Let me begin with a joke, a rather grim joke attributed to a popular Bavarian folk comedian named Weiss Ferdl. It seems that he would innocently inform his Munich audiences that the Nazi regime had just opened a new camp at nearby Dachau, and he would proceed to describe the elaborate security measures taken there – the armed guards, the dogs, the encircling rings of barbed and electrified wire. And then, when he felt the moment was right, he would deliver the punch-line: ‘But no matter what they do, they can’t keep me out if I really make up my mind to get in’.

It takes nothing away from the thousands who did ‘get in’ to Dachau or from the millions who ultimately peopled the other camps like Dachau to state the obvious fact that the great majority of individuals in Nazi Germany did not ‘make up their minds to get in’ but, quite the contrary, did what they were told to do so that they might be sure of staying out.

This obvious fact led many to embrace the doctrine of ‘collective guilt’ that was so popular as World War II drew to its close with the total collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’. This was the time when the question of the form of peace would take was already engaging the attention of the political and intellectual leaders of the Allied World. The prevailing tone was one of stern vindictiveness. The enthusiasts of the so-called Morgenthau Plan in America had their counterparts in the followers of Vansittart in England.