpetrator people” was voted unword of the year . The official justification stated: “The word perpetrator people is fundamentally reprehensible, as it makes a whole people responsible for the deeds of a group.” But if the term is related to the Jews, then it is “a current evidence of what is still in effect Anti-Semitism".
Because of the early use of the term by right-wing extremist groups, some German-speaking critics argue that the thesis of a "perpetrator people" was only created by the critics of this term. The word perpetrator people was rejected in order to ward off any differentiated investigation of the crimes during the time of National Socialism .
In contrast, there are numerous treatises and speeches in which identical terms with different wording can be found.
In the German-speaking world, this assignment of terms led to violent reactions from opponents and supporters of collective blame. Examples of similar terms:
"People of the perpetrators ". This modified formulation came into the public discussion through the publicist Lea Rosh . This expressed what, in their opinion, all Germans were responsible not for the Holocaust , but for the moral duty to remember and come to terms with the Holocaust and its historical causes. In the media debate about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, the distinction between commemorating the descendants of the victims and those of the descendants of the perpetrators played an important role.
German collective guilt
A collective guilt of all German people was clearly rejected in the judgments of the Nuremberg trials . Karl Jaspers denied collective guilt , but as early as 1946 introduced the notions of moral guilt and historical guilt into the debate alongside the criminal guilt of individual perpetrators .
The Jewish victims' associations and the Central Council of Jews in Germany have also repeatedly stated that the necessary remembrance of the Holocaust is not an indiscriminate indictment against all Germans and should not be used, which does not rule out joint responsibility for the many who were not directly involved in the murder.
See also
literature
- Karl Jaspers: The question of guilt. There is no statute of limitations for genocide. Piper Publishing House. Munich 1979 ISBN 3-492-00491-1 (there also lecture series from 1946 on the question of guilt)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tagesschau.de: CDU member calls Jews "perpetrator people" ( Memento from May 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive )