There is a remarkable little detail in the life of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, born in Germany in 1927. In 1944, at the age of 17, he wanted to know what had happened to the Jews. He asked German soldiers returning from the Eastern Front, and they told him the truth: They were all being murdered. After the war, Germans would insist—almost unanimously—that they knew nothing. Perhaps they really did not know, but if so, it was because they did not ask.

This dynamic appears in every scandal, and it raises another question: How do we deal with the responsibility of those who avoided becoming suspicious? Are they complicit? They will say that they did nothing wrong.

The righteous like to imagine a clean line between them and the reprobates. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked, the line between good and evil passes through every human heart.

When those labelled reprobates ask for forgiveness, the righteous might answer that forgiveness is a price for those who have redressed their wrongs. Only then, they say, can the sinner cross back over the line and receive forgiveness as if it were a welcome-back present.

This logic makes little sense. None of us is righteous enough to make such a demand. Our nature is so deeply communal that we must always show a way back to those who have been shunned—especially when the shunning serves only to maintain a self‑righteous illusion.

The real question is whether we can still speak meaningfully about sin and its universality. Sin wounds relationships; forgiveness restores them. If the former is ubiquitous, then the latter is universally needed. And what is universally needed—what is essential for human life together—must surely be counted among human rights.

Spaemann, in recounting his wartime inquiry, never implied guilt in others. That restraint is what I have always admired most about the story. He simply stated the fact. And it is just as much a fact that without forgiveness, we cannot live.