Re Forgive Us Our Sins, July/August
In his otherwise thoughtful article “Forgive us our sins” (July-August), David Harris says that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom did not expiate the collective sin of Germany in permitting the rise of Hitler and Nazism. This comment seems to call for some response. The notion of collective sin is difficult to impose on a whole nation. The German nation never gave a free majority vote for the Nazi party’s dictatorship – it was foisted on them by a series of underhand political maneuvers, and once established it was virtually impossible to shake off. Modern Germany has made strong efforts to expiate the evils of the Nazi period. Is Great Britain guilty of a collective sin for the wholesale destruction of German cities, or the United States for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and various subsequent atrocities committed by small groups? And are Canadians who were children or not yet born at the time of the native residential schools expected to share in guilt? It seems unfair, and perhaps an affront to German-Canadians, to single out the case of 1930s Germany as an example.
