Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Despite this, two-thirds of the subjects in the original experiment continued, obeying the leader to the end. In other words, they increased the shock voltages up to the highest setting, at which point the leader would call a halt.

Stanley Milgram’s own view of his results was that they confirmed Hannah Arendt’s perception of ‘the banality of evil’. The subject, who in the role of teacher believed that he had used shock strengths that were lethal, was not a deranged monster, but one of a majority, two-thirds of a group drawn from the population at large. The behaviour of this subgroup was not defined by psychosis, racism or hatred, but by obedience.

Milgram’s experiment was thoroughly tested by several other groups in the USA and elsewhere, and later Milgram, as well as many others, repeated the general idea with various modifications. It is now known that the percentage of wholly obedient subjects is relatively constant, regardless of gender, nationality and year of testing (early 1960s — the present).

The proportion of obedient subjects decreases by only a few per cent if the screams and wails of the pupil are relayed via an intercom system, but falls from about 65 per cent to about 40 per cent if teacher and pupil are in the same room. Social psychologists also obtained results demonstrating that, if the subject is in a work situation and someone of higher rank gives the destructive orders, the ‘obedient’ percentage increases considerably.

Over the decades these experiments have been both praised and condemned. The criticism focuses on the potentially crucial difference between giving someone electric shocks for a fixed time, and carrying on killing people over months or years.

One interesting angle is that many war criminals in post-war trials defended themselves by declaring that they ‘had to obey orders’. However, nobody acting for the defence was able to produce a single example of a German soldier being punished for his refusal to serve in concentration camps or in other settings where civilians were murdered.

Milgram’s experiments changed the perception of this crucial issue by shifting the attention from enforced obedience to spontaneous acceptance of authority.

Ordinary men

Studies on perpetrators of genocide took a new turn in the 1990s. The trigger was the publication in 1992 of a book entitled Ordinary Men by the American professor Christopher Browning, which drew a great deal of attention to the participation of German private soldiers in the Holocaust. This led others to focus on the same issue. For example, in 1995 a Hamburg museum exhibited documentation showing that the German army had executed prisoners of war, as well as Jews and other civilians. Daniel J. Goldhagen’s much discussed book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust came out in 1996.

In his book Christopher Browning describes how, in 1942, a battalion of approximately five hundred reserve policemen from Hamburg was dispatched to Poland for guard duty — or so they thought. By then almost all the younger or more aggressive men were fighting on the front line, and most of the reservists were middle-aged men who had not joined the Nazi Party. Their average age was thirty-nine, which meant that they had grown up and formed their attitudes in a Germany that was not under Nazi rule. The majority came from the Hamburg working class and were likely to have been communists or social democrats before Hitler came to power.

Several years after the end of the war the survivors from this battalion were thoroughly questioned by staff in the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Hamburg. Browning had found and analysed the extensive notes from these interrogations.

Early one morning, after three weeks of routine service in Poland, the entire battalion was ordered to get on board lorries. They were driven to the country town of Jozefow. On arrival they received their orders: kill the city’s 1,800 Jewish inhabitants.

The commanding officer, a major, wept as he told his men what Berlin demanded of them. He repeatedly made it clear that those who came to him and requested transfer to other duties would be accommodated, but only ten (possibly thirteen) men out of 500 did so.

The task was new to both officers and men, but an army doctor instructed them in what should have been an effective procedure: they were to put the tip of the rifle bayonet on the back of the victim’s neck at the point where his cranium joined the vertebral column and then pull the trigger.

The first batch of victims, children as well as young and old people, were marched along to a forest clearing and told to lie belly down. The soldiers started shooting but were so shaken that many missed, despite the unusually close range. They tended to aim their rifles at the victims’ skulls, which exploded when hit by the large-calibre bullets. The men were sprayed with brain matter again and again. In the course of the day many broke down, vomited and generally became physically incapable of continuing and an increasing number requested leave to stop participating in the killings. Others hid, or took implausibly long times to search houses that they knew to be empty, or deliberately missed when shooting at Jews who were running away.

When the sun set on Jozefow, between 10 and 20 per cent of the men had asked to be allowed off duty either for physical or psychological reasons. The rest had obeyed orders. But this was only the beginning. Following their initiation in Jozefow, the men adapted and obeyed orders more willingly as, during the months to come, they surrounded one small Polish town after another to round up Jews. Their job was either to send the captives off to extermination camps or to execute them on the spot. In the course of the next ten months the battalion caused the deaths of at least 83,000 Jews. The men had learned to live with their consciences.

The efficiency of the entire German killing machine improved by leaps and bounds. To the huge relief of the soldiery, slaughtering the Jews personally soon became a thing of the past. Instead most of the victims could be crammed into trains and sent off to Treblinka, the main regional extermination camp. Herding Jewish civilians into trains and sending them off to a certain death seemed easy, compared with having to kill them one by one. To help the policemen relax in the evenings, their spirit rations were increased and singers and actors were sent from Berlin to entertain them. Also, prisoners of war from the Eastern Front could now be detailed to deal with the more repulsive aspects of their task.

The battalion’s past experience had led them to adopt much more effective ways of killing Jews, which were also less emotionally disturbing. The men realised that there was no point in making the victims lie down before shooting them and instead herded them along to line up on the edge of a waiting pit. The double advantage was that they could be shot from a greater distance, and that the dead fell straight into their grave.

However, this method meant that many were only wounded as they fell, and it became the task of the East European POWs to go down into the grave and shoot anyone who moved or moaned. The prisoners were given very large vodka rations, and were out of their minds with alcohol before descending into the pits, where they had to wade through a knee-high mixture of blood and ground water They shot wildly, bullets criss-crossing the bunker dangerously as they aimed at the floating bodies.

Most of the policemen became accustomed to the slaughter as an everyday occurrence and grew hardened to the task. They had learned to cope.

Browning describes some of the men and their lives: There is the normally ‘strict and unapproachable’ SS officer who becomes bed-ridden with diarrhoea and stomach cramps every time another ‘Jewish action’ is announced. We learn of how he attempts to hide his weakness from his superiors.