Date:         Wed, 10 May 1995 09:47:21 -0500
Reply-To:     H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers <drogers@jaguar1.usouthal.edu>
Sender:       H-NET List on German History <H-GERMAN@MSU.EDU>
From:         H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers <drogers@jaguar1.usouthal.edu>
Subject:      Re: Victimization

There are two messages:


1)

Submitted by:   Steve Muhlberger <STEVEM@EINSTEIN.UNIPISSING.CA>

The true grotesquerie behind David Neal Miller's opinion is merely
underlined by the fact that thousands of the victims of the Dresden
bombings were not German at all--guilty or innocent, Nazi or not, worthy
of death or not--but uprooted refugees trying to escape from the front.
With logic like Mr. Miller's, one could find a justification to incinerate
any city on earth.

Steve Muhlberger
Nipissing University


2)


Submitted by:   David Neal Miller <miller.3@osu.edu>


>Submitted by:   Roland Wagner <WAGNER@SJSUVM1.SJSU.EDU>
>
>     You seem to grant a begrudging "grief" to the children in cities such
>as Dresden (but only if they were not "corrupted").  All others -- women,
>grandparents, non-combatants -- apparently merited a death sentence to be
>carried out by mass incineration.  Is this not a rather sad inversion of
>the "final solution," justified by a theory of "collective guilt"?

1.      I do not predicate my satisfaction with the bombing of Dresden on a
theory of collective guilt, but on the certitude of the *actual* guilt of a
near-totality of the German people--women, grandparents, non-combatants--in
a project of genocide at the time of the bombing: a well earned death
sentence indeed.

2.      While I did not choose to advance a theory of collective guilt,
equating a theory of collective guilt with the final solution is monstrous.
The former holds, rightly or wrongly, the collective (polity, people,
whatever) responsible for the very real crimes of a portion of its members.
To liken this to the final solution is to assert that the murder of Jews,
Roma, persons with disabilities, gays, etc. was a response, appropriate or
inappropriate, to the guilt of a portion of the victims. But the Holocaust
was not about Germans casting their retributive net too widely (as you
assert I do in my response to Dresden); it was about the murder of
innocents.

        I am afraid that Roland and I are arguing across a conceptual abyss
which will not be bridged in our lifetimes.

        With the eighth of May behind us, let us reassume the academic
proprieties.

David Neal Miller
ashkenaz@webcom.com
.