Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Generally, the Nazis were found to have had normal, functional and individually distinctive personalities — with just two exceptions. Traits shared by them were a marked tendency to overvalue their own abilities and a willingness to adjust their behaviour to whoever was construed as the group leader. In other words, these men were unable or unwilling to follow the directions of their ‘internal compass’.

Despite the shared traits, the researchers emphasised that the differences between the top Nazi individuals were much greater than the similarities. There is, they concluded, no uniform ‘Nazi personality type’.

The administration of the Third Reich

For the first fifteen years following the end of World War II, attempts to understand what motivated perpetrators of the Holocaust concentrated on psychological aberrations. The leaders attracted all the attention and the Nuremberg court documentation was the primary source of information.

Another line of investigation attempted to define the so called ‘authoritarian personality’. People with this personality type were thought to do exactly as they were told, even when the orders contradicted common sense or decency. Many believed this personality type to be particularly prevalent in Germanic culture.

The early 1960s brought a shift in emphasis. Three circumstances were crucial:

1. The publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European jews , a pioneering book in which Hilberg analysed, fo the first time and in great detail, the bureaucratic structure that underpinned the Nazi regime. He showed that Nazi rule was not directed by a united hierarchy that ruled from the top down, as had been generally believed. Instead, the Reich depended on the rivalry for power between several distinct organisations, each one striving to outdo the others. This system expanded into a colossal killing machine, which employed people from every sector of German society.

Hilberg also realised the necessity of setting up an extensive administrative structure to manage the extermination of millions. Administration meant, as always, rules, documentation and set procedures. Staff selected either for certain mental disorders or for a specifically Germanic personality type (or types) could not possibly have followed complex operational directives on such a scale.

Hilberg’s book interested many and stimulated further studies of the bureaucracy of the Third Reich and of the middle-ranking managers who were in charge of running the system according to the guidelines laid down by the leadership.

2. Hannah Arendt, the famous American philosopher and intellectual, wrote a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , which came out in 1963. Its core material consisted of her report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Israeli intelligence agents had captured him in Argentina and delivered him to stand trial in Jerusalem. The court case took several months. Eichmann had been the head of the Gestapo’s Section for Jewish Affairs and in that position he had borne the ultimate responsibility for organising the Jewish transports across war-torn Europe to the network of concentration camps.

Arendt argued that the most terrifying thing about Eichmann was precisely that he was not a crazed demon, driven by his obsession to exterminate Jews; instead he was a dull bureaucrat devoid of any noteworthy personal traits. He was, in her view, bereft of any will of his own and followed orders without engagement, or any consideration of the consequences. The face of evil was not one of frenzied hatred, but of a mediocrity who, above all, cared about advancing his career within the organisation.

Hannah Arendt’s book portrayed evil in a new light. Her image of it has had immense influence on our attitudes to Nazi Germany and, more generally, to the phenomenon of evil, as well as to large, rule-ridden organisations. Her influence persists, even though most contemporary historians agree that she was wrong in her judgement. She had uncritically accepted Eichmann’s own story of his contribution to the Holocaust, distorted by him in order to support his defence.

It appears that Eichmann did in fact defy orders from above, if these interfered with the efficiency of his section’s management of Jewish transports. His energetic performance of his work went far beyond the call of duty. Indeed, his passion for his task was such that he was prepared to weaken the German war effort at times, if this allowed more Jewish transports to be completed.

3. Nineteen sixty-three also saw the publication of experimental results from the laboratories of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. His data demonstrate the extent to which ordinary people will obey a perceived authority, even if those in charge have no means either of rewarding or punishing those who serve their purposes.

Originally, Milgram had intended to compare American and German subservience to authority, in order to illustrate a presumed trait in the German national character. He never started the German part of his experiment, because the first set of results from the USA were more sensational than anyone had imagined.

The world’s most famous experiment in social psychology

Milgram’s experimental paradigm has become internationally recognised through dissemination in school and university textbooks, newspapers, magazines, films and television programmes. Recently, it was even referred to in a TV commercial.

Two experimental subjects are told that they are participating in an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on learning. They draw lots about who is going to be respectively ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’. The lottery is fixed beforehand. The true subject is unaware that his companion is an experimental assistant, who is predestined to be the pupil. Consequently, the true subject will always be the teacher.

The pupil is strapped into a chair wired up to deliver electrical shocks. The subject/teacher is then led away to another room, where his only contact with the pupil is via a microphone and the text on a display screen showing the pupil’s responses. If the pupil answers incorrectly, the teacher is instructed to deliver a punishment shock by pressing a button.

The shocks are mild at first. Another display shows the voltage and grades the severity — as in 15 volts: mild shock. With each wrong answer, the teacher must gradually increase the voltage in fifteen-volt steps. The scale reaches 420 volts: Danger — severe shock, and then, finally, 450 volts: XXX.

To facilitate international comparisons there are precise rules for how the leader of the experiment and his assistant must behave. The pupil is never actually shocked, but when the subject believes that he is delivering 300 volts, the pupil will protest by banging hard on the wall that separates him from the subject. He bangs again at 315 volts and then does or says nothing at all. The implication is that the pupil might be unconscious by this stage.

The teacher is told that any failure to answer a question must be regarded as an incorrect answer and hence, despite the pupil’s silence, the voltage must be increased another step each time.

If the subject protests, the experimental leader has four command options. The first is: ‘Please continue,’ then: The experiment requires that you continue,’and next: ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’ The last option is: ‘You have no other choice. You must continue.’ If the subject still refuses to carry on, the experiment is stopped.

The most common response by far is that the subject/teacher protests repeatedly and, as the experiment proceeds, starts to sweat, shake, stutter, groan and bite his lip.

When the subjects arrive in the lab they are typically relaxed and self-assured, but in the course of the first twenty minutes they usually come close to having a complete breakdown. Twitching nervously, they pace about the room, as if trying to make up their mind whether to leave or not. Often, they keep talking aloud about how they cannot stand this any more. The subjects know they are free to leave at any time and that a decision to end the experiment will not have any repercussions. All they have to say is that they don’t want to do this any more and then actually stop.