Tätervolk

From Wikispooks
Revision as of 10:09, 31 July 2015 by Peter (talk | contribs) (glossary)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

German word meaning 'Perpetrator people' and applied by Orthodox Judaism to the alledged collective guilt of Germans as a race of people for the events of World War II - with particular emphasis on The Holocaust

Concept.png Perpetrator People Glossary.pngRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
TypeEpithet
German word meaning 'Perpetrator people' and applied by Orthodox Judaism to the alledged collective guilt of Germans as a race of people for the events of World War II - with particular emphasis on The Holocaust

A slogan/epithet meaning "Perpetrator people". It encalsulates the thesis of collective guilt, which postulates that a people/race is morally responsible for criminal acts of it leaders. It refers to a nation as a whole as culprit for immoral and inhuman acts. In spite of having a theoretically universal applicability, its usage originated - and is largely confined to - alleged German guilt for the events of both World War I and World War II, in particular "The Holocaust"

Usage was given additional impetus following the publication of Daniel Goldgagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners [1]. It The racist nastiness of the concept is perhaps best illustrated by Elie Wiesel' infamous injunction:

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. [2]

Readers are invited to juxtapose the positions of the Words German and Jew in that piece of vitriol and consider what would happen to the person promulgating it - especially if he/she was a German.

Repudiated by the Nuremberg Trials

German collective guilt was specifically repudiated by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.