Reflections on Milgram (article)

In 1945, following the liberation of the German concentration camps by British and American armies, photographs and newsreels starkly revealed that a new level of horror had been reached. Susan Sontag later wrote:

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One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau…. Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously (Susan Sontag on Photography, 1990).

The question asked in bewilderment was, “How could people do this?”, without ever receiving an adequate answer.

Theodore Adorno and his colleagues in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), concluded that certain personality types are attracted to authoritarian movements — in other words, that there is such a thing as an authoritarian or fascist personality. Harsh German childrearing practices were seen as responsible for creating people who could commit these atrocities. Henry Dicks in License for Mass Murder (1972) had interviewed some SS men and officers convicted of major crimes and held that they had a distorted personality whose origins Dicks saw in their authoritarian childhood and in bad mothering. Florence R. Miale and Michael Selzer in The Nuremberg Mind (1976) sought to prove the abnormality of the leading Nazi figures by analyzing their responses to Rorschach inkblots. The major merit of these explanations was that they permitted the comforting conclusion that since the perpetrators could be labeled medically deviant, then clearly they were different from the rest of us who could not possibly do such things.

Such a view could not maintain itself for long, as reports from Algiers, Chile, Greece, and, above all, Viet Nam showed that the Germans had no monopoly on the commission of atrocities. It is in this context that the pathbreaking studies of Stanley Milgram must be placed. Between 1960 and 1963, Milgram, a member of the psychology department of Yale University, carried out a series of experimental studies on obedience. These are described in detail in his book, Obedience to Authority (1974). The experiment consisted of a “teacher” subject being asked to give electric shocks to a “learner” (who acted out that role). The object of the experiment was to determine how readily individuals would administer pain when asked to do so by the individual supervising the experiment. (All of Milgram’s subjects were male.) Against expectation, Milgram found that

Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out…. It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation (p. 5).

Milgram referred to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964) which had portrayed Eichmann, in Milgram’s words, as “an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat on his desk and did his job” (p. 5). The pessimistic conclusion Milgram arrived at was:

After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation — a conception of his duties as a subject — and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies (p. 6).

Milgram’s final conclusion has been cited in numerous studies on the Holocaust:

Ordinary people simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority (p. 6).

The phrase “I was only obeying orders” was heard not only during the Nuremberg trials and in the trials of the rather large number of individuals who had participated in the running of concentration camps and death camps. Eichmann used it as the primary means of his defense in Jerusalem. Both Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Franz Stangl, who had commanded the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, in their defense argued that it would have been unthinkable for them to disobey orders.

Dwight Macdonald in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1959) cites the response of a paymaster of a camp who, when told that the Russians who had liberated the camp would

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probably hang him, responds with “`What have I done?’” Macdonald comments, “What had he done indeed? Simply obeyed orders and kept his mouth shut. It was what he had not done that shocks our moral sensibilities.” He then concludes, “It is not the lawbreaker we must fear today so much as he who obeys the law” (pp. 60-61). Macdonald, as many other writers, had noted that the Germans had a propensity for their deep respect for law, order, and obedience to authority. This made it possible to point to a responsibility in the German character.

The emphasis on the willingness of people to obey authority as a prime explanatory principle for atrocities, with its implied demand that immoral orders should not be obeyed, underwent a metamorphosis. When many Americans during the 1960s thought to apply what they perceived as the lesson from Nuremberg by refusing to participate in a war they viewed as immoral, they found that their government did not permit individuals to exercise their consciences in this regard and applied a variety of repressive measures. In Viet Nam, when a pilot refused to participate in a bombing mission (as I recall of Hanoi) which he believed would (as it did) result in many civilian deaths, he found himself court-martialed. In Austria, for reasons of conscience Franz Jägerstätter had refused to join the army to participate in what he viewed as an illegitimate war. For this he was executed. The response of the Church was to not recognize him as martyr to conscience. Bishop Joseph Fliesser commented:

I consider the greater heroes to be those exemplary young Catholic men, seminarians, priests, and heads of families who fought and died in heroic fulfillment of duty in the firm conviction that they were fulfilling the will of God at their posts. Or are the greater heroes Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventist who in their “consistency” preferred to die in concentration camps rather than bear arms? All respect is due the innocently erroneous conscience; it will have its reward from God. For the instruction of men, the better models are to be found in the example set by the heroes who conducted themselves “consistently” in the light of a clear and correct conscience (in Andres Maislinger, “Franz Jägerstätter,” in F. Parkinson, ed., Conquering the Past, 1989, pp. 180-181).

The Milgram studies, with their documentation of the ease with which people can, when authorized to do so, inflict harm on others, do not serve as the foundation for a positive view of human nature. They suggest that people only do harm when some legitimizing authority commands them to do so. Left to their own devices, Milgram implies, they would not inflict any pain on anyone else. Such a view is no longer tenable. In Varieties of Psychohistory (1976), Leon Rappoport and I included an essay by an army psychiatrist, which examined the wanton killing of a Vietnamese farmer by an American sailor (pp. 257-263). In describing the event, he noted that the unit had

swept through a village, killing all living things, including men, women, children and livestock…. [The sailor, who was a corpsman] came across an elderly injured farmer. When smilingly asked by one of his officers, “How are you going to treat him, Doc?”, Bob shot and killed the harmless man lying at his feet.

What is of particular interest here is that there are no indications that anyone in the unit thought such conduct in any way unusual. The army psychiatrist also commented:

As with My Lai, however, I doubt whether direct orders to gun down defenseless men, women, and children were responsible for the brutalities committed. Certainly our soldiers knew that such a command was unlawful and under most circumstances would not have obeyed it if they basically had not wanted to…. Many other such brutalities were reported to me by different individuals. In these cases there was no question of orders being responsible for the acts committed. These individuals clearly killed because they wanted to (p. 259).

The work which provides decisive evidence that we must go beyond Milgram is Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men (1993). Reserve Police Battalion 101, whose actions he describes, was made up of older men, no longer fit for military service, engaged in massive killing operations in Poland in 1942 and 1943. The men of this unit were not fanatical Nazis — they came from Hamburg, from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture, and some were probably former socialists and communists. Browning describes how the commander of the unit, 53-year-old Major Wilhelm Trapp, felt distressed about his tasks: “If this Jewish business

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is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans” (p. 48). Trapp, after explaining the battalion’s mission, then made an “extraordinary offer: Any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out” (p. 58). One man stepped forward followed then by ten or twelve others.

Browning then describes the “action” which some men did find indeed difficult. Browning clearly puts to rest the old canard that individuals had to participate in killing operations or put their lives at risk. In explaining the reasons why most of the men participated in the killings, Browning rejects Daniel J. Goldhagen’s interpretation of the primacy of anti-Semitism (Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996). Browning examined the indoctrination in anti-Semitism the men received and discounts it as a significant explanation for their actions. He judged that

80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them — at least initially — were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men (p. 57).

Browning concluded his book by asking what group of men could not become killers under such circumstances.

Setting aside Goldhagen’s nearly universally rejected explanation of German behavior as grounded in an “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” one cannot fail to be appalled at his description of the death marches at the end of the war. Inmates from camps were moved under incredibly brutal conditions away from Allied armies. Those who could not keep up were killed. The men who did this were not simply following orders or acting under compulsion of an external authority.

We have for too long been operating on the basis of an Enlightenment view of human behavior, which has perceived nurturance and kindness as “normal” and destructive behavior as aberrant. Milgram’s recognition of how easily individuals respond to authority was a major attempt to account for the new level of human destructiveness. It did not go far enough. It may be time that we move toward a new secular equivalent of original sin, recognizing that it takes little to liberate the potentialities for destructive and cruel behavior which lurk just beneath the surface.

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