The Nazi Genocidal and Apocalyptic Mind

After World War II, social scientists, some of whom had fled the Third Reich, sought to explain the genocidal mind. They identified an “Authoritarian Personality” -- a type of person likely to obey authority generally and follow orders to harm innocent people particularly. This work, and experiments by Solomon Asch on how perception can be manipulated, undercut the complacent belief in the United States that genocidal obedience was a German aberration -- that a holocaust “can’t happen here.” (In fact it had already happened here, when President Ulysses Grant sent an army to exterminate Native Americans. United States soldiers carried out their mission obediently, and their commander, General William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps a reader of Martin Luther, wrote home that he was proud to participate in “the final solution of the Indian problem.”) Most shocking were Stanley Milgram’s experiments (Obedience to Authority, 1974), showing that ordinary citizens in Connecticut obeyed orders to harm innocent people, even to a lethal extent. His experiments so disturbed the psychological community that Milgram was condemned and his findings only poorly integrated into social science.