By Sean Swain with additions by Abigail D.

Stanley Milgram, a Harvard Psychology intern working on his master’s degree, could not accept conventional wisdom. After the trial for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Milgram wondered if it was fair to hold people accountable who were just following orders. Were they truly accomplices or just obeying authority? Twenty years earlier, the Nazis had turned Europe into one large mass grave--and not just the Nazi party and the German military. The German people had participated to some lesser or greater degree. Gypsies, Jews, Slavs, Poles, homosexuals, and others, marched to death camps and were coldly exterminated under the noses of the German people with little more than a peep of protest. The process of serial, wholesale murder had been kept about as secret as the weather. Germans could look out their windows and see it in its full technicolor reality. But few lifted a finger to oppose it. Most participated, if not actively, then with passive cooperation, sweeping the ashes of the dead off their proverbial doorsteps.

As the evidence of crimes against humanity amassed, disturbing questions emerged of how a modern industrial nation that produced Martin Luther, Richard Wagner, Karl August Von Heigel, and Karl Marx could also produce a population of otherwise average people capable of participating en masse in one of the most brutal and bewildering crimes in human history.

The disturbing implication that made many, including psychologist Stanley Milgram squirm in their seats was: “if it happened there...” Perhaps the grisly truth of German crimes against humanity revealed a deeper reality about the capacity of all human beings to become death-camp guards. Perhaps it is in all of us to march strangers to their deaths as if baking a pie or cutting the grass. Maybe the mass graves did not begin in German soil. Perhaps mass graves had their origins in the human heart.

The Milgram experiments, groundbreaking and earth-shattering when first conducted in the 1960’s, remain as relevant as ever, and just as troubling. These experiments, duplicated again and again, produced the most disturbing and revealing social science findings ever generated about humans and our relationship to authority.

This is how it worked: A volunteer, the subject of the experiment, was designated as “the teacher” and was told the experiment was a study in the effect of electric shock on memory. The teacher would read a series of words and another volunteer in the next room, “the student”, would respond with answers. For every wrong answer, the teacher was to press a button and give the student an electric shock, starting at 45 volts. As the session progressed, the subject would be directed to increase the voltage incrementally.

What the subject did not know was that the person in the other room was not a volunteer and was not hooked up to electrodes. The other person “receiving shocks” was an actor. The real purpose of the experiment was to see how long and under what conditions subjects would continue to administer shocks. Before Milgram began the experiment he polled seniors in the psychology department and his colleagues to see how they thought people would respond. Most speculated the volunteers would not be able to continue in the experiment after the first or second electric shock. Milgram thought the same.

Milgram was wrong. Over and over, time and again, session after agonizing session, people from all walks of life came in and participated in the experiment and did as they were told. They pressed the button and administered painful shocks. They turned up the voltage as instructed.

Zap..Zap...Zap... As the voltage increased, so did the actors agony. Banging on walls, wailing, begging for mercy, crying out about an existing heart condition and severe chest pain were used to see if the humanity of “the teacher” would be invoked and he/she would not be able to continue. Not so. An astoninshing 60-65% of people who were subjects in this experiment finished it out until the end, administering a full 450 voltage shock to “the student”. None of them stopped before 300 volts. Zap...Zap...Zap...

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point, he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered, ‘Oh God, let’s stop it.’ And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed till the end.” —S. Milgram.

Average Americans would make good death camp guards.

Since the initial Milgram Experiments conducted at Yale in 1961, hundreds of similar experiments have been reproduced in different settings in different countries with different variables around the world. All have had the same results and have come to the same conclusions: our ingrained “respect for authority” makes us prone to obey even when we would otherwise feel compelled to refuse; that we defer to the judgment of perceived authorities and continue to do as we are told even to the harm and possible destruction of other human life. In simple terms, our healthy respect for authority makes us all potential war criminals.In Mr. Milgram’s words, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

But beyond this, Milgram’s experiments revealed the “how”. In interchanges between the subject and the authority--represented by a man in a lab coat holding a clipboard--reoccurring themes arose as the authority persuaded and coerced each subject to continue administering shocks. Subsequently, Milgram could draw conclusions about dynamics that authorities use to most effectively manipulate people into going along with a program they would otherwise reject:

1. Convince the subject he/she is not responsible. In the Milgram Experiments, the authority assured the subject that she/he was not responsible for anything that happened, that the experiment’s mastermind accepted all responsibility. Thus, if the other person complaining of chest pain was to die, it was not the subject’s fault.

It is essential when getting people to be good Nazis to divest them of personal responsibility, to convince them that they are only complying with orders and are absolved. When this dynamic is effective, a subject’s reponse is, “I’m only doing my job...Its not me, its the system... I don’t write the rules, I just follow them...”