Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment

However, although the ingroup-outgroup differentiation and the role of fear are largely applicable to many perpetrator groups in the Holocaust, there are some aspects of the killings were the account falters. Although the Jews were seen as the chief enemy by the Nazis, there were many outgroups that began to take form. They persecuted Romani people, Slavs, people with disabilities, lesbians and gays as well as political enemies, particularly Communists. For example, under the SS Totenkopfverbdn, they enforced labour as a way of inscribing political identity. The Guards would often reserve the hardest labour for those whose policies were on the far left. (Allen 1997:263) The Nazis had many groups of ‘them’, which may have blocked the sense of

At the forefront of this account is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. The experiment saw a learner on one side of the wall and the teacher, the subject of the experiment, on the other. The subject was instructed by the experimenter to meet any wrong answers from the learner with electric shocks of increasing intensity from 15 up to 450 vaults. The subject was given a shock of 45 vaults in order to experience the intensity of the treatment. (Jones 2006:271) Milgram reported that 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed the orders of the experimenter right until the end, despite the learner pounding on the wall at 300 and at 315 vaults. (Jones 2006:271) These results led Milgram to believe it to be possible for a subject to obey orders passively and dutifully, and slip into an ‘agentic state’, where they are simply an instrument of authoritative orders. (Helm and Morelli 1979:324) Lifton offers a thesis of doubling to support this claim. He suggests that people may divide themselves into two fully functioning wholes and use part of themselves to act as an entire self. (Glass 1997:73) Furthermore, Milgram saw his findings as largely inline with Arendt’s banality of evil thesis. (Blass 2002:99). He believed the sequential nature of the shocks to be key as it worked to “bind a subject to his role”. (Milgram

German children would read cautionary tales such as ‘Struwwelpeter’ or ‘Shock-headed Peter’ where disobedience was seen to lead to bad consequences. (Blass 1993:34) Furthermore, the first of twelve commandments used to teach Nazi youth was ‘The leader is always right’. (Blass 1993:33) Christopher Browning explores the applicability of Milgram’s findings to the members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. In terms of geographical and social background, the men were not likely future mass killers. (2001:164) Milgram’s findings on obedience to authority are convincing applied to the men of the battalion. Despite the authority at Józefów being far more complex and multifaceted than in the experiment, it does hold considerable support for Milgram’s conclusions. Their orders for massacre were received from high yet distant authority that bound both the men and their immediate superior, Major Trapp, to kill.