Publishing companies translated and issued Milgram’s 1974 book into eleven languages. His articles were printed in German in 1966 and in Hebrew in 1976. Milgram’s “findings” may have provoked President Jimmy Carter to appoint Elie Wiesel as chair of the newly-created thirty-four member Commission on the Holocaust. Many magazines featured Milgram’s theories and in 1979, Sixty Minutes (CBS) featured his conclusions in a segment. His work may have also served as the basis for a play, The Dogs of Pavlov. The timing of these events is surely questionable. 1930
Milgram conducted an experiment which ultimately involved 1,000 participants. Two people, one acting as the “learner” and the other, a naïve volunteer was designated the “teacher,” who committed to work with the official experimenter, a stern-faced high school biology teacher. In the Yale’s Interaction Laboratory, a likeable forty-seven year old accountant acted as the “learner.” The authority situated the “learner in an adjacent room, secured to a chair with an electrode attached to his wrist. The authority told the “learner” that he had to learn specific word pairs. If he made an error, he would receive electric shocks increasing in intensity with each error, all at the hands of the “teacher.” 1931
The helpless “learner” did not actually receive a shock. The experiment’s object was to determine the amount of pain the “teacher” would inflict on a protesting victim because of an authority’s order. When the “teacher” exhibited hesitancy to expose the learner to what he thought was increasing amounts of pain, the authority, without means of enforcement, ordered him to continue. Most subjects rendered obedience without question. 1932 They could have left the laboratory when the demands made upon the “teacher” conflicted with their own moral values. James Waller asks, “Why is submission to authority such a powerful and potent condition in humankind?” 1933 Although many of Milgram’s subjects’ demonstrated internal conflict and some showed hesitancy, most of the “teachers” continued to obey the authority figure. 1934
Some of the participants viewed their counterparts as deserving of shocks. Comments like, “He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,” were quite common. After all, the faulty learning could not have been because of ineffective teaching. Moreover, once the “teacher” acted against the victim, it was crucial to view him as a worthless individual whose punishment was justifiable. 1935 Once people adopt violence as a means of imposing “learning,” it accelerates—one bullet quickly becomes a bomb, applicable to every “enemy.” If those Germans had only resisted Nazism, the United States would not have found it necessary to bomb their cities into oblivion, nor would it have had to slaughter three million Vietnamese, if they had only rejected Communism. You see, it’s their fault. Now, it’s those stubborn Muslims who will not comply with America’s version of democracy.
His study certainly took the focus off of American war crimes and helped validate Holocaust stories and how evil the Germans were. Given the catastrophic numbers, in the millions, of World War II victims, the hundreds of towns and cities that the Allies bombed and the 1.5 million Germans who died in Eisenhower’s enclosures, the millions that Stalin starved or otherwise killed, one might ask why Milgram did not accurately reframe his test question and ask why tens of thousands of Soviet, British, American and other soldiers would obey authority figures and deliberately destroy another nation and millions of its citizens in two world wars.
All societies have some form of hierarchy, individuals who assume a managerial position over the masses. In such circumstances, the masses have a tendency, augmented by government education, to cede compliant obedience and confine their complaints to the people within their immediate environment. The government, despite the authoritative aura and the royal treatment accorded the leaders, is not holy; it is an artificial entity created by the people. Over time, a gradual turnabout occurred—officials became the masters and the people became the submissive servants, resulting in a very obedient populace. Regardless of the availability of historical information, society has conditioned the majority of the population to acknowledge and learn from the historical similarities.
Breaking the grip of authority control requires a number of mental adjustments. Thou shalt not kill, a moral imperative, does not register in the human psychic structure when distorted by propaganda, a draft notice, or orders from a uniformed superior. Inflicting pain on a helpless, harmless person is universally unacceptable yet people become so engrossed in the technicalities of obedience, they fail to acknowledge the consequences. For example, individuals who indiscriminately drop white phosphate or napalm from a plane never smell the burning flesh. When citizens act on behalf of the government instead of themselves, it apparently decreases their ethical concerns although those objectives are personally unimportant. Mental disassociation allows the perpetrator to transfer all responsibility to the authority. 1936 People who are unwilling to defy authority at the expense of their own purported values who then later attribute their morally deficient acts to an external entity have squandered their own agency, their responsibility to make decisions.
Another psychological factor is to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects, like the government or the flag. Propagandists dehumanize and devalue certain ethnic or social groups through mild criticism that rapidly becomes vilification. People easily exclude these groups from the national identity, both emotionally and physically into ghettos, reservations, camps, or detention centers, for their own safety of course. Then they might be required to have special documentation showing personal status. It metastasizes; hatred of the Nazis was easily transformed into hatred of all Germans and now, all Muslims. Subtle systematic anti-German, anti-Japanese and anti-Muslim propaganda psychologically prepares citizens to accept and participate in the destruction of entire ethnic populations through massacres, pogroms, and wars.
Under the leadership of both parties, Americans have willingly tossed emaciated cadavers into mass graves, worked in detention centers, tortured, killed, raped and used napalm and phosphorous, incendiary devices and tons of high-explosive bombs to immediately cremate the frequently unsuspecting poor, the elderly, the men, women and children in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Berlin, Dresden, Vietnam, Baghdad and Fallujah. Institutionalized hate promotes the most heinous behavior in otherwise ordinary, law-abiding, non-critical-thinking citizens once their government, the ordinary humans behind the artificial institution, manipulates and manufactures facts and employs the media to identify enemies.
Harold Thomas wrote, “In their day to day lives, in their immediate physical environment, most Americans have no discernible enemies. It is always possible that there could be governments and other organizations that pose a genuine physical threat to the American people. However, it is virtually impossible for the people to know this for themselves. They must depend almost entirely upon information provided by government and the mainstream media.” 1937 Further, he says, “In all of human behavior, what can be more serious than supporting acts of violence against people in faraway places? Or for that matter, at home! Is there not a profound, moral responsibility to be absolutely sure of both the accuracy and urgency of the situation before perpetrating acts of death and destruction upon other human beings? How difficult does this become when one is at the mercy of sources of information that he/she cannot verify? What if those sources have lied to you at other times and on other issues, and you know it? What if both intuition and available facts tell you that your government has not only been lying to you, but may have been involved in creating the very danger it now says will require the use of violence?” Is it morally justifiable to support your government’s acts of violence against people anywhere when
1)You are not in immediate physical danger
2)You feel strongly that you cannot trust your government
3)You have no way to verify the information the government is providing as its excuse for violence? 1938
People frequently negatively perceive in
dividuals who dissent. Compliant, silent citizens are much easier to manage and manipulate. People have learned that dissent against popular beliefs and well-established concepts is uncomfortable and unpopular in the classroom, the boardroom and in social circumstances. People do not knowingly or willingly set themselves up as targets of criticism. However, when reality demands it, people have the right and the obligation to dissent against tyranny, especially if the government carries such oppression out in their name.
Slave Laborers Working for the Allies
In 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a statement requiring German officials to implement acts of restitution, reinstatement, restoration, reparations, reconstruction, relief or rehabilitation as directed by any Allied representative. Further, the defeated Germans were obliged to “provide such transportation, plant equipment and materials of all kinds, labor, personnel, specialists, and other services for use in Germany or elsewhere as the Allied representatives may direct.” 1939 In September 1944, Roosevelt pressured Churchill to accept the Morgenthau Plan, which mandated “forced German labor outside Germany.” On October 21, 1944, FDR hypocritically declared, “the German people are not going to be enslaved, because the United Nations do not traffic in human slavery.” 1940
Morgenthau, in Germany is Our Problem, wrote, “Reparations, in the form of future payments and deliveries, should not be demanded. Restitution and reparation shall be effected by the transfer of existing German resources and territories, a) by restitution of property looted by the Germans in territories occupied by them; b) by transfer of German territory and German private rights in industrial property situated in such territory to invaded countries and the international organization under the program of partition; c) by the removal and distribution among devastated countries of industrial plants and equipment situated within the International Zone and the North and South German states delimited in the section on partition; d) by forced German labor outside Germany; and e) confiscation of all German assets of any character whatsoever outside of Germany.” 1941
On January 5, 1945, General George C. Marshall wrote to the National Commander of the American Legion, “Our treatment of them (POWs) is governed by the Geneva Conventions which, among other provisions, requires them to be furnished rations equal in quality and quantity to those of American troops at base camps in this country. This is done as a matter of treaty obligation and our soldiers in German hands receive generally reciprocal treatment.” Ninety-nine percent of the American POWs in Germany survived their incarceration.1942 Churchill told the Germans in January, before their surrender, “We Allies are no monsters. This, at least, I can say on behalf of the United Nations… Peace, though based on unconditional surrender, will bring to Germany and Japan immense and immediate alleviation of suffering and agony.” 1943
General Georgy Zhukov, Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny participated in the Potsdam Conference. These military leaders exchanged opinions about assessing war criminals, reconstructing Germany, and overpowering the Japanese. Ike had an especially good reciprocal, respectful friendship with Zhukov as did his successor, General Lucius Clay who said that if Zhukov and Eisenhower had continued to work together, that the Soviet-America relationship should have developed further.
At the Yalta Conference, February 4-11, 1945, officials decided to force Germans to rebuild war-damaged areas. FDR said this was a “healthy idea.”1944 At the Potsdam Conference, July 17-August 2, the Allies reiterated, “It is not the intention of the Allies to… enslave the German people.” By June 29, the Soviets had already incarcerated between four and five million Germans, including civilians. As soon as Berlin and Breslau surrendered, long lines of prisoners were force-marched east, twenty-two miles per day, to existing camps near Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kharkov, Sevastopol and Kiev. They were going to rebuild what they had destroyed. Frequent Soviet purges by the NKVD had always provided a huge multitude of laborers, from ten to twenty million slaves. The Soviets were quite willing to add their defeated German enemies to the labor pool.1945
The Allies visualized the extended use of German slave labor, between seven and eight million people, to remove the war debris and rebuild the damage that they had caused during the war. In 1943, the British first broached the idea of using Germans for slave labor in Moscow. However, using POWs for forced labor is contrary to the Geneva Conventions so British and American officials simply altered the prisoner’s status to Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs). The Allies viewed high ranking German soldiers as war criminals, and undeserving of a trial. Despite this, they did not treat them as harshly as the enlisted men but gave them a few special privileges and confined them in select generals’ camps in South Wales. 1946
On July 10, 1945, General Rousseau assumed control of the Dietersheim Camp from the U.S. Army. There were 32,000 men and women in the camp, all in the agonizing process of dying. Captain Julien, who arrived on about July 27, was shocked by the disastrous sight of a camp “peopled with living skeletons, male and female, huddling under scraps of wet card board” which was, according to him, reminiscent of the photos taken of the Buchenwald and Dachau inmates. 1947 During the three-year occupation, following Germany’s surrender, the United States kept the Germans on less rations than those in the German camps. The military even starved the Germans they liberated from those camps. 1948
Other American camps in the vicinity of Dietersheim were in the same deplorable, disgusting condition. Many of the captives in the American camps in Germany and France, destined for enforced labor, were totally incapable of work due to their debilitated physical condition. Out of the 1,000 German prisoners arriving in Marseille, 287 could not work. In the camp at Sainte-Marthe, only eighty-five out of 700 prisoners were capable of working. The French reported, from Siershahn, that, among the prisoners, there were over 400 children under the age of fifteen and some of them were under the age of eight. They also incarcerated older people—there were men and women over the age of fifty. At least two-thirds of the captives from the camp at Hechtsheim were starving. 1949
Stalin insisted that the Soviet Union was entitled and expected restitution for Germany’s destruction in his country. He claimed that hardly a usable house existed between Moscow and the Polish frontier. Churchill and FDR arrived at a figure of $20 billion as a foundation, from which the Soviets would get half, given the extent of the damages and grievances. Stalin viewed the POWs, like those already there, as a huge labor force that fulfilled reparation obligations. FDR assured Harry Hopkins that Stalin planned on using the POWs for forced labor. 1950 The Soviets, who already held millions of POWs planned to take full advantage of this provision. They conscripted men and women in their zone as workers in chain gangs or at labor camps.1951
On June 14, 1940, the German army had entered Paris and took control of the buildings of the Grand Orient of France. The Germans established teams to seize the documents relating to the activities of the largest body of French Freemasonry. The historical documents and files covered Masonic activities immediately preceding the outbreak of the 1939 war. They transported the massive archives to Germany.” In 1945, the Soviets found twenty-five railway cars in the Prussian province containing those Masonic documents from numerous lodges in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, Poland and Czechoslovakia which provided evidence of the widespread power of international freemasonry. The Red Army transported them to Moscow. The records described thousands of freemason and political connections. Stalin used these records to manipulate freemason politicians in the western world who worried about people discovering their devious activities. 1952 Stalin, with this incriminating secret knowledge, could demand abundant concessions, which he most certainly would. Perhaps, he used this information to obtain additional people to exploit in slave labor, or the acquisition of the choice intellectual or industrial plunder from Germany.
The United States, Britain, and France violated the 1929 Geneva agreements by us
ing thousands of former German soldiers to clear minefields, sweep sea mines, destroy surplus ammunition and demolish bombed-out buildings. Japan and Russia did not sign the agreement but certainly had certain moral obligations regarding the treatment of POWs. The German government drafted their citizens to fight as part of a national army, just like Americans. Yet, many of the slaves were civilians, not former soldiers. The United States deported American citizens to Germany due to their pro-German sentiments, some of whom were enslaved and used for forced labor. 1953
The British held approximately 130,000 former German officers and men during the harsh winter of 1945-46. These individuals were inadequately clothed for the freezing temperatures in the camp in Belgium. Even British officers described the conditions as, “Not much better than Belsen.” The inmates slept in tents on the bare ground with only one blanket. The guards habitually beat and abused these undernourished pathetic prisoners. In August 1946, the Americans in Germany’s U.S. zone had 284,000 German slave laborers, 140,000 of them worked in the occupation zone; 100,000 were in France, 30,000 in Italy, and 14,000 in Belgium. The slave holdings in other countries totaled 80,000 in Yugoslavia, 48,000 in Belgium, 45,000 in Czechoslovakia, 4,000 in Luxemburg and 1,300 in Holland. 1954
In August 1946, Britain, according to the ICRC, had 460,000 German prisoners, all performing slave labor. The government contracted their prisoners out to companies who paid standard wages, typically $15 to $20 per week. The government paid these slaves from ten to twenty cents a day in addition to providing them with scant clothing, food and shelter. The British government netted over $250,000,000 annually from the slaves that they “owned.” 1955
According to ICRC records, France held 680,000 German slaves as of August 1946. The United States had captured 475,000 of those individuals and then, as I mentioned earlier, later relinquished them to France for forced labor. The residents in the French camps, literally living skeletons, resembled the gruesome pictures we frequently see of alleged victims of the German concentration camps. Prisoners perished from malnutrition and were systematically and savagely battered. They were compelled to remove mines devoid of protective equipment. In a Sarthe district camp, 20,000 prisoners received a substandard, meager 900 calories a day. Naturally, many of the prisoners perished from starvation combined with hard labor. They transferred new inmates, to replace the dead, by train. Often, these emaciated, desperate captives died during the arduous trip as they ate pieces of coal that they found in the boxcar. At the Orleans camp, the damnable, greedy commander spent only nine of the sixteen francs a day allotted for food per inmate. They housed the prisoners, who had no blankets and insufficient straw to sleep on, in filthy, vermin-infested quarters. Epidemics of typhoid were frequent and naturally spread to neighboring camps. They shot the slaves, expected to work despite their emaciated condition, for the most minor violations, contrived or real.1956 American GIs observing the dehumanizing physical evaluation of incoming prisoners remarked, “Gee! I hope we don’t ever lose a war.”1957
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