Usually, however, we are in familiar situations interacting with others who are well known to us, whom we can affect by how we act. So it matters who we are and what we do. And research shows it takes more pressure to get low RWAs to behave shamefully in situations like the Milgram experiment than it takes for highs. But the difference between low and high authoritarians is one of degree, I repeat, not kind. To put a coda on this section: with enough direct pressure from above and subtle pressure from around us, Milgram has shown, most of us cave in.
Not very reassuring, huh. But it makes crystal clear, if it wasn’t before, why we have to keep malevolent leaders out of power.
Ordinary Men
If you’re thinking that the man on the street might somehow be manipulated into administering possibly lethal shocks to someone in a psychology experiment, but he certainly could not be induced to murder innocent victim after innocent victim in real life, let me ask you: Who did the killing in the Holocaust? Answer: Mostly members of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the “S.S.” They followed along behind the German army as it advanced through Poland and the Soviet Union, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews who now found themselves in Nazi-occupied territory. And they operated the death camps, including the greatest murder factory of them all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. To be a member of the S.S. you had to be a fanatical Nazi. Usually believed Jews were sub-human racial enemies and had to be destroyed. By all accounts they destroyed with sadistic enthusiasm.
But they did not do all the systematic murdering of the Jews. Some of it was done by quite ordinary men who were not consumed with anti-Semitism, and who were only marginally members of the German armed forces. Reserve Police Battalion 101 provides an example.[10]It was a part of the “Order Police” formed in Germany to maintain control in occupied countries.
Battalion 101 had eleven officers and nearly 500 men—nearly all of them from Hamburg. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was a World War I veteran who had risen in the police service after that war. He was not a member of the S.S., but two of his company commanders were, and the third was a “Nazi by conviction.” The rank and file were about 40 years old on the average, too old to be drafted into the Wermacht. They had worked on the docks, driven trucks, and moved things around warehouses for the most part prior to being drafted. Although a quarter of them were members of the Nazi Party, they had grown up before Hitler came to power. They were given basic military training and in June 1942, sent to Poland.
At first the battalion rounded up Jews in various locations and send them off to camps and eventual death. The men did this with about as much hesitation as Milgram’s subjects showed in the “Eichmann condition.” But on July 11, 1942 Major Trapp received orders to move his battalion to the town of Jozefow —which was probably a village much like Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof—and after sending the fit Jewish males off to labor camps, to kill the 1800 Jewish women, children, infirm and elderly who remained.
Trapp was quite distressed by this assignment, and as the order passed down the chain of command within the battalion of policemen, one of the junior officers announced he would not take part in the killings. His platoon was therefore put in charge of moving the Jewish men to the labor camp.
As the day of execution dawned Trapp assembled his battalion, told them of their assignment, and then made an extraordinary offer: any of the older policemen who did not feel up to the task would be excused. One man stepped forward and was immediately berated by his company commander. But Major Trapp cut his officer off and took the soldier under his wing. Seeing this, ten to twelve other men stepped forward. But the rest of the battalion stayed in their ranks, and were soon moved out to perform the executions. Major Trapp excused himself from any direct participation, and the three company commanders organized the massacre.
The policemen blocked off the Jewish section of the village and set to work herding the residents to the town square. The old and infirm were shot in their homes. Infants and small children were sometimes shot on the spot, but usually were moved with everyone else to the square. One company of the battalion was pulled aside and given a quick lesson in how to shoot someone in the back of the head with a rifle. It then moved to a nearby wooded area and awaited the victims to be brought to them in trucks.
When the trucks were unloaded the executioners were paired off, face to face, with their individual victims. They marched the Jews further into the woods, made them kneel down, and shot them. The killings continued all day without interruption, but the pace was slow so Major Trapp ordered a second company into the woods to speed up the murders. The leader of one of the platoons in this company gave all his men the opportunity to do something else, without penalty, but no one took up his offer.
A number of the policemen however found various ways to avoid becoming executioners. They hid in the village, or gave themselves extra “searching” duties. Some of the shooters asked to be given other assignments, especially after being given a woman or child to kill, and generally they were excused. Some of the policemen deliberately missed their target from point-blank range, while others just “disappeared” into the woods for the rest of the day. But these were the exceptions. At least 80 percent of those called upon to murder helpless civilians did so and continued to do so until all the Jews from Jozefow had been killed.
Afterwards Major Trapp instructed his men not to talk among themselves about what they had done. But great resentment and bitterness roiled in the battalion. The physical act of shooting someone had proved quite gruesome, with many of the shooters becoming covered with the blood and brains of their victims. Some of the policemen had killed people they had known earlier in Hamburg or elsewhere. Almost everyone was angry about having to kill children.
How could they do it, especially since many of them never individually had to? For one thing, while the policemen were not usually Nazis, they had little regard for Jews in general, so that made it easier. For another, their company commanders made it clear that, whatever Major Trapp had said and whomever he had protected, they expected their men to do the job assigned to them.
But judicial interrogations of some 125 of the men conducted in the 1960s indicated that, while no one had to participate, and about a dozen men demonstrated this by stepping forward, and others later dropped out in various ways, the great majority stayed in ranks and later killed whoever was brought to them out of loyalty to those ranks, and to maintain their standing in their units. “The act of stepping out that morning in Jazefow meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was too weak or cowardly.” “Who would have dared,” declared one of the policemen, “to lose face before the assembled troops?”[11]
Thus the men chose to become murderers rather than look bad in the eyes of the other men. It was a hideous, barbarous, supremely evil thing to do for mere acceptance, but as I said, researchers find the need to belong and conform, to be liked and “not make waves” powerfully affect the behavior of ordinary men. And the mass murderers in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were rather ordinary men.