Example Newspaper front page distributed in 1945
Translation courtesy of /u/_wolfenswan :
"These atrocities: you are to blame!
Millions of Europeans were tortured, abducted and murdered by the Nazi-criminals in twelve years. Men, women and children were chased (hetzen is a difficult verb to translate, it's a specific act of chasing or hunt and usually refers to the hunting dogs chasing the prey) and tortured to Death by Hitler's brutish butchers (Henkersknechte are literally the hangmen's assistants but I figured butcher is used in a similar connotation in English), only because they were Jews, Czechs, Russians, Poles or French. You watched calmly and condoned it quietly.
Allied soldiers, hardened by battle, could not hide their disgust and outrage on facing the gased, charred and haggard corpses of the KZ's victims. According to German reports (Lagerbericht = reports found in German camps) 50 000 people were burned, shot and hanged in Buchenwald. In Dachau alone American soldiers found 50 freight wagons filled with decaying corpses (could also be rotting or putrefying). Since beginning of this year 10 000 people have succumbed to their torture at that place.
In Belsen British Soldiers found torture chambers, crematories (no idea why they didn't use Krematorium there) , gallows and flogging-poles (is there a better word for it?) . There, 30 000 people died.
In Gardelegen, Nordhausen, Ohrdruf, Erla, Mauthausen, Vaihingen uncountable numbers of forcefully displaced people (not happy with that translation, very literal) and political prisoners died to an Inferno (not sure if they are intentionally using the original meaning of "holocaust" here, before the latter became widespread) which the world had never seen before (literally: the world's history)!
You watched idly. Why didn't you use words of protests and screams of outrages to shake the German conscience awake? This is your great guilt - You are jointly responsible for these great atrocities!
In Dachau Freight wagons filled with corpes were discovered by american troops.
Stacked like firewood [these] corpses were found in Dachau by American troops. Blood was flowing along the floor when the soldiers arrived.
This inmate of the infamous Dachau camp [Schandlager is a component word and tricky to translate: Schande can mean disgrace, shame(ful) or infamous] was found hollow-eyed and emaciated by hunger by american soldiers.
A part of the 1000 corpses found in a pit by British and American soldiers after liberating a camp.
American soldiers inspect an atrocious camp [again a compound word: Gräuel is very strong and implies also madness and horror], where the burnt corpses of the Nazi-victims are stacked
Charred corpse of the political prisoners, who were chased [again hetzen, see above] to death by SS-troops in Dachau.
A Dachau inmate watches the corpses of his comrades, who became the victims of brutish SS-troops. The Nazis poured them in gasoline and burnt them."
The original post which triggered this question can be found here at /r/PropagandaPosters
Answer now below!
I do want to make clear that the Germans were not blamed very often as a collective: Much of the focus was on specifically the leadership of the Nazis, not on the average German citizen.
More to follow!
There are three major pieces involved in this that we have to consider, so I'll do that one-by-one, if that's alright!
The Nuremberg Trials: Perceptions
The Nuremberg Trials were exceedingly controversial, for many reasons. The first was the fact that a trial was even happening, obviously, for the German leadership/war criminals. Winston Churchill was in favor of simply shooting the major Nazi leaders without trial, while others were less inclined. Over time, Roosevelt and co. won out on this. On November 1, 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin "[spoke] in the interest of the thirty-two United Nations" at the Moscow Conference and provided that all Nazis who were responsible for, or who had taken a consenting part in atrocities, would be judged and punished without prejudice to how major their crime; essentially saying that all would be judged, even the leaders. Nuremberg also established precedents:
They refused the defense of "following orders" (now known as the Nuremberg Defense).
They established a precedent for trying people for things like crimes of aggression (ie. aggressive wars without justification), and crimes against humanity (which had been mostly ignored, and believed to be the right of sovereign states to carry out). While both were prosecuted in the past, there weren't many laws on crimes against humanity specifically.
They worked under laws that were not in play or force (internationally or in Germany) at the time of the crimes. This made the trials based on ex-post-facto laws, laws established after the fact. This is not allowed in most Western nations, even though they were the ones hosting the trials.
Keep in mind these major precedents and factors, because they're important for what I'm about to explain!
The Nuremberg Trials ended up sentencing 12 of the 22 Nazi defendants (who were prosecuted by French, American, Soviet, and British prosecutors, with each handling different counts/charges and areas the crimes allegedly occurred in) to death by hanging. That's right, 12 of 22 were sentenced to death. Another 7 were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from 10 years to life. 3 were acquitted. 3 of the 6 accused organizations (yes, organizations like the SS were tried) were found to be criminal. Only Martin Bormann (who was convicted in absentia) and Hermann Goering (who committed suicide a few hours before) were not hanged on October 16th. This is very significant, and had a huge play in the minds of the Germans.
The Germans learned from posters on the street that their former leaders had been hanged, and for what crimes. There were few signs of remorse. Friedrich writes:
In Wuppertal, schoolgirls dressed in black on the morning of the execution; in Hamburg, people whispered that the British leaders responsible for the bombing of the city also deserved to hang...None of [the deaths of millions of Germans during the war] was justified by international law, nor by justice, nor by humanity. It was brute revenge.
The Germans understood this perfectly. Reprisals had been their customary method of occupation. Moreover, Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels had announced that the Allied forces, if successful, would destroy the vanquished. So the public regarded the International Military Tribunal as the Allies' way of eliminating an enemy, just as trials had been used in the Third Reich. The fact that the Soviet Union...was participating in a legal proceeding strengthened this belief.
So essentially, what it boiled down to with Nuremberg was not the issue that the Germans believed the Nazis shouldn't be hanged, but rather that they didn't think it was in the interest of "international law" or "justice", but more towards revenge. Typically, Germans referred to Nuremberg as legally flawed, but said that the major Nazis deserved what they got. They just thought that the Soviets, and other war criminals, deserved the same, and that the trial was purely politically motivated since the Allies tried none of their own. This was only reinforced by Germany's legal professionals, who believed that the major architects of Nuremberg (like Justice Robert Jackson) were working under ex-post-facto laws while trying to say that Western law was consistent with the trials. They viewed him as a hypocrite for it.
Once again, Friedrich:
...Germans abandoned considerations of legal guilt and asked a fundamentally emotional question: who actually deserved punishment? In the German mind, their defeat was undeserved...The men responsible for leading them into [a war against the entire world] deserved the worst. By thus acknowledging the need to punish the major war criminals...Germans joined the winning side...In this view, however, any further prosecutions were undeserved, because the victims of criminals cannot be their accomplices. Yet accomplices were precisely what the Nuremberg project considered many Germans to be.
That sums up German sentiment about the Nuremberg Trial, which was a very important step in the effort to re-educate and change German thinking; it was as much propaganda in a sense as it was legal justice. Germans felt this first attempt to blame them unjust, for the most part, because of how it didn't stop at Nuremberg. The re-education to follow would only make them more certain of the injustice.
The Nazi Purge
As I mentioned, Nazi organizations also stood trial at Nuremberg. They were convicted as criminal gangs and their members as gangsters, facing sentences. Over one million people were affected by this procedure. Suddenly, there was a denazification program going on, and while most of the punishments were things like fines, confiscation of property, dismissal from public service, and loss of businesses, there was a lot that the Germans didn't like about this. I've already gone over most of it in Nuremberg, but I'll reiterate it: Most Germans didn't feel responsible for the acts they committed or were complicit in. They didn't see themselves as the perpetrators of crimes, because they blamed their leaders instead.
Even with things like the Holocaust, there was a great reluctance to admit moral wrong due to the insane amount of propaganda they had experienced. That leads me to the much more vast third category: social re-education.
Social Re-education
All media was now subject to censorship, and things like newspapers, books, and films were to be replaced by right-thinking versions. This, I should note, is not something that international law justifies; the Hague rules of land warfare say that a country's domestic affairs can only be interfered with if that is to help the occupier's military position be secured. This was not the case here.
Part of the re-education process involved detaining 300,000 people in camps for three years to prevent uprisings and partisan activities. These were mayors, Hitler Youth leaders, and the like. They were considered security risks, and the Allies used the justification that they would have to undo the past 12 years of authoritarian rule by temporarily being authoritarian themselves in re-educating Germans.
Still, the Germans found the harsh trial and purge treatments impressive yet reprehensible. They knew what this type of treatment was like, having watched their leaders do it to other nations, but they saw it directed unequally, given to those who did and didn't deserve it alike.
In spite of all this opposition, Germans had no more willpower or motivation to fight. They no longer had the spirit to continue in vain, as the German army had in 1945. So while the Allies prepared for this resistance militarily, they found nothing of the sort. They only found re-education to be trying and difficult, because of the German belief in its unfair application. People also took it upon themselves to retroactively "denazify" themselves, insisting they had been coerced, tricked, and deceived by Hitler. They insisted they had secretly cherished things like democracy all along. They did this in the hopes of gaining trust and assistance rather than punishment; only another testament to how they hoped to comply, rather than fight.
Eventually, this effort to re-educate Germans of their guilt is said to have failed, because of the rivalry between the Soviets and the West.
Around 1949, the new sworn-democratic government of Germany (installed by the West) decided to rehabilitate and reintegrate many German elites in prison, to combat rising Soviet influence with already-popular figures. The Allies were doing it already; in 1950 slaveholder Alfried Krupp went free. In 1951, though, the Americans executed mass-killers (5 members of the SS), and the outcry and uproar (despite those 5 being publicly despised "butchers") underlined German hopes that rehabilitation and amnesty would be granted to more people.
Thus, the German public accepted, understood, and saw the Allies' arguments about the justifications for the programs. They felt blamed unjustly: they felt that their leaders were the ones to blame, but that Allied leaders ought also be blamed. And they felt, most of all, that they were not at fault; that they were forced by their leaders to accept a war they couldn't win. This is nuanced, but I tried to explain as best I could the various viewpoints!
Sources:
Friedrich, Jörg. "Nuremberg and the Germans." War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg. New York: TV, 1999. 87-102. Print.
Wright, Quincy. "The Law of the Nuremberg Trial, Part I." War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg. New York: TV, 1999. 3-8. Print.
Stahmer, Dr. "Motion Adopted By All Defense Counsel, November 19, 1945." War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg. New York: TV, 1999. 81-83. Print.
