The Pope at Auschwitz

There is, on one point, an odd balance of emphases in the speech made by Pope Benedict XVI at Auschwitz. He doesn't mince his words with respect to where God was in the years of the Nazi genocide. He asks:

Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

And again:

Where was God in those days? Why was he silent?

But as to the more worldly responsibility of the German people for the fate of European Jewry and Nazism's other victims, he seems to speak more circumspectly. From the text of his address:

I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people - a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

The dominant thought here is of a people deceived, terrorized, used and abused - and therefore not in any large degree themselves the agents of what befell them and of what, more terribly, befell others. Pope Benedict is also mindful of those Germans who died for their resistance to Nazism. He says:

The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were considered as "Abschaum der Nation" - the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed. We are grateful to them, because they did not submit to the power of evil, and now they stand before us like lights shining in a dark night.

But between the criminals who abused Germany and these few who 'did not submit', the Pope's words allow a dissipation of political and moral responsibility. Sixty years ago, the philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote more wisely on The Question of German Guilt. He distinguished four types of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical (see here pp. 52-55). At least the second and third of these are relevant to assessing the responsibility of that generation of Germans for what happened at Auschwitz and the many other death sites. Not only God was silent - if indeed He was.