The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

After the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany, an Allied military tribunal was set up in Nuremberg to examine the legal cases brought against twenty-two high-ranking Nazis accused of ‘crimes against humanity’.

  During the war, Allied propaganda portrayed the top Nazis as sadistic madmen and, later, documentary films from the German concentration camps demonstrated to the rest of Europe and the United States that those running the system had to be amongst the sickest, most inhumane people the world had ever seen.

  A sizeable group of psychologists and psychiatrists, led by Douglas M. Kelley and Gustave Gilbert, was given access to the twenty-two prisoners for the purpose of examining their mental state. The brief was to find out what was wrong with the Nazi leadership. There was no question in the minds of the experts that the accused were deranged. The task was seen as diagnostic: what conditions afflicted the perpetrators and how mentally unstable were they?

  The main diagnostic tools used were IQ and Rorschach tests. The media gave comparatively little publicity to the results of the intelligence testing because the Nazi prisoners turned out to be exceptionally intelligent, an observation that the world definitely did not want to hear. None of the accused had an average IQ – 100 – or less, and all fell within the range 106–143, with a mean of 128. This figure is substantially higher than the mean of American college graduates (118), and several high-ranking Nazis were borderline geniuses. In other words, if they were mentally ill, they were remarkably brilliant madmen.

  The Rorschach test is a method used to determine personality traits, not intelligence. The psychologist shows the subject a standardised series of cards with symmetrical ink-blobpatterns and asks the subject what each ¡mage might be. The patterns are meant to stimulate the imagination, but are strictly meaningless, in the sense that no answer is correct. The psychologist takes note of what the examinee says, but also variables such as the time taken before an answer, any emotional reactions, spontaneous comments and other responses to the images. The session is intended to chart the subject’s personality, thought patterns and capacity for imaginative expression. The method was developed in the 1920s and is still in use.

  The hostility between Douglas M. Kelley and Gustave Gilbert grew in the course of the investigation, and finally reached the point where they refused to work together. Kelley, a psychiatrist, was experienced in the use of the Rorschach cards and, after having examined seven of the accused, he found no evidence of mental illness. Even though Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist, was unfamiliar with Rorschach tests, he went on to examine sixteen of the prisoners.

  Gilbert wrote several books and articles about his experiences among the Nuremberg war criminals. He described the Nazi leadership as psychopaths and ‘murderous robots’, lacking in conscience and empathy. However, he presented very few analyses of his test results. Instead his books mostly quoted notes from his informal conversations with the accused. These talks were conducted during a period when several of the prisoners were trying to use the widespread conviction that they were psychotic to their own advantage. Among others, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess later admitted that he had simulated mental illness, hoping for less severe punishment and a better opportunity to escape.

  Gilbert’s unfamiliarity with the analysis of Rorschach test results was the reason why his notes were later handed over to ten experienced Rorschach specialists, who were asked to re-evaluate the Nazi leaders. Not one of the ten experts ever delivered their interpretation. Presumably, they feared being blamed for the outcome. Feelings would have run high in Europe and the USA if their results had shown that the Nazis were not mentally ill. The general public would simply have concluded that the Rorschach method, on which the investigators’ claims to expertise were based, must be flawed. Almost thirty years passed before Gilbert’s records were re-examined.

  In 1975 the records were published in book form, which meant that, for the first time, they were subject to scrutiny by interested psychologists. The wide-ranging discussions that followed showed how divided opinions still were. Many found clear evidence of psychopathic, depressive and violent personalities, while others contested this, pointing to the results of blind tests. In these, Rorschach analysts were unable to distinguish between Nazi responses and those made by non-Nazi and presumably normal subjects.

  However, in later years, the Rorschach method was refined still further and given a more systematic, scientific basis. In 1985 the group of researchers who made the best use of the improved methodology (Eric A. Zillmer, Molly Harrower, Barry A. Retzler and Robert P. Archer) published their conclusion that mental illness was not rife among the Nazi leadership.

  Generally, the Nazis were found to have had normal, functional and individually distinctive personalities – with just two exceptions. Traits shared by them were a marked tendency to overvalue their own abilities and a willingness to adjust their behaviour to whoever was construed as the group leader. In other words, these men were unable or unwilling to follow the directions of their ‘internal compass’.

  Despite the shared traits, the researchers emphasised that the differences between the top Nazi individuals were much greater than the similarities. There is, they concluded, no uniform ‘Nazi personality type’.

  The administration of the Third Reich

  For the first fifteen years following the end of World War II, attempts to understand what motivated perpetrators of the Holocaust concentrated on psychological aberrations. The leaders attracted all the attention and the Nuremberg court documentation was the primary source of information.

  Another line of investigation attempted to define the so called ‘authoritarian personality’. People with this personality type were thought to do exactly as they were told, even when the orders contradicted common sense or decency. Many believed this personality type to be particularly prevalent in Germanic culture.

  The early 1960s brought a shift in emphasis. Three circumstances were crucial:

  1. The publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European jews, a pioneering book in which Hilberg analysed, fo the first time and in great detail, the bureaucratic structure that underpinned the Nazi regime. He showed that Nazi rule was not directed by a united hierarchy that ruled from the top down, as had been generally believed. Instead, the Reich depended on the rivalry for power between several distinct organisations, each one striving to outdo the others. This system expanded into a colossal killing machine, which employed people from every sector of German society.

  Hilberg also realised the necessity of setting up an extensive administrative structure to manage the extermination of millions. Administration meant, as always, rules, documentation and set procedures. Staff selected either for certain mental disorders or for a specifically Germanic personality type (or types) could not possibly have followed complex operational directives on such a scale.

  Hilberg’s book interested many and stimulated further studies of the bureaucracy of the Third Reich and of the middle-ranking managers who were in charge of running the system according to the guidelines laid down by the leadership.

  2. Hannah Arendt, the famous American philosopher and intellectual, wrote a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which came out in 1963. Its core material consisted of her report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Israeli intelligence agents had captured him in Argentina and delivered him to stand trial in Jerusalem. The court case took several months. Eichmann had been the head of the Gestapo’s Section for Jewish Affairs and in that position he had borne the ultimate responsibility for organising the Jewish transports across war-torn Europe to the network of concentration camps.

  Arendt argued that the most terrifying thing about Eichmann was precisely that he was not a crazed demon, driven by his obsession to exterminate Jews; instead he was a dull bureaucrat devoid of any noteworthy personal traits. He was, in her view, bereft of any will of his own and followed orders without engagement, or any consideration of the consequences. The face o
f evil was not one of frenzied hatred, but of a mediocrity who, above all, cared about advancing his career within the organisation.

  Hannah Arendt’s book portrayed evil in a new light. Her image of it has had immense influence on our attitudes to Nazi Germany and, more generally, to the phenomenon of evil, as well as to large, rule-ridden organisations. Her influence persists, even though most contemporary historians agree that she was wrong in her judgement. She had uncritically accepted Eichmann’s own story of his contribution to the Holocaust, distorted by him in order to support his defence.

  It appears that Eichmann did in fact defy orders from above, if these interfered with the efficiency of his section’s management of Jewish transports. His energetic performance of his work went far beyond the call of duty. Indeed, his passion for his task was such that he was prepared to weaken the German war effort at times, if this allowed more Jewish transports to be completed.

  3. Nineteen sixty-three also saw the publication of experimental results from the laboratories of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. His data demonstrate the extent to which ordinary people will obey a perceived authority, even if those in charge have no means either of rewarding or punishing those who serve their purposes.

  Originally, Milgram had intended to compare American and German subservience to authority, in order to illustrate a presumed trait in the German national character. He never started the German part of his experiment, because the first set of results from the USA were more sensational than anyone had imagined.

  The world’s most famous experiment in social psychology

  Milgram’s experimental paradigm has become internationally recognised through dissemination in school and university textbooks, newspapers, magazines, films and television programmes. Recently, it was even referred to in a TV commercial.

  Two experimental subjects are told that they are participating in an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on learning. They draw lots about who is going to be respectively ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’. The lottery is fixed beforehand. The true subject is unaware that his companion is an experimental assistant, who is predestined to be the pupil. Consequently, the true subject will always be the teacher.

  The pupil is strapped into a chair wired up to deliver electrical shocks. The subject/teacher is then led away to another room, where his only contact with the pupil is via a microphone and the text on a display screen showing the pupil’s responses. If the pupil answers incorrectly, the teacher is instructed to deliver a punishment shock by pressing a button.

  The shocks are mild at first. Another display shows the voltage and grades the severity – as in 15 volts: mild shock. With each wrong answer, the teacher must gradually increase the voltage in fifteen-volt steps. The scale reaches 420 volts: Danger – severe shock, and then, finally, 450 volts: XXX.

  To facilitate international comparisons there are precise rules for how the leader of the experiment and his assistant must behave. The pupil is never actually shocked, but when the subject believes that he is delivering 300 volts, the pupil will protest by banging hard on the wall that separates him from the subject. He bangs again at 315 volts and then does or says nothing at all. The implication is that the pupil might be unconscious by this stage.

  The teacher is told that any failure to answer a question must be regarded as an incorrect answer and hence, despite the pupil’s silence, the voltage must be increased another step each time.

  If the subject protests, the experimental leader has four command options. The first is: ‘Please continue,’ then: The experiment requires that you continue,’and next: ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’ The last option is: ‘You have no other choice. You must continue.’ If the subject still refuses to carry on, the experiment is stopped.

  The most common response by far is that the subject/teacher protests repeatedly and, as the experiment proceeds, starts to sweat, shake, stutter, groan and bite his lip.

  When the subjects arrive in the lab they are typically relaxed and self-assured, but in the course of the first twenty minutes they usually come close to having a complete breakdown. Twitching nervously, they pace about the room, as if trying to make up their mind whether to leave or not. Often, they keep talking aloud about how they cannot stand this any more. The subjects know they are free to leave at any time and that a decision to end the experiment will not have any repercussions. All they have to say is that they don’t want to do this any more and then actually stop.

  Despite this, two-thirds of the subjects in the original experiment continued, obeying the leader to the end. In other words, they increased the shock voltages up to the highest setting, at which point the leader would call a halt.

  Stanley Milgram’s own view of his results was that they confirmed Hannah Arendt’s perception of ‘the banality of evil’. The subject, who in the role of teacher believed that he had used shock strengths that were lethal, was not a deranged monster, but one of a majority, two-thirds of a group drawn from the population at large. The behaviour of this subgroup was not defined by psychosis, racism or hatred, but by obedience.

  Milgram’s experiment was thoroughly tested by several other groups in the USA and elsewhere, and later Milgram, as well as many others, repeated the general idea with various modifications. It is now known that the percentage of wholly obedient subjects is relatively constant, regardless of gender, nationality and year of testing (early 1960s–the present).

  The proportion of obedient subjects decreases by only a few per cent if the screams and wails of the pupil are relayed via an intercom system, but falls from about 65 per cent to about 40 per cent if teacher and pupil are in the same room. Social psychologists also obtained results demonstrating that, if the subject is in a work situation and someone of higher rank gives the destructive orders, the ‘obedient’ percentage increases considerably.

  Over the decades these experiments have been both praised and condemned. The criticism focuses on the potentially crucial difference between giving someone electric shocks for a fixed time, and carrying on killing people over months or years.

  One interesting angle is that many war criminals in post-war trials defended themselves by declaring that they ‘had to obey orders’. However, nobody acting for the defence was able to produce a single example of a German soldier being punished for his refusal to serve in concentration camps or in other settings where civilians were murdered.

  Milgram’s experiments changed the perception of this crucial issue by shifting the attention from enforced obedience to spontaneous acceptance of authority.

  Ordinary men

  Studies on perpetrators of genocide took a new turn in the 1990s. The trigger was the publication in 1992 of a book entitled Ordinary Men by the American professor Christopher Browning, which drew a great deal of attention to the participation of German private soldiers in the Holocaust. This led others to focus on the same issue. For example, in 1995 a Hamburg museum exhibited documentation showing that the German army had executed prisoners of war, as well as Jews and other civilians. Daniel J. Goldhagen’s much discussed book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust came out in 1996.

  In his book Christopher Browning describes how, in 1942, a battalion of approximately five hundred reserve policemen from Hamburg was dispatched to Poland for guard duty – or so they thought. By then almost all the younger or more aggressive men were fighting on the front line, and most of the reservists were middle-aged men who had not joined the Nazi Party. Their average age was thirty-nine, which meant that they had grown up and formed their attitudes in a Germany that was not under Nazi rule. The majority came from the Hamburg working class and were likely to have been communists or social democrats before Hitler came to power.

  Several years after the end of the war the survivors from this battalion were thoroughly questioned by staff in the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Hamburg. Browning had found and analysed the extensive notes from these in
terrogations.

  Early one morning, after three weeks of routine service in Poland, the entire battalion was ordered to get on board lorries. They were driven to the country town of Jozefow. On arrival they received their orders: kill the city’s 1,800 Jewish inhabitants.

  The commanding officer, a major, wept as he told his men what Berlin demanded of them. He repeatedly made it clear that those who came to him and requested transfer to other duties would be accommodated, but only ten (possibly thirteen) men out of 500 did so.

  The task was new to both officers and men, but an army doctor instructed them in what should have been an effective procedure: they were to put the tip of the rifle bayonet on the back of the victim’s neck at the point where his cranium joined the vertebral column and then pull the trigger.

  The first batch of victims, children as well as young and old people, were marched along to a forest clearing and told to lie belly down. The soldiers started shooting but were so shaken that many missed, despite the unusually close range. They tended to aim their rifles at the victims’ skulls, which exploded when hit by the large-calibre bullets. The men were sprayed with brain matter again and again. In the course of the day many broke down, vomited and generally became physically incapable of continuing and an increasing number requested leave to stop participating in the killings. Others hid, or took implausibly long times to search houses that they knew to be empty, or deliberately missed when shooting at Jews who were running away.

  When the sun set on Jozefow, between 10 and 20 per cent of the men had asked to be allowed off duty either for physical or psychological reasons. The rest had obeyed orders. But this was only the beginning. Following their initiation in Jozefow, the men adapted and obeyed orders more willingly as, during the months to come, they surrounded one small Polish town after another to round up Jews. Their job was either to send the captives off to extermination camps or to execute them on the spot. In the course of the next ten months the battalion caused the deaths of at least 83,000 Jews. The men had learned to live with their consciences.