German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stood in front of a roomful of schoolchildren in Marsberg this week and announced that an entire nation, the United States, was being humiliated by Iran. He questioned American strategy. He volunteered German minesweepers for the Strait of Hormuz. He compared the war to Iraq and Afghanistan and suggested, with the easy certainty of a man who has never had to make the call himself, that he would have warned President Trump more emphatically if he had only known.
It was, by any measure, an extraordinary speech. And it was delivered by a man whose country, of all countries, ought to be the most careful about the words it chooses when the subject is a Jewish state fighting for its existence against a regime that has spent forty years promising to wipe it off the map.
The Country That Made the Question Necessary
There would be no State of Israel in the form we know it, no urgency, no founding, no in-gathering of millions, without the events Germany set in motion between 1933 and 1945. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the historical record. The Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, the Wannsee Conference, the cattle cars, the camps, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the death marches: these were German projects, planned by Germans, executed by Germans, and tolerated or assisted by a great many ordinary Germans who looked the other way.
Six million Jews were murdered. Millions more were left displaced, stateless, and unwanted. The countries of Europe, including the country that had just spent six years murdering them, were not exactly lining up to take the survivors back. The British, then administering Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, had spent the prior decade restricting Jewish immigration precisely when it was most desperately needed. The Americans had turned the SS St. Louis away in 1939. The doors closed, one by one, until only one door remained.
That door was Palestine. And the people who walked through it did so because Germany had made every other option a grave.
Britain's Hand on the Scale
If Germany supplied the catastrophe, Britain supplied the architecture of the conflict that followed. The 1917 Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish national home in Palestine. The 1939 White Paper, issued as the Holocaust was beginning to take shape, capped Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and then cut it off entirely. London enforced that cap with the Royal Navy, intercepting refugee ships and interning survivors in camps on Cyprus. The Exodus, in 1947, was sent back to Germany. To Germany. Survivors of the camps were returned to the soil of the people who had murdered their families because Britain would not let them land in the one place that would have them.
When the Mandate became untenable, Britain did what Britain has always done in places it could no longer hold: it drew lines on a map and walked away. The 1947 partition plan was handed to the United Nations, the British troops withdrew, and the new state was left to defend itself the moment it declared independence, against five Arab armies, several of them trained, equipped, and in some cases led by British officers.
The modern Middle East, its borders, its grievances, its unresolved questions of sovereignty and refuge, is in very large part a British inheritance. Sykes-Picot in 1916, the Mandate, the White Paper, the partition, the abandonment. Every one of those decisions has cost lives, and is still costing them.
Munich, 1972
There is one more chapter in the German ledger that bears mentioning, because it is the one Chancellor Merz's own country tried hardest to forget.
In September 1972, eleven Israeli athletes and coaches came to Munich to compete in the Olympic Games. They were guarded, if that is the right word, by a German security apparatus that had been explicitly warned of the risk of a Palestinian terrorist attack and had chosen, for the sake of optics, to present a smiling, demilitarized face to the world. Members of Black September walked into the Olympic Village and took the Israeli team hostage. The rescue operation at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield was a catastrophe of German planning: too few snipers, no armored vehicles, no coordination, no plan. All eleven Israelis were murdered. A German police officer was killed. The surviving terrorists were released within weeks, after a Lufthansa hijacking that many in Israel believe was staged with German cooperation to make the problem go away.
It then took the German government fifty years to acknowledge its failures and to compensate the victims' families. Fifty years. The final settlement was reached in 2022.
And Now, the Lecture
This is the country whose chancellor now stands before schoolchildren and pronounces that the United States is being humiliated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the same Revolutionary Guard that funds Hezbollah, that armed Hamas for October 7, that has spent four decades chanting "Death to Israel" as official state doctrine, and that is now openly within reach of a nuclear weapon.
Merz is not wrong that the war is going badly. He is not wrong that Europeans were not consulted. He may even be right that the United States lacks a coherent exit strategy, a fair criticism that Americans themselves are making. But humiliation is a strong word, and it is a strange word to deploy from a podium in North Rhine-Westphalia, of all places, against a country fighting the ideological heirs of the men who cheered the Munich massacre and who built their movement on the same eliminationist logic that produced Auschwitz.
There is a version of this critique a German chancellor could legitimately offer. It would acknowledge that Germany's voice on questions of Jewish security carries a particular weight precisely because of what Germany has done. It would recognize that the Iranian regime is not a negotiating partner in the conventional sense, but the latest in a long line of movements that have promised to finish what Germany started. It would offer European help, minesweepers, intelligence, sanctions enforcement, without the sneer.
That is not the speech Merz gave. The speech he gave was a complaint about American clumsiness, delivered as if Germany were a disinterested party with no skin in the game and no history to answer for. It was the kind of speech a country earns the right to give only after it has reckoned, fully and without flinching, with its own role in making the conflict necessary in the first place.
A Closing Word
History does not assign collective guilt forever. The Germans of 2026 are not the Germans of 1942, and no serious person argues otherwise. But history does assign moral standing, and moral standing is earned, not assumed. Germany, having spent the better part of a century rebuilding its credibility on questions of Jewish life and Jewish death, ought to be the last country in the room to use the word humiliation against the country currently doing the dirty, expensive, unpopular work of preventing the Iranian regime from acquiring the means to commit a second Holocaust.
Britain, for its part, ought to spend less time at international podiums and more time in honest conversation with its own historical record. The lines its diplomats drew a century ago are still bleeding.
There is a place for European criticism of American policy. There is a place for hard questions about exit strategies and consultation and the cost of war. But that conversation begins with humility about how we got here. And on that subject, Friedrich Merz of all people should know to lower his voice.