Dachau and Collective Guilt

A very short background on Dachau

I must admit that before my visit to the Wiener Library, my knowledge of Dachau concentration camp was very limited. I learnt that Dachau was the first regular camp to be established by the Nazi regime during the Second World War, in 1933. As with a large number of the camps, it still exists today and is visited by thousands of people every year. The camp, interestingly enough, replaced an ammunitions factory, right outside the town of the same name, located only about eight miles northwest of Munich (Neurath 18). It was not very discrete in size either; the camp- which consisted of 21 further subsidiary camps- had an estimated number of 229,000 internees passing through (Perry 103).

Was anyone ignorant of the evils?

The fact that the camp was so close, and yet so few German civilians were seemingly unfazed by the evil taking place right by their doorstep, poses the question of how much the locals really knew about what was happening. From the Wiener Library’s collections, I discovered the work of Karl Jaspers, a German Philosopher. Jaspers questioned the German people’s collective responsibility and lack of involvement, suggesting that the typical German was aware of the sickening acts that occurred against approximately 11 million victims. Of course, there is still much debate centring around how much the citizens really knew, so my focus here won’t be on how much they were conscious of- or even if they were aware at all. Instead, I want to briefly consider the moral implications of inaction and its relation to collective guilt. The concept of collective guilt raises the issue of how much responsibility an individual can have for tolerating and ignoring other people’s wrongdoings. If I am conscious of evil, and do nothing or very little to prevent it, then how much blame do I deserve? Assuming that I could have stopped the evils, am I just as accountable as those who were doing the harm?

Doing vs. Allowing: Is there a difference?

In many ways, I think that allowing harm is in certain cases equally as bad as actually causing it. If we look at what makes an action bad, the first thing that might come to mind is the consequences of said action. We judge the drowning of a person to be malicious because of the outcome that follows, i.e. suffering and harm. Whether I am the one actively doing the drowning or I am standing by and am in agreement with someone else doing the evil deed, the outcome is the same- and it was intended by both of us. I think it’s important that if we are to hold them both as being morally accountable, the person who passively watches and does nothing must have the power to stop the action. Maybe, then, allowing harm is equal to causing it only when I approve of and am able to prevent the action caused by someone else.

So it seems that not being able to intervene with the drowning, despite my good intentions, makes me immune to a sense of responsibility or blame. I’m only accountable if I could have intervened but chose not to. Following on, the German citizens are also supposedly responsible if they had the power to interfere but instead chose to not act. Although I don't want to speculate, I think it's a different matter if the citizen felt unable to intervene, rather than accepting what was happening and ignoring it. This, I think, is also where collective guilt becomes especially relevant.

A quick look at collective guilt

The idea of collective guilt, or collective responsibility, states that even though as an individual you might have been almost completely powerless, as a group there was more that could have been done to prevent the evils. Of course it’s not realistic to call out just one person and hold them responsible because they failed to act out against the Nazis and their crimes. As a nation, however, maybe the citizens hold some responsibility for their non-intervention. We have read about many uprisings and Resistance groups, so surely the collective of the citizen is accountable to some degree at the very least. Even if they didn’t cause any harm themselves, their deliberate inaction seems to be a significant factor.

Certainly, Dachau – The City and the Concentration Camp talks of one US Army commander who holds this sentiment, angrily shouting at 30 Dachau citizens that the town wrongfully tolerated the brutalities. The book, which is available in the Wiener Library’s Reading Room, highlights the same view as that found in the 1945 film, Death Mills. The American film was created for German civilians to educate them of the Nazi’s cruelties. So maybe then, while the individual is void of any blame because of the overwhelming force of the Nazis, the population’s inaction allows for some idea of responsibility to be attributed to them. For a more in-depth look into the idea of collective guilt, I would recommend the book Collective Guilt: International Perspectives, which can be accessed from the Wiener Library.

Final thoughts

I don't think we will ever truly know how much as a general civilian population the Germans could have done to intervene, or how many people were against the horrors but were left with no choice but to conform. Unfortunately, there are suggestions that it was not exclusively the German civilian population that was passive- the Wiener Library’s latest exhibition, Dilemmas, Choices, Responses: Britain and the Holocaust, explores the idea that Britain also did not do as much it was capable of doing in its response to the Holocaust. Nevertheless, with the Germany of today doing much to acknowledge the horrors of the past, I think that we can view the future with optimism and hope that much more is done to avert potential future genocides.

Works Cited:

Branscombe, Nyla R. and Bertjan Doosje. Collective Guilt: International Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

Neurath, Paul Martin. The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps. London: Paradigm, 2005. Print.

Perry, Michael W. Dachau Liberated: the Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army: Released within Days of the Camp's Liberation by Elements of the 42nd and 45th Divisions. Seattle: Inkling, 2000. Print.

Steinbacher, Sybille. Dachau: die Stadt und das Konzentrationslager in der NS-Zeit: die Untersuchung einer Nachbarschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994. Print.

Edited and published by The Wiener Library