Yes. The Elites of the West did it to us.
The Allies imposed guilt on us. Yes.
And I have an idea: after the power elites in the West realized that this „cowing“ of the surviving West Germans, and instilling a national inferiority complex in them, with the help of those hellhounds from the Frankfurt School (a pox on them) had made their country supine and helpless, they said (possibly around 1960):
„Wow. That really worked like a charm. Let us apply this medicine to our own respective peoples, too.
This way our power will never be challenged - and we shall get the international big business community on our boat as well. They need mindless customers who pay indiscriminately for their goods, after all; not self-conscious individuals who can discern what is good for them and what is not“.
Just a thought. If there should be truth to my guess, Lord Acton would be vindicated once more: „Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely“.