"We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?"
About this Quote
Moral clarity is easy when it flatters your side; Wiesenthal’s line is built to deny that comfort. Coming from a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking Nazi war criminals, the refusal of “collective guilt” isn’t a soft plea for forgetting. It’s a hard-edged argument for precision: if guilt is to mean anything, it has to land on perpetrators and enablers, not on an entire passport category.
The intent is both ethical and tactical. Ethically, he’s defending a principle that protects everyone: people aren’t reducible to the worst actors among them. Tactically, he’s protecting the legitimacy of justice itself. Once punishment becomes national shorthand, outrage turns into a bludgeon, and the demand for accountability starts to resemble the very logic that makes mass crimes possible.
The subtext is self-implicating. “We know” doesn’t let his own community off the hook by claiming innocence; it insists on a distinction between responsibility and inheritance. Wiesenthal understood how quickly historical trauma can be converted into permanent suspicion of “the other,” and how easily that suspicion becomes policy, prejudice, or revenge dressed up as righteousness. He’s warning against a seductive shortcut: if you can label a whole nation guilty, you never have to do the difficult work of identifying who did what, who benefited, who looked away.
Context matters: postwar Europe wrestled with German culpability, denazification, and the temptation to treat “Germany” as the criminal. Wiesenthal’s point doesn’t deny widespread complicity; it insists that justice, to be credible, must resist collective condemnation even when anger feels deserved.
The intent is both ethical and tactical. Ethically, he’s defending a principle that protects everyone: people aren’t reducible to the worst actors among them. Tactically, he’s protecting the legitimacy of justice itself. Once punishment becomes national shorthand, outrage turns into a bludgeon, and the demand for accountability starts to resemble the very logic that makes mass crimes possible.
The subtext is self-implicating. “We know” doesn’t let his own community off the hook by claiming innocence; it insists on a distinction between responsibility and inheritance. Wiesenthal understood how quickly historical trauma can be converted into permanent suspicion of “the other,” and how easily that suspicion becomes policy, prejudice, or revenge dressed up as righteousness. He’s warning against a seductive shortcut: if you can label a whole nation guilty, you never have to do the difficult work of identifying who did what, who benefited, who looked away.
Context matters: postwar Europe wrestled with German culpability, denazification, and the temptation to treat “Germany” as the criminal. Wiesenthal’s point doesn’t deny widespread complicity; it insists that justice, to be credible, must resist collective condemnation even when anger feels deserved.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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