In a 1946 article in the Deutsche Rundschau, Rudolf Pechel suggested that the question of German guilt “is perhaps the most difficult problem, faced by us all, without exception.” Whether explicitly articulated or not, the problem of guilt lay at the root of many intellectual debates in the postwar period, from the dispute between “inner emigrants” and exiles to discussions of German youth and their predicament; it was, as Barbro Eberan has suggested, “a mirror of German self-understanding” in the years after the war. Martin Niemöller declared in 1946 that the problem of guilt “is the real question behind all our disquiet, our coming and going, our innermost dissatisfaction.” In her novel Die grössere Hoffnung Ilse Aichinger asked: “Where does it end, the path of this guilt, where does it stop?”

The extent to which the more general problem of German guilt — whether differentiated or not — became associated in the immediate postwar period with the undifferentiated concept of collective guilt (Kollektivschuld) requires explanation, since virtually none of the major participants in the debate, even Germany's staunchest foes, subscribed to the notion that every single German was equally guilty for the crimes of the Third Reich. It is true that during the war Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lord Robert Vansittart, a senior British diplomat, took a negative view of Germany and favored harsh political and economic sanctions against the conquered nation during the postwar period, up to and including deindustrialization and a partition of Germany.