"The question comes up a lot whenever I speak to students," said Eric Cahn, a Denver man who survived the Holocaust. Cahn's German Jewish parents were imprisoned in a holding camp in southern France, and made the desperate decision to give 4-year-old Eric and his 2-year-old sister to French Resistance fighters posing as camp workers. His mother died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz; his father survived but refused to speak about his experiences in the camp.

"In terms of Germans my age or younger, I have no animosity towards them," said Cahn, 67. "I do have a lot of animosity and anger towards Germans in their 80s and 90s today who stood by and let the Nazis do what they did. People turned a blind eye. I do feel collectively they are guilty."

Another survivor, Amitai Etzioni, now a noted sociologist at George Washington University in Washington, agrees:

"Let's assume you live in a community and know a lynching is going on and do nothing about it - you are complicit," he said. "There have been a lot of studies that showed most of the Germans knew what was happening. There was complicity."

Etzioni says Schulzinger is confusing law with ethics. For reasons having nothing to do with the Bible, I agree with Mr. Cahn and Mr. Etzioni. I think there is a collective guilt on the part of those Germans who knew, stood by and did nothing. I also agree that Germans who were born after WWII bear no such responsibility.

Bringing it back to Churchill, however, Etzioni makes a great last point.

As for Churchill's comments about the dead at the World Trade Center, Etzioni doesn't think vengeance is ever justifiable. "Killing innocent people is not a way to deal with guilt," he said. "Two wrongs don't make a right. Even the Nazis got a trial."