Executioners, bystanders and victims: collective guilt, the legacy of denazification and the birth of twentieth-century transitional justice

Abstract

‘We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away; we did not scream until we too were destroyed … We are guilty of being alive.’Karl Jaspers The Question of German Guilt, p 66The following scene as recounted by the English writer James Stern occurred in a German town one week after Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945. A crowd is gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading ‘WHO IS GUILTY?’. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised, and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming ‘THIS TOWNISGUILTY! YOUARE GUILTY!’.