Hadolf Hitler is rightly considered the principal responsible of the Jews’ genocide: it’s not possible thinking to the destructive process caused by the Third Reich without consider the mind and the great charisma of the fuhrer. But Hitler was only the dome of a well-organized structure which was composed by several trusted collaborators. The project idealized by a crazy man was developed and supported by a host of faithful men, like Göering, Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels. Among all those men who contributed to the achievement of horrible ideas presented by Hitler, we must remember Adolf Eichmann: he has significantly contributed in the terrible deportation and extermination of the Jews with his "diligent" work. Eichmann's role was to ensure the effective organization of the system of deportation of Jews to concentration camps; he was the head of department IV B 4 of the Gestapo, which was created precisely to deal with the Jewish question. This department was the main coordination centre of all operations carried out against deportation of the Jews of Europe.Once the Nazi Reich was destroyed, all the major leaders of atrocities committed against the Jews were tried; this fate also touched Eichmann, who was captured and subsequently submitted to the judgement of the Court district of Jerusalem. Eichmann, although he admitted that the genocide of the Jews had been an horrific and indelible page in history, sustained not never been anti-Semitic, and justified his actions claiming always the same reason: "I just obeyed to orders”. Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed on May 31, 1962. Eichmann is the emblem of how a 'normal' man (that is not suffering from mental illness and not sadistic person) can contributes to the implementation of a destructive process conceived in the mind of a charismatic leader. Anyone who saw the process of Jerusalem was literally shocked to see that the person who managed the infamous Section IV B 4 wasn’t a cruel monsters or a sadic and perverse man: he was instead a “common” and “normal” man. That aspect was highlighted and analysed in depth by Arendt, who introduced the concept of "the banality of evil". Eichmann is the emblem of the ease with which a human being might become the author of a destructive process on a large scale. Don’t forget: the general destructive process designed in the minds of a few, could be achieved only with the collaboration of many “obedient” and “good” people.
Why Eichmann obeyed to bloody orders?! It can be understood and analyzed thanks to the results carried out by Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority: it’s no coincidence that his famous experiment has been nicknamed “Eichmann experiment”. Stanley Milgram, through his research, highlighted the ease with which a common man could have induced to behave in an aggressive way against an innocent and unknown victim, on the basis of obedience to commands from a considered legitimate authority. The fact that some orders are given by a prestigious and competent authority, let break in man who stay at a lower hierarchical level any personal moral judgement on the type of conduct to implement: he considers that the commands coming from a legitimate authority must be followed and implemented with care, without thinking if these commands are immoral and destructive. The great prestige and charisma in of Hitler during the Nazi regime could “manage” german people’s mind: Hitler, just like a puppeteer, could give immoral and sadic commands, because his followers would had obeyed without thinking. A remarkable and shocking example of the perpetual eteronomic state in which Hitler’s followers were captured, can be found in the pronounced sentence by Göering during the Nuremberg trial: "I have no conscience. My conscience is Hadolf Hitler”.
Milgram was able to demonstrate that there was a strong link between what happened during his experiment, and what happened in Nazi’s burocracy. The “distance” between perpetrator and victim is the key to understand the phenomenon called eteronomic state: more perpetrator (in Milgram’s experiment this position is rapresented by “the teacher”) feels close to the victim (the Milgram’s learner), more inhibitions he had to face to behave in immoral and aggressive way. If a man feels to be directly responsible for the suffering of the victim, he must overcome much greater inhibitions than the one who instead perceives of being responsible for the suffering of the victim only indirectly.
Burocracy can strongly influence men’s behaviour, because burocracy creates “social distance” between man who order and men who obey: between these two characters, there a lot of intermediate ones who can depersonalize orders. It’s like a chain composed by many rings: every rings represents a level of hierarchy. An example can help to understand. A represents the high level of the ierarchy (Hitler), Z represents the low level (man who has the task to kill). B, C, D, E (and so on…) are all the rings of this bureaucratic and bloody chain. A say to B: “That Jew must die”. B will transmit the same order to C, who will transmit the same order to D, and so on. The psychological mechanism responsible for commissioning of orders in Milgram’s experiment and in the Nazi violence it's the same. A man who has the task of transmitting only orders from a higher level of responsibility at a lower hierarchical level, don’t care about immediate consequences of the transmission of that order. Eichmann occupied the intermediate position between the level of those who took the most important decisions, like Hitler, who was the one who had stressed the need to deport Jews in a camp, and the level occupied by those who directly killed the Jews once they came to extermination camps.The "creation" of people like Eichmann, which are fundamental means to implement the project of extermination wanted by Hitler, was fostered in large part by the burocratic structure of the Reich. The Nazi regime was structured in an extremely hierarchical way: this aspect favoured the emergence of psychological processes highlighted mainly by Milgram, processes that favoured officials in obedience and availability to the transmission of orders without worrying about consequences of these orders. The Nazi hierarchy was an important factor in the implementation of a destructive process, calculated and planned to the smallest terms. It has been the great bureaucratic efficiency of the system the key of all. It is clear that it was important in determining a destructive process of these dimensions, creating those circumstances which allowed simple officials of the Nazi regime to play with no moral inhibition their task of transmitting orders to criminal hierarchical levels lower.
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Dr. David Evangelisti
57100 Livorno, Italy
Date of birth: 28/6/1979
evangelisti@hotmail.it
www.evangelistidavid.blogspot.com
http://www.psychologyofevil.com/
http://www.psychologyofevil.com/
○ Bachelor’s degree in Political science (Università degli Studi di Pisa), mark 110/110 cum laude. Final dissertation (19/10/2005): “Good people make bad things: dal comportamento aggressivo alla psicologia del male” [Good people make bad things: from the aggressive behaviour to the psychology of evil].
○ In 13/2/2006 he has been invited by the University of Pisa to a conveign about “The social costruction of good and evil”: he has taken a lesson about The psychology of evil (See more at http://www.sp.unipi.it/sp/files/2605-Seminario_Bene_e_male.pdf).
○ Main subjects: Social psychology, sociology, education, communications.
David Evangelisti
evangelisti@hotmail.it
evangelisti@hotmail.it
