The term inner emigration was most famously used by novelist Frank Thiess in response to Thomas Mann's BBC broadcast alleging German collective guilt for Nazi war crimes and The Holocaust. Thiess replied that Mann had spent the Nazi years in the relative freedom and safety of Switzerland and the United States and had not experienced the police state tactics used by the Nazi Party and the Gestapo. Mann therefore had no right, according to Thiess, to pass judgment upon the compromises made by those who had. Thiess further argued that many German people who had outwardly appeared to conform had proven far more heroic than political refugees like Mann, who now passed judgment on them after spending the Nazi years in other, freer countries.
