“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”
Entry in progress—B.P.
“America will never forgive blacks for slavery” is a later, similar saying.
Wikipedia: Secondary antisemitism
Secondary antisemitism is a distinct kind of antisemitism which is said to have appeared after the end of World War II. It is often explained as being caused by —as opposed to in spite of— Auschwitz, pars pro toto for the Holocaust. One frequently quoted formulation of the concept, first published in Henryk M. Broder’s 1986 book Der Ewige Antisemit (“The Eternal Antisemite”), stems from the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex, who once remarked: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” The term itself was coined by Peter Schönbach, a Frankfurt School co-worker of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, based on their Critical Theory.
Wikipedia: Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, also KZ Auschwitz [kʰɔnʦɛntʁaˈʦi̯oːnsˌlaːɡɐ ˈʔaʊ̯ʃvɪt͡s]) was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish question”. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, around 90 percent of them Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.
Google Books
The Operated Jew:
Two Tales of Anti-Semitism
By Jack David Zipes
New York, NY: Routledge
1991
Pg. 23:
This operation is typical of the new German-Jewish symbiosis put forth by Henryk Broder, one of the most outspoken critics of German anti-Semitism: it is the Germans who will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.
Google Books
Demonizing the Other:
Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia
By Robert S. Wistrich
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
1999
Pg. 356:
The backlash can produce deep resentment as was provacoatively pointed out by Henryk M. Broder in his book, Der Ewige Antisemit (1986), when he coined the bitter remark that “Die Deutschen werden den Juden Auschwitz nie verzeihen” (The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”).
OCLC WorldCat record
Forgiving the Jews for Auschwitz? Guilt and Gender in Bernhard Schlink’s Liebesfluchten¹
Author: AGNES C MUELLER Affiliation: University of South Carolina
Edition/Format: Article Article : English
Publication: The German Quarterly, v80 n4 (October 2007): 511-530
Database: Wiley Online Library
Other Databases: ArticleFirst; British Library Serials
Twitter
Spreagle
@Spreagle
@jbouie I’m surprised a white-black variant of that old “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz” line has never caught on.
8:23 PM - 24 Aug 2015
Empire Burlesque
Anti-Social Media: Wealthy NY Wankers Bash the Poor
Chris Floyd Published: 27 August 2015
As the old joke goes, “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or another variant: “America will never forgive blacks for slavery.” Oppressors and abusers (and the beneficiaries of past abuses) often project their own guilt, self-loathing and dehumanization onto their victims, then hate them for being evidence – the living (or dead) proof – of the abusers’ moral rot. So it is with the rich and the poor, as a new story at Alternet demonstrates.