Real Life Situation of an Obedience Act

During the World War II, millions of people were killed by the Nazi Germany but the question is could Adolf Hitler killed them all personally? The answer was absolutely not. It was done by a handful of peoples, peoples who believe in and been influenced by a man name Hitler. The work on obedience stemmed from Nazi atrocities. It was widely believed that Hitler himself was an evil genius, but he relied on the co-operation of millions of people to carry out his plans, including ‘the final solution'. What made all those peoples follow the orders they were given? Were they afraid, or was there something in their personality that made them like that? In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate and legal for the command to be made of them.

Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann (born 1906) was executed in 1962 for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control. Hannah Arendt (1963) published her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann titled ‘A Report on the banality of evil.’  Eichmann was the mastermind of the ‘final solution’ that involved using gas chambers in the death camps.  In her account Arendt described Eichmann as ‘a dull, uninspired, unaggressive bureaucrat who saw himself as a cog in the machine.’ She concludes that the Nazi's were mostly just ordinary people following orders. Most controversially she believed that the rest of us would behave in a similar way, given a similar set of circumstances.

Eichmann's trial on April 1961 in Jerusalem

Eichmann was a logistical genius whose part in the Holocaust was the planning of the efficient collection, transportation and extermination of those to be killed.  At his trial in 1961, Eichmann expressed surprise at being hated by Jewish people, saying that he had merely obeyed orders, and surely obeying orders could only be a good thing. In his jail diary Eichmann wrote 'The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question' (extract quoted in The Guardian, 12 August, 1999, p. 13).

Eichmann was declared sane by six psychiatrists, he had a normal family life and observers at his trial described him as very average.  Given that there appears to be nothing particularly unusual about Eichmann, we must face the uncomfortable possibility that his behaviour was the product of the social situation in which he found himself, and that under the right circumstances we may all be capable of monstrous acts.