Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

The goal of US-led denazification was to establish the collective guilt of the German people. This was a mistake, for two reasons. First, the notion of guilt rendered the violence of the war and the Holocaust a matter of crime and therefore an offense against the state. This foreclosed a reckoning with Nazism’s political roots and undercut the possibility of reform, for offenses against the state necessitate no reform of the state, only the restoration of its authority through corrective action against offenders. Second, while many Germans were in fact Nazis, and while many more benefited from Nazi policies, Germans were not in fact collectively to blame. Germany was also home to an antifascist opposition, which paid dearly for its position. The Americans, however, refused to work with antifascists after the war. Doing so would have undermined the collective-guilt thesis and put the United States in league with the left in the middle of the postwar red scare.