The Holocaust cannot be forgiven because everyone has a conscience

The argument

Our conscience helps people know what actions are right or wrong. The argument begins from the claim that this capacity is general rather than specially acquired — that recognising the wrongness of killing innocent people does not depend on particular moral instruction, and so cannot be said to have been unavailable to the people who took part. Even in the case of the Holocaust, many Germans chose to follow and murder innocent people despite knowing it was wrong. They involved themselves with the mass murder of German Jews. The word carrying the argument is "chose". If the wrongness was apparent, then participation was not ignorance but a decision taken against what the person already understood, and it is that decision which is held to be unforgivable. Although some people were not directly involved with killing the Jews, they freely chose to discriminate and harm them. The same reasoning extends the judgement beyond those who killed: the choice to discriminate was made with the same conscience available, so the absence of a direct role changes the degree of involvement rather than the moral position occupied. Their choice to mistreat the Jews despite the obvious unethical implications should not be forgiven. Studies show that when people are under another authority, they feel less responsibility for their actions. Although this partially explains why Nazis may have followed authority so easily, it does not excuse their actions. The distinction between an explanation and an excuse is the argument's central move. Showing how a person came to do something is not the same as showing that they could not have done otherwise, and a diminished feeling of responsibility is not a diminished responsibility. The Holocaust would not have been possible without the enormous amount of support from all the soldiers that followed orders without considering their conscience. Scale is what makes this decisive: an atrocity of that size could not be carried out by a small number of decision-makers, and required instead the participation of very large numbers of people, each of whom had a conscience and each of whom set it aside. Therefore, those involved in the Holocaust should not be forgiven.

Premises

Counter-arguments

During the criminal trials following the Holocaust, many Nazis claim that they were unaware of the mass murder of the Jews. Some soldiers were responsible for the deportations, but they had no idea about the ultimate fate of the Jews to concentration and extermination camps. In the trials, documents were brought forth, showing that while the Nazis followed deportation orders, they were unaware that they were going to be killed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Conscience is not uniform or independent of circumstance. Years of propaganda, dehumanising ideology and a legal order that recast the crime as duty shaped what participants understood themselves to be doing — which is why historians study how ordinary people came to act as they did rather than assuming each simply overrode a clear inner warning. [Rejecting P2] Participation ran from those who planned and carried out the killing to those who processed paperwork or looked away, and the postwar trials turned on precisely those gradations. Collapsing them into a single choice makes the moral question unanswerable — and forgiveness is in any case not a verdict a third party can issue, since it belongs to those who were wronged, most of whom did not survive to grant or withhold it.