Ordinary reserve policemen murdered thousands on orders, confirming Milgram’s obedience findings.

Evidence

One historian even makes a direct connection between some events that occurred during the Holocaust and Milgram’s obedience experiments. In his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher Browning (1992) describes the activities of a Nazi mobile kill­ ing unit that scoured the Polish countryside between 1942 and 1943, search­ ing for Jews. The unit’s members ended up murdering 38,000 Jews in cold blood at the bidding of their commanders. Browning makes a detailed com­ parison between the actions of members of Battalion 101 and those of Milgram’s subjects, concluding that “many of Milgram’s insights find graphic confirmation in the behavior and testimony of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101” (p. 174). — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 611

Categorization

• XREF: Bridges Milgram’s obedience paradigm to real-world genocide, directly relevant to the reader’s perpetrator-mechanism literature. — connects to: Entry into evildoing is gradual self-adaptation rather than Milgram’s sudden agentic shift — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 4042
• DEFINE: Names Reserve Police Battalion 101 and Ordinary Men as the canonical case study of ordinary-men perpetration.

Broader Connections

• Entry into evildoing is gradual self-adaptation rather than Milgram’s sudden agentic shift #qualifies (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4042