Milgram's View Of Morality During The Holocaust

Milgram’s experiment brought to light the darker side of human nature, and how they apply to situations across cultures and date back throughout generations, it explains how individuals morality can break down in the presence of supposed authority figures and stressful situations. The Holocaust is the perfect real-life example of Milgram’s statistics. Milgram showed that not all Nazis who were responsible for the acts that occurred during the Holocaust were evil and sadistic. Milgram said “The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation...and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive

By slowly upping the shock instead of going all out conditioned the subjects into complying with the directions given by the experimenter. Like the Holocaust it was a slow process that built up gradually and ended with the death of 5 million innocents (Blass 277). Milgram then found out what led to the genocide (Rathus 489). In Milgram’s obedience experiments, buffers were used to increase the distance between the students and the subject which lead to an increase in the subjects compliance. The Holocaust used buffers in order to divide the people using negative stereotypes and anti-Semitic propaganda, in order to separate and dehumanize a group of people. In both Milgram's experiment and the Holocaust by cultivating an “us and them” mentality ordinary people were able to undermine their own feelings of responsibility (Newman 15). Thus obedience not a massive group of heartless individuals contributed to the events during the Holocaust, as was shown with fundamental psychology gained by Milgram’s obedience