German rightists, not leftists, first promoted the idea of collective guilt

Evidence

Initially, the idea of collective guilt encompassing all native Germans regardless of age and role in the Nazi regime was employed, if not invented, by Germany’s national conservatives and radical rightists (Benz, 1994). They maintained that a sweeping collective guilt reproach was politically promoted by Jews, the Allied forces, and foreign scholars who allegedly tried to justify collective punishment of the entire German nation (a punishment supposedly exemplified by the Nuremberg trials against war criminals and by Allied re-education policies designed to suppress German pride). Serving as a defensive strategy to push questions of one’s personal guilt and national responsibility aside, the main function of the concept of collective guilt at that time, it seems, was to turn around the blame and claim a collective innocence and collective victimhood for all Germans. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 1202

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the core theoretical point that guilt operates as a functional signal; here the right deployed the concept defensively to claim collective victimhood. — connects to: The Goldhagen controversy actually debated German national self-concept — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1216; Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583

Broader Connections

• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime #complicates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583