Assuming a Role... and Running with It

I am still trying to wrestle with how exactly seemingly ordinary people can turn into mass murderers, or even how Stanford students can become tyrannical prison guards. It baffles me and scares me. It does not make sense when killings were still carried out despite the obvious humanity of the Jews, in face-to-face encounters and even in cases of recognized and familiar Jews. Still, the Germans may especially have been conditioned to follow orders and obey authority, but I don't understand how orders to murder so many people could be taken without objection. "While the policemen did not know precisely where the Jews were being sent or what was to be done with them, 'it was clear and well known to us all,' as Heinrich Steinmetz admitted, 'that for the Jews affected these deportations meant the path to death. We suspected that they would be killed in some sort of camp.' Spared direct participation in the killing, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 seem scarcely to have been disturbed by this awareness." (90)

Check out this video on Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (starting at 4:54 after the description of Milgram's "shocking" experiment).

Browning connects the findings of Zimbardo's prison experiment to assert that authoritarian personalities are more susceptible to conformity and obedience to authority; however, I don't quite think his description captured the relevance of the experiment findings to the relationship between the Nazis and their Jewish/Polish victims.

I found that the results of the experiment suggested the unsuspecting power that comes with assuming a role. For the police battalion, that meant wearing a uniform, distancing themselves from their victims, and remaining as a collective unit. Also, the role of the Jews as prisoners and captives must have perpetuated their submissiveness, similar to the mock-prisoners in the case of the Zimbardo's experiment. Each group assumed a role that was hinged on the presence of a clear authority figure/source of power that gave the other group the impression of helplessness and powerlessness. But then, how do we explain such obedience to roles when there is that lack of psychological distance that occurs when "Jews were not forced to undress" and yet orders for "all the Jews, regardless of age and sex, were to be shot" (99)?

I found that the Zimbardo prison experiment showed that even when there was resistance, a break in the conformity, and a 'prisoner' staged a rebellion, the other 'prisoners' did not follow in support or solidarity. I perhaps had too much confidence in the minorities in both the case of Trapp's last-minute offer to back out of the assignment and in the case of the prison experiment. I expected that Trapp's men that backed out and prisoner 8612 and prisoner 812, after breaking conformity and dispelling the fear of consequence and public judgment, would facilitate the presence of followers. However, especially in the case of the prison experiment, the rebellion ringleader was put down and regarded as the troublemaker by both the guards and the other prisoners.

Even when being explicitly told that the experiment was over and being comforted, prisoner 819 voiced that he needed to go back to prove to the others that he wasn't a bad prisoner. It suggests that public opinion did weigh much more heavily upon the psyche of the minority. Maybe, in spite of Browning describing the ease of men's refusal to participate in the direct killing, the mental process of refusing was much more difficult. Those who were scorned for standing up to a oppressive system, as in prisoner 819, was still deeply rooted in this idea that his image was tainted and that he must reverse his 'bad prisoner' image.

Does this idea of assuming a role and simply following orders (and thus being less culpable for conducted actions) account for these killings? How did ordinary men simply assume their roles as obedient minions to a higher power and justify their actions accordingly? How did ordinary men assume the role of mass murderers? Or rather, how did this role of mass murderers eventually consume ordinary men?