by Dan McMillan
Two examples illustrate these behavioral patterns. The first is Reserve Police Battalion 101, a group of 500 uniformed Germans who helped shoot 38,000 Jews in German-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943, and who brutally rounded up another 45,000 victims and forced them onto trains headed for the gas chambers of Treblinka. The second is Charlie Company, a group of 105 American soldiers who shot roughly 500 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968. The American people also reacted to the My Lai massacre in ways that reveal widespread habits of obedience in American society, at least at that time.2
Turning first to Reserve Police Battalion 101, we know a great deal about their motivations and attitudes, thanks to Christopher Browning’s remarkable study, as well as to Daniel Goldhagen’s work. Both scholars studied these men using judicial interrogations of some 210 members of the battalion.3
The men of the reserve police battalion were thoroughly “ordinary.” Raised to adulthood under the old German Empire (1871–1918) or the democratic Weimar Republic (1919–1933), they had experienced none of the Nazi indoctrination that molded so much of German youth after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Except for some of their officers, they were not Nazi fanatics like those who volunteered for the SS. Instead, they were drafted into the Order Police because they were too old for combat duty. Nearly two-thirds of the rank-and-file members came from the working class of Hamburg, a city in which the Nazi Party had made few inroads before Hitler seized power. Based on their socioeconomic backgrounds, and what we know about politics in Hamburg during the 1920s, it is safe to say that very many of these men—perhaps most of them—had voted before 1933 for one of the two political parties that most strongly opposed the Nazis, the communists or the socialists. Judging from their background, these men should have been the last men in Germany who would murder Jews for the Nazi government.4
These men were of course not typical of those who filled most of the murder squads in the East. Most shooters came from the SS or had otherwise demonstrated a commitment to Nazism. However, several thousand other killers were, like the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, middle-aged conscripts with no prior service in Nazi institutions. Therefore, we must find a way to understand their behavior and motives, which probably also resembled the behavior and motives of many other perpetrators who were not Nazis—for example, those who worked in industry and the civil service doing jobs that helped to facilitate the Holocaust.5
On June 20, 1942, after completing their training in the Hamburg region, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders sending them to Poland. The men were led to believe that they would be performing guard duty; even their officers probably did not know the awful task that awaited them. They arrived in the Lublin region of Poland on June 25 and settled into their base in the town of Bilgoraj. During the next three weeks they moved among a series of small towns, driving the Jewish populations onto trains that took them for resettlement in urban ghettos. In a few cases, some men seem to have murdered Jews who were too frail or sick to be resettled, but they still did not perceive the full scope of their murderous undertaking in Poland. Their initiation into the extermination of European Jewry came on July 13.6
The battalion’s commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, called all units of the battalion from outlying regions back to their base in Bilgoraj on July 12. Trapp met with his officers and gave them their orders for the following day. The men learned that they were going into action, but apparently did not know what it entailed. The officers woke their men early on the 13th, and at about 2:00 a.m. they left Bilgoraj in trucks. They carried their firearms and large amounts of extra ammunition. Arriving at the outskirts of the town of Jozefow just before sunrise, the men stepped from their trucks and assembled to take their orders from Major Trapp.7
Trapp explained that roughly 1,800 Jews lived in Jozefow. Over the course of the day, his men would separate out approximately 300 men, especially skilled craftsmen, and ship them to a work camp. The remaining 1,500—women, children, and elderly men—the battalion would shoot dead. Trapp spoke haltingly, with tears in his eyes, as he explained that their orders had come from the highest authority, even as he recognized that this would be a terribly difficult task. He briefly tried to justify the murders by blaming Jews for the bombs then raining on German cities and for guerrilla attacks on German troops in Poland. Then he made an offer to the older men of the battalion, because many had wives and children of their own at home: if they did not feel that they could complete this difficult task, they could step forward and he would assign them some other duty. Ten or twelve men stepped out of line to accept Trapp’s offer.8
Two platoons surrounded the village, while the remaining men drove the Jews of Jozefow to the marketplace, shooting anyone too frail to walk. After separating out the men slated for the work camp, they shuttled their victims to a nearby forest in trucks and began shooting them. The killing continued almost until nightfall, when some 1,500 men, women, and children lay dead and unburied in the forest. Over the next year and a half, these men carried out a series of smaller mass shootings. Small groups from the battalion also participated in what they called the “Jew hunt.” This meant combing through the villages and forests of the northern Lublin region, looking for scattered individuals or families who had gone into hiding, many of them in underground bunkers dug out of the forest floor. They shot their victims on sight and ordered nearby Poles to bury them. In early November 1943, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, together with several other units, carried out a massacre of over 30,000 Jews at two work camps.9
Although no more than a dozen men immediately accepted Trapp’s offer to let them avoid killing, many others asked to be relieved of this duty after taking the lives of one or more victims. Over the course of the year and a half that followed the slaughter at Jozefow, a division of labor developed among the men of the battalion. A substantial minority of men emerged who shot willingly and in some cases eagerly. Such men regularly volunteered for the “Jew hunt.” When the battalion carried out a massacre, Trapp could rely on them to do the shooting, and often only their help was needed, allowing the others to avoid this task. A larger group, probably the majority of the battalion, shot when so ordered, but with little enthusiasm. The smallest group—no more than 10 to 20 percent of the battalion—consistently avoided shooting.
How can we understand why an overwhelming majority of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 committed murder when asked? None of these murderers would have faced punishment—or any other serious adverse consequences—if they had refused to kill. In all the postwar trials of men who perpetrated the Holocaust, not once could any defense attorney provide an example of punishment for failure to follow such orders. Conversely, in many cases the officers who ordered the killings, acting as Major Trapp had, explicitly offered their men the chance to opt out, acknowledging that the men might find it emotionally difficult to shoot unarmed civilians, especially women and children.10
If the killers faced no punishment for refusal to kill, this does not mean that obedience to authority did not play a powerful role in determining their behavior. The reflexive tendency to obey authority figures pervades every functioning society. Without some automatic obedience, civilization would dissolve into chaos. In a celebrated series of experiments conducted in the 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed just how far such obedience could go, even in a peacetime setting where the authority figure was an unimposing psychology researcher, as opposed to a superior officer in wartime.11
Milgram did not tell the subjects of the experiment that they were its focus. Rather, they would “assist” him in a “learning experiment” by administering electric shocks to other people (played by actors) whenever the actors gave wrong answers to questions. The actors pretended to react sharply to the nonexistent shocks. Goaded by the researcher, the true subjects would dial up the voltage of the shocks after each wrong answer. In turn, the actors would complain with increasing vehemence about the
pain and cry for help. On the voltage dial, the subjects saw a red zone of high voltage marked “Danger.” Responding to instructions from the researchers, many volunteers repeatedly administered shocks at “Danger” levels, even after the actors had fallen silent, presumably passed out from pain or stricken by heart failure. All told, two-thirds of the subjects obeyed the researchers’ instructions to the point of causing extreme pain.12
In an even more dramatic example of obedience to authority, members of an American infantry company shot roughly 500 unarmed, unresisting Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. While the circumstances surrounding the My Lai massacre differed dramatically from those confronting Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland, there were enough similarities to warrant including the American soldiers in this discussion. The most obvious difference between the two groups of men is that, unlike the German police unit, Charlie Company had seen combat and had suffered grievous losses during the three months that the men had fought in Vietnam before the massacre. Twenty-three members of the company had been wounded, some maimed for life, and five of their comrades had died. What is more, they had experienced the uniquely frustrating type of combat that characterized the American soldier’s lot in Vietnam. During these three months, they had almost never seen their communist enemies, who struck at times and places of their own choosing, only to retreat into the jungle before the Americans could engage them.13
Two days before the My Lai massacre, on March 14, Charlie Company lost one its most popular sergeants, George Cox. A booby trap tore him into pieces. Another soldier lost his legs, while a third lost an arm and a leg and was blinded. The following day, the men of the company attended an emotional funeral for Cox and then received their orders for the 16th from Captain Ernest Medina. Medina made clear that now Charlie Company would have a chance to “get even,” and claimed that the villagers in My Lai were communist sympathizers. At a subsequent trial, twenty-one witnesses testified that Medina gave an unambiguous order to kill everyone in My Lai the next day, armed or unarmed, man, woman, or child. On March 16, numerous members of Charlie Company did exactly that, although not a single shot was fired in their direction.14
The My Lai massacre thus differed markedly from the murders committed by Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland. American policy in Vietnam, although terribly careless of civilian lives, did not constitute genocide. Unlike the German policemen, the Americans had recently taken heavy casualties and were motivated in large part by a desire for revenge. And yet, other factors should have caused the American soldiers to be less willing than the German policemen to shoot civilians. The soldiers of Charlie Company had grown up in a democratic society in which prevailing expectations of obedient behavior could not have been as strong as they were in Nazi Germany. Unlike the policemen at Jozefow, who had to commence shooting very shortly after receiving their instructions and had no opportunity to discuss the situation with their comrades, Charlie Company got its murderous orders a good twelve hours before going into action. Any man who disliked the idea of killing civilians had ample time to discuss the matter with his comrades, to seek out those who might support him in refusing to kill, and to rally opposition. Although many of the men did refuse to shoot, despite a direct order on the ground from Lieutenant William Calley, no one seems to have registered any dissent the night before the massacre.15
Further insight into Americans’ views on obedience to authority comes from examining how the public reacted to the trial of Lieutenant Calley. Convicted of murder at a court martial, Calley was sentenced to life in prison at the end of March 1971. A Gallup poll taken shortly thereafter revealed that 79 percent of Americans disapproved of the verdict, while only 9 percent approved. Two months later, the psychologist Herbert Kelman and the sociologist Lee Hamilton conducted a detailed survey of 990 randomly selected Americans. The survey described a situation identical to that faced by Charlie Company and posed two questions. First, “Do you think most people in this situation would follow orders and shoot [the civilians], or do you think most people would refuse to shoot them?” Second, “What do you think you would do in this situation—follow orders and shoot them, or refuse to shoot them?” A full 67 percent said that most people in this situation would kill the civilians, while only 19 percent thought that most people would refuse. In addition, 51 percent said that they themselves would shoot, while 33 percent said they would refuse. However, as Kelman and Hamilton pointed out, refusal was clearly the “right” or desired answer in this survey, so that 33 percent likely overstates the percentage who would refuse; presumably, 51 percent understates the percentage of those who would shoot.16
This survey does not necessarily predict how the respondents would actually have behaved if they had found themselves in uniform in a combat zone. However, it does show that a majority of the American people thought murdering civilians under orders was normal, expected, and perhaps even morally right. This finding seems all the more remarkable when one considers that the court martial, by its verdict, had clearly laid down a moral and legal standard sharply opposed to this prevailing sentiment. The court had rendered its judgment: Calley’s order to shoot was illegal, and killing these civilians was murder. Moreover, the Vietnam War had for years inspired profound controversy among the American people. Millions had demonstrated against the war, calling it both immoral and futile. The survey’s respondents had every reason to see Calley’s murderous order as highly controversial and, at a minimum, morally problematic. Nonetheless, a full two-thirds of them thought that most people would kill civilians if ordered, and over half admitted that they would commit murder if told to do so.17
Milgram’s experiments, the My Lai massacre, and Kelman and Hamilton’s survey make it easy to grasp why Reserve Police Battalion 101 committed so many murders with so little dissent. The universal habit of obedience to authority would have operated with doubled effect in the wartime German context. These killers had already lived nine years under the heel of a repressive dictatorship, and their tendency to obey any order must have been massively reinforced by prevailing expectations. They were also committing these murders during a war in which over 5 million German soldiers would lose their lives. Amid this massive cheapening of human life and intense pressure to support the war effort, few men would refuse to kill people whom the regime had branded “enemies of the Reich.”18
These killers also yielded to a second kind of pressure, namely, the need to conform to the behavior of the group that sheltered them. Loyalty to one’s comrades in a military unit has long been recognized as a powerful motive driving soldiers’ behavior. It is probably the main reason why almost all soldiers fight when commanded to do so. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were a small, close-knit unit, almost all recruited from the same city and most coming from the same social background. Operating far from home and living in Poland among a hostile population, these men depended entirely upon each other for companionship and moral support. Since the battalion had to shoot even if an individual did not, any man who refused to kill was leaving the “dirty work” to his buddies and faced the risk of being ostracized. Moreover, refusing to shoot might appear as a moral reproach to one’s comrades. Consequently, the minority who did avoid shooting (roughly 10 to 20 percent) usually pleaded that they were too “weak” for the task, thereby reaffirming the majority view that murdering civilians was a sign of “toughness.” Explaining his actions during a postwar interrogation, one shooter observed that “no one wants to be thought a coward.” A policeman who avoided shooting during the battalion’s first massacre found that his comrades “showered me with remarks such as ‘shithead’ and ‘weakling’ to express their disgust.”19
Michael Bernhardt, a member of Charlie Company who refused to murder civilians at My Lai, later recalled the men’s loyalty to each other and the acceptance of perverted moral norms that came to be shared by most members of the unit:
When you’re in an infantry company, in an isolated environment like this,
the rules of that company are foremost. They’re the things that really count. The laws back home don’t make any difference. . . . Killing a bunch of civilians in this way—babies, women, old men, people who were unarmed, helpless—was wrong. Every American would know that. And yet this company sitting out here isolated in this one place didn’t see it that way. I’m sure they didn’t. This group of people was all that mattered. It was the whole world. What they thought was right was right. . . . The definitions for things were turned around. Courage was seen as stupidity. Cowardice was cunning and wariness, and cruelty and brutality were seen sometimes as heroic.20
Bernhardt had joined Charlie Company later than the other men and had remained an outsider. Not fully belonging may have made it easier for him to refuse to kill, to violate a group norm.
Bernhardt also put his finger on a third mechanism that helps explain why men kill under orders: the tendency people have to adapt to any role that they must fulfill and to adjust their notions of morality to the situation that faces them. As he put it, although “every American” would know that killing civilians was wrong, in their role as soldiers and in the terrifying circumstances that confronted them, “the definitions of things were turned around,” so that “cruelty and brutality were sometimes seen as heroic.” A remarkable experiment, conducted on the Stanford University campus in 1971, further illustrates this inclination to adapt to a prescribed role. A psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, constructed a mock prison in the basement of a campus building, filling it with “prisoners” and “guards” drawn from a pool of volunteer subjects. Zimbardo put the subjects through a battery of tests, weeding out those who displayed an “authoritarian” personality or who otherwise scored outside the normal range in various dimensions of their psychological makeup.21