Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supported the genocide by presenting birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry took away Jewish property; German businesses fired Jewish workers and took away stock that belonged to the Jews. The universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices organized the trains that were scheduled for the deportation to the camps; German pharmacist
However, they were not told that it was they, the subjects, who will be experimented on. The learner is given a list of word pairs and has to memorize them. Then the learner has to remember the second word of the pair once the learner hears the first word. If the learner gives the incorrect answer then the teacher will shock him with electricity until he gets it right. Each time the learner is wrong the shock will get stronger.
In his article he hypothesizes, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (Milgram63). This experiment was inspired by WW2, which had just roughly ended. Milgram saw the Nazis fulfill orders without any questions to carry out horrific acts. This made Milgram question just how far the average citizen would go in order to obey. In the first execution of the experiment Milgram randomly selected Yale students to use for the experiment.
An experiment conducted in 1963 sent shockwaves though the academic community and beyond. Through alarming methods, researcher Stanley Milgram had made advances on the topic of obedience. He was pursuing the idea that a whole nation could fall under the authority and spell of one person, leading to the extermination of another race. He wanted to establish that the blind, sickening obedience during the Holocaust was not just a freak happening, but rather a common phenomenon (Milgram, 1963). The experiments began three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
Background Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was born to Jewish parents who immigrated to New York from Europe. Milgram studied Psychology at Harvard University and in 1961, inspired by the horrors of the Second World War began work looking at the moral question, ‘what makes people do harm to others’? He devised a unique experiment that put volunteers in a moral dilemma (Banyard 2012). Milgram’s Obedience Study: * Procedure: Milgram advertised for male volunteers aged between 20 and 50, to participate in what they believed to be a scientific memory study at Yale University. * Milgram developed a fake ‘shock generator’ consisting of switches starting at 15volts increasing to a maximum of 450volts.
He was known as “the most productive social psychologist of his generation” (Banyard. P. 2010 p 67). Milgram is most remembered by the Obedience study (1961), the main question he wanted answering was inspired by the activities and the mass murders carried out in WWII by the Nazis and their allies. “What makes people do evil things?” Milgram made this a scientific question but also a personal one as there were over six million European Jews killed during the holocaust. In 1961 one of the Nazi leaders involved in WWII was on trial, Milgrams question was the centre of the trial.
In “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram was trying to prove a point that shows how far someone will go to be obedient to the authority. He began this experiment using three subjects: the experimenter, the teacher, and the learner, but only the teacher was clueless about what they were about to partake in. The teacher would read out a series of words, and the learner, who was strapped to an electric chair, was required to remember the words that were associated to each other (Milgram 215). When asked, if the learner gave the wrong answer, the teacher was required to give them an electric shock of “fifteen to four hundred fifty volts” (215). Although the teacher did not know it, the learner was actually an actor pretending to be in extreme pain when given the electrical shock to persuade the teacher to want to discontinue the experiment (215).
Milgram’s experiment was taking two individuals – a teacher and a learner- and he would see how much the teacher would inflict pain upon the learner simply because he was following orders. Milgram wanted to see how far the teacher would go. Milgram put the teacher and learner in two separate rooms. The teacher actually believes that they will be giving shocks to the learner, but the learner is actually an actor who receives no shock at all who knows what is going on. The learner was put in a room with an electric chair, where he sat with his wrist strapped down and an electrode attached to his head.
Concentration Camps "When fate's got it in for you, there's no limit to what you may have to put up with" (Heyer 1). This quote is all to familiar to the situation many people faced when they were imprisoned in concentration camps. The concentration camps had an incredible effect on innocent civilians during WW2. From the rise of the Nazi power in 1933, the regime built many detention camps to imprison or kill so-called "enemies of the state." Most people believe that there were just Jews in the camps and to a certain extent this is true but there was many people there besides Jews.
In Nazi Germany the police were allowed to arrest anyone they suspected to be a threat to the party and anyone who openly opposed Nazi in public would be tortured, even to death. The SS largely helped Hitler to eliminate political rivals and was loyal till his death compared to the army and without such support, Hitler would face serious political challenges and lose much public support. The propaganda also played an important role in helping Hitler advertising his political ideology and ideas. The Nazi propaganda department was led by Joseph Goebbels, a Ph.D. in philosophy. Radio, newspapers, magazines, books, theatre, films, music and art were all supervised.