Crimes of Obedience

Milgram's Experiment in Obedience

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, performed an experiment to study the conflict between an individual's obedience to authority and personal conscience. He wanted to understand how someone might justify acts of genocide. In the experiment, he enlisted student volunteers to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to the “subjects,” also called “learners,” on the other side of a barrier. In reality, these people were actors pretending to be shocked. As the students increased the “electric shocks,” the actors pretended to express their discomfort audibly. Some students were obviously upset by this, but 60% continued to administer the shocks until a level of 450 volts was supposedly reached. No student stopped before a level of 300 volts was administered. The students did question whether they should continue administering the shocks, but once reassured by the experimenter or authority that they would not be responsible for any harm to the learners, most of them continued with the experiment.

My Lai Massacre

Incidents have occurred during wartime in which members of the military are known to have harmed unarmed civilians because they were ordered to do so by superiors. A well-known example is the “My Lai Massacre,” during the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, entered the village of My Lai, a heavily mined area under Vietcong influence. Charlie Company had experienced several injuries and losses in the area in the weeks preceding this event. They were on a “search and destroy” mission that turned into a massacre of over 300 unarmed women, children, and elderly from the village. After the incident, when asked why they committed such acts, men from Charlie Company reported that they were bound to obey the orders of their superiors.

The Holocaust

In March 1938, the Nazis began systematically suppressing the freedoms of Jews in Germany and Austria, and the first concentration camp was established in Mauthausen by Adolf Eichmann. By 1939, Jewish citizens had lost nearly all their rights and most of their property. In October of that year, the Nazis begin euthanasia of sick and disabled Jews in Germany. Though a 39-nation meeting took place to address the situation, no action was taken to assist the victims.

In January 1940, the Nazis opened a new concentration camp, Auschwitz, in Poland. By February, the regime had invaded Poland, and in March, Denmark and Norway fell under their power. Jewish citizens in each of these countries faced the same losses as German Jews. Two ghettos, Krakow and Warsaw, were sealed off, confining more than 470,000 Jewish men, women, and children.

By the end of 1941, it was estimated that more than a million Jews had been murdered as German troops seized territories for Hitler. In December, Hans Frank, of Poland, told fellow cabinet members that they must rid themselves of all feelings of pity for the Jews. He announced that the Jewish population must be annihilated to maintain the structure of the Reich. Atrocities continued through 1943. [Page 98]In March 1944, U.S. President Roosevelt condemned the German and Japanese for their “crimes against humanity.” By November 1945, the Nuremberg International Tribunal took place, in which the war crimes of several Nazi officers and officials were examined. The officers and officials claimed they were “simply following orders.” These acts may be considered the largestscale modern day crime of obedience: Approximately 6 million European Jewish citizens were estimated to have been murdered in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, leaving only 3.5 million European survivors.

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