How did Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman rationalize his role in the atrocities of the Holocaust?
Subject: Obedience to Authority - Milgram’s Shock Machine
Event: Trial of Adolf Eichman, 1962
-The Parable of the Two Wolves:
A grandfather is talking to his grandson: “Inside each of us there is a battle going on between two wolves. One wolf is evil - full of anger, greed, jealousy, and arrogance. The second wolf is good - full of love, generosity, honesty, and humility.
After listening intently to his grandfather’s words, the grandson asks, “Which wolf will win?”
The grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”
Image by Rain Carnation from Pixabay
On this day in 1962, NAZI SS officer and organizer of Hitler’s final solution Adolf Eichmann was executed after being found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. After fleeing Germany at the end of World War II, Eichmann lived under an assumed identity for fifteen years. When he was discovered living in Argentina in 1960, Israeli officials apprehended him and transported him to Israel for trial.
One person who was especially captivated by Eichmann’s trial was a young Jewish psychologist named Stanley Milgram. When he heard Eichmann’s defense, that he was just following orders, Milgram got an idea that would become one of the most famous and most controversial psychological studies in history.
The study that Milgram designed involved 40 male volunteers. The subjects were told that the study was about the effects of punishment on memory, but what Milgram was really after was to find out how far subjects would go to obey authority.
Subjects were told that they would be randomly assigned the role of either “teacher“ or “learner.“ In reality, however, every subject became a “teacher,“ and each “learner” was one of Milgram’s assistants. The first step was for the “teacher” to observe while electrodes were attached to the wrist of each “learner.” The “teacher” was then taken to a separate room and provided with a microphone and headphones for communication with the “learner.” After studying a list of word pairs, the “learner” was quizzed by the “teacher.” If a “learner” gave an incorrect answer, an electric shock was administered. The “teacher” had a control board with 30 switches in a line. The first switch began with the smallest shock, 15 volts, and each of the other switches increased the shock slightly. The maximum shock was 450 volts. “Teachers” were told that although the electric shocks were painful, they were not dangerous.
In reality the “learner” never received any shock, but the teacher was led to believe that an actual shock was administered: Each time a switch was pressed a buzzer sounded and a red light illuminated.
As the voltage of the shocks increased, the “teacher” would hear the “learner” request to end the test, or the “learner” would complain of a heart condition. At 300-volts, the “teacher” would hear the “learner” banging on the wall, demanding to be released.
In the room with the “teacher” was the supervising experimenter, who wore a long white lab coat. If the “teacher” ever expressed doubts about continuing the test, the experimenter would respond with one of the following prods:
1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires you to continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice but to continue.
The results of Milgram’s study revealed that 65 percent of the “teachers” continued the shocks to the highest level 450 volts while all “teachers’ continued to at least the 300-volt level.
Milgram concluded based on his study that ordinary people are likely to follow the orders of an authority figure, such as the experimenter in the long grey lab coat. Furthermore, he concluded that this obedience to authority could extend even to the murder of innocent human beings as it had during the Holocaust.
Although many have turned to Milgram’s study to point out the fundamentally flawed nature of humans and their seeming willingness to follow orders blindly, historian Hunter Bregman sees things differently. In his 2019 book Humandkind: A Hopeful History, Bregman points out that questionnaires by Milgram’s subject revealed that only 56 percent actually believed that they were actually inflicting pain on the learner. Furthermore, because the experiment was framed as a learning experiment, subjects felt that they were being helpful and were through their participation making a contribution to science. This analysis serves to counter those who assert strongly that Milgram’s experiment proves that anyone will blindly follow the orders of a man in a grey lab coat (1).
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Whose trial inspired Milgram's experiment? What were the results of the Milgram experiment?
Challenge - No Good or Noble? : One of the oldest debates in philosophy is about the essential nature of human beings. For example, philosopher Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679) argued that humans are essentially corrupt and deprived and that without the civilizing forces of government, society would devolve into chaos. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) disagreed. He viewed the essential nature of humans as noble and peaceful. Do some research on what people have said about the essential nature of humans. Identify a quotation that you find interesting, write it down, and explain why you like it.
ALSO ON THIS DAY:
May 31, 1819: Today is the birthday of American poet Walt Whitman.
One of the great contributions that Whitman made to poetry was his experimentation with free verse. Without regular meter or rhyme, free verse combines rhythm, repetition, and parallelism to create music for the reader’s ears. Whitman’s verses with their optimistic, robust tones, celebrated the individual, painted images of democratic America, and reveled in the colloquial language of its common people.
Sources:
1-Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. New York: Little, Brown and Company 2019.
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