Eichmann said … after much delay and a great deal of discussion, that there was an order of Himmler according to which all Jews were to be exterminated.14 When I asked him who was going to assume responsibility for this order, he said he was prepared to show me this order in writing which had been signed by Himmler. I then requested that he show me. This order was under the classification of Top Secret. This discussion took place in his study in Berlin. He was sitting at his desk, and I was in the same position opposite him, as I am now opposite the colonel. He took this order from his safe. It was a thick file. He then searched and took out this order. It was directed to the chief of the Security Police and the Security Service [Heydrich]. The contents of the order went something like this: ‘The Führer has decided that the final disposition of the Jewish question is to start immediately.’ By the code word [sic] ‘final disposition’ was meant the biological extermination of the Jews … it was an official decree. It was surrounded by a red border as a special delivery document … Yes, urgent document. I was very much impressed by this document which gave him [Eichmann] as much power to use as he saw fit.
We have a strikingly similar account from Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D. Although he had personally overseen the murders of more than 90,000 Jewish people and partisans, he again defers responsibility completely to his superior officer (in his case, Himmler). We can see this process as he testified at his trial in January 1946, about a briefing he and the other Einsatzgruppen commanders had received from the Reichsführer on 22 June 1941:
Question: Did you have any other conversations with Himmler concerning this order?
Ohlendorf: Yes, in late summer of 1941 Himmler was in Nikolaiev. He assembled the leaders and the men of the Einsatzkommandos, repeated to them the liquidation order, and pointed out that the leaders and men who were taking part in the liquidation bore no responsibility for the execution of this order. The responsibility was his, alone, and the Führer’s.
Question: And you yourself heard that said?
Ohlendorf: Yes.
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At Yale University in 1961, Stanley Milgram, directly influenced by the Eichmann trial then taking place in Israel, began his famous research study ‘Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View’.fn7 In 1963, Milgram published ‘The Behavioral Study of Obedience’ in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. This stunned the world by finding a capacity for ordinary people to obey scientific ‘authority’ figures by administering (what they believed to be) severe electric shocks to victims they couldn’t see – in reality, actors in a neighbouring room simulating agonised screams of pain. The volunteers for this experiment were recruited from a broad range of social backgrounds, and paid for their time; they were told by the ‘scientific researcher’ (suitably dressed in a white coat) that they were helping in a ‘learning experiment’ that concerned the ‘study of memory’.
They were then assigned the role of a ‘teacher’ who had to ask questions of a ‘learner’ (who was positioned in a neighbouring room, so could not be seen, but only spoken to through the wall). The teacher was then positioned in front of a large machine with the words ‘Shock Generator Type ZLB’ written above it, with switches ranging from 15 volts (‘slight shock’) to 75 volts (‘moderate shock’) to 255 volts (‘intense shock’) up to 375 volts (‘danger severe shock’), finishing with 450 volts (‘XXX’). The teacher was then directed by the ‘scientific researcher’ to ask a series of questions to the learner. If the learner got the answers wrong, the teacher was told to administer an electric shock; these increased in level of severity, until the final shock could be given at the ‘450 volts’ level (supposedly a dangerous, possibly fatal, degree of shock). If the teacher hesitated to enforce the electric shock at any stage, they were repeatedly told by the scientific ‘authority’ figure that ‘the experiment requires that you continue’, ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue’.
Before Milgram conducted the first research he asked his psychology students at Yale to predict what they thought the results of the experiment would be. The students thought only 1.2 per cent of participants would administer the maximum electric shock. The actual result, from the first round of experiments, was that 65 per cent of participants gave (what they believed to be) the maximum electric shock of 450 volts. And all of the participants gave shocks of up to 300 volts. Instead of taking personal responsibility for the decision of whether or not to give the electric shocks, the vast majority of the participants simply deferred responsibility to the authority figure next to them in the room – repeatedly asking the ‘scientist’ in the white coat for reassurance:
‘Are you sure it’s OK? That guy doesn’t sound very good in there.’
‘Yes, it’s fine, please continue with the experiment; it’s imperative for the good of science.’
‘Alright Doc, if you’re sure …’
Other common responses included comments like ‘Who’s going to take responsibility if anything happens to him?’ – to which the scientific researcher would reply, ‘The responsibility is mine – please go on, the experiment requires you to continue.’
In subsequent years, other psychologists repeated Milgram’s experiment and got strikingly similar results. Milgram also conducted the experiment several more times, but with variations. It was found that the distance between the ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ was a critical factor – i.e. when the experiment was carried out with both of them in the same room (and therefore visible to each other), the ‘teacher’ was far less likely to obey the order to give electric shocks. This finding links us back to what I was describing earlier (Abstractifying Victims), if you can see the face of a potential victim, it is vastly harder to inflict pain or death than if your violence can be delivered anonymously, for instance from a plane, or drone, or, as in the original experiment here, from another room. In other subsequent experiments it was found that if the scientific authority figure was not in the same room giving orders, the teacher was far less likely to obey. For instance, when the orders were given by telephone, the percentage giving the ultimate shock of ‘450 volts’ dropped from 65 per cent to 21 per cent. The original experiment had used only men as participants, but in subsequent research women were found to be equally obedient as men, equally prepared to deliver severe electric shocks when asked to do so by an authority figure.
*
If we move away from the laboratory we can see how such deferral of responsibility works in real-world contexts. In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, a prison guard who had worked on Death Row explained the process of having participated in many executions. His role was to strap the prisoner’s legs to the chair in the gas chamber, yet he didn’t appear to feel any responsibility whatsoever for his role in the deaths of the 126 men whose executions he had participated in: ‘I never pulled the trigger. I wasn’t the executioner … It never bothered me, when I was down at their legs strapping them in. But after I’d get home, I’d think about it. But then it would go away. And then, at last it was just another job.’fn8