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“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” –Theodor Adorno, 1949 For Adorno, both philosopher and critic, the Holocaust is something that cannot be expressed in any language, even that of poetry. For numerous others both during and after the immeasurable tragedy, the Holocaust remains virtually unimaginable. Even more disconcerting, however, is the extreme number of German participants who simply “evaded acknowledging the fact that the Jews were being deported to their death while the Final Solution was being carried out” (Jones, 79). In the fourth chapter of his Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, David Jones discusses the nature of self-deception as well as the moral blameworthiness inherent in the actions (or lack thereof) of a significant part of the German populace motivated by feelings of “guilt, shame and responsibility” to engage in “evasive self-deception” during the Holocaust (81). Jones’ discussion of “evasive self-deception” is of particular import in an assessment of moral responsibility among individual perpetrators in the Holocaust. A logical but by no means obligatory component of moral responsibility, judgmental blame rests upon the simultaneous existence of five basic crit