The Holocaust cannot be forgiven unless the perpetrators repent

The argument

A person cannot be granted forgiveness by another unless they genuinely turn away from their actions and request forgiveness. According to Jewish tradition, a person that has done something wrong must perform teshuvah, an act of genuine repentance and remorse for their actions. Without performing this, the offender is in no position to request forgiveness at all. Forgiveness on this understanding is not a unilateral gift the wronged party may simply hand over; it is the second half of an exchange whose first half is the wrongdoer's own turning, and where that first half is absent there is nothing for forgiveness to answer. Therefore, any Nazi that has not shown repentance for their actions is not deserving of forgiveness. Genuine repentance also asks for more than a change of heart. For a person to show true repentance, they should make amends for their past actions, and this is where the particular character of the Holocaust becomes decisive. Due to the atrocities of the Holocaust, millions of innocent people were murdered. There is no way for the perpetrator to repay the harm and trauma that harmed generations of people: the dead cannot be restored, and the injury carried by those who survived and by their descendants is not a loss that any act of restitution can meet. The condition that repentance sets therefore cannot be satisfied here, which makes it impossible for Nazis to be forgiven for the harm that they inflicted on other people. There is also a cost to granting forgiveness regardless. To grant a Nazi forgiveness for their actions when they are undeserving is immoral, because it sets the standard that a person will be forgiven even though they are not repentant of their actions — a standard that empties repentance of its meaning for every wrongdoer who comes after.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Forgiving a person does not imply that the person must ask for forgiveness first. It is more about the mental and emotional healing of the victim. In many cases, a survivor of the Holocaust may never meet any of the Nazis that harmed them after the Holocaust, so they will never observe them repenting and asking the survivor for forgiveness. Despite this, the survivor should be willing to forgive for the healing that it will bring them. While the Nazis may not deserve forgiveness, it is up to the survivors to show compassion and take control of their own healing.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise states one tradition's account of the conditions for forgiveness, offered without argument for why that account should govern the question generally. [Rejecting P2] Even within that account, what follows is that an unrepentant offender is in no position to be absolved — a claim about the offender's standing rather than about whether a survivor may forgive. The counter-argument draws exactly this distinction. [Rejecting P3] Treating forgiveness of the unrepentant as setting a permissive standard casts it as a public precedent rather than as something a particular person extends. On the alternative view the counter-argument sets out, the act belongs to the survivor and serves their own healing, and it sets no standard for anyone else.