collective guilt
collective guilt is the principle formulated after the Second World War that the German people as a whole were responsible for the war and that, consequently, the people as a whole should be punished. The Allied Powers did not use this principle in official documents but it became established in public thinking. According to the Yalta Agreement (February 1945), the victorious powers did not aim ‘to annihilate the German people, but only after the radical eradication of Nazism and militarism will there be any hope of the German people living a life of dignity and being integrated into the community of nations’. This was the justification given in the Potsdam decisions (August 1945) for the resettlement of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to Germany (about 5.6 million persons). Prior to this, some 3.5 million Germans from these countries, as well as from the Baltic States, East Prussia and Yugoslavia fled to Germany to escape the Red Army. Germans were deported en masse from the Soviet-occupied territories to the forced labour camps of the Soviet Union.
The Košice Government Programme, issued in April 1945, also deprived the Hungarians, along with the Germans, of Czechoslovakia of their citizenship, basic rights and property (the ‘years of statelessness’), based on the principle of collective guilt. The principle of collective guilt appeared here in various legal forms (e.g. it is included in13 of the 143 so-called Beneš decrees issued by the president of the republic), essentially punishing individuals for belonging to a minority community (via expulsion, population exchange, confiscation of property and re-Slovakization). After the Second World War the atrocities against Hungarians in the Soviet Union (Transcarpathia/Subcarpathia), Yugoslavia (Vojvodina) and Romania (Transylvania) were also committed based on this principle.