Certain things are simply True. The Sun is hot. The Earth is old. Both exist, and long since have; some day neither will. Star and stone and soliton; mass and light and Law. A language with no room for terms like these is incomplete; it is subtly wrong. But at human scale, too small for all to average out and too large for perfect law, concepts are suggestions; lines of thought for you to follow - nothing lost and nothing found. To find the suspect guilty of high treason is not to state a fact; it is an intention; not a claim about what is; but about where we ought to go. It aims for somewhere dark and small and dank and fleshy beneath the fresh reburied soil. It concerns itself with corpses, and how we might make more. To assert the nameless many’s guilt is to walk that road the whole way down, towards that sick sad final resting place where I will never go.
I do not care for collective guilt, or for those who do. I will not cross that line. I still hesitate to raise the topic here, which is why I must: you and I both know which side, some eighty years ago now, the Auslandsdeutsche were on. Many of them - tens of thousands, millions maybe - were all too eager to embrace the Volkisch cause; the collective guilt of Poles and Jews and socialists drove them on and on and on. Some gave aid and comfort to the war, and thereby helped it burn; some fought and died and murdered to make their plural fiction one. I would stand aside and grimly nod if they were tried and hanged and swung. Ten thousand, a hundred, all of them - whatever the true count was. But failing that, they had a right to live where their fathers lived; be there but one righteous German in the east, they did not deserve to die. And yet they were driven out; not all of them survived. They were worst of all the peoples of the Earth, and we had done them wrong.
Shoot every last Schutzstaffel man; execute the Heer. Bury all Kriegsmariners at sea and all pilots in the ground. Burn them out with fire and sword; damn their memories and names. Do what you will with party men; whatever your justice might demand. I do not approve; blood and rage and talon turn to ashes in my mouth. But I can live with those who do: I reject, but understand. But that’s not what we did that year; those aren’t the ones who died.
Twelve million Germans were driven west, from the Oder and its east. A few thousand fled from France. Six hundred thousand, less or more, were killed or left to die. Some were guilty. Maybe most. But not the children. Not the babies. Not the German volk. There is no such thing - there are no The Jews and there are no The Greeks. There are no peoples. There are no nations. There is no line of blood descent; there is no motherland. There is no sacred soil for which your fathers died. Only rock and dirt and unmarked graves. There are only people, only places: many monstrous, many stupid, but none collective fictions or mere labels on a map.
This is what the rights of nations get you; the self that self-determines does not respect the rights of man. To Germany, the world owed nothing; we let it off too light. Denazification should have actually happened, to hell with the logistics of it - I would not regret it for an instant if we still staffed Berlin. The Bundeswehr did not need expertise; it was lucky to exist. If the whole of German jurisprudence were forgotten and disbarred, then so be it; the Allies were the law. It would have been worth the inconvenience; it would have been proper and been right. We could have dissolved the country, and returned the Left Bank to the French, and the people once called Germans would have no just cause to complain. But every single dead civilian was a plain and simple crime. Crimes were going happen; crimes are just what empires do. All things considered, I’m glad they did. Nothing in the world war’s wake could hope to tip the scales: nothing any Ally did could possibly compare. But I refuse to call a bad thing good; I refuse to lie. No harm could have been inflicted on the German state which it did not deserve, but to the Germans, as to all people, more decency was owed. If the diaspora had to go, so be it - but kill the Sudetendeutsche, and save the man.