Tätervolk

Perpetrator People
Type	Epithet
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.

Tätervolk is a German word literally 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". This usage was given additional currency following the publication of Daniel Goldgagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners . The racist nastiness of the concept is perhaps best illustrated by Elie Wiesel's 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.

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.

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