Reflections on Milgram

In 1945, following the liberation of the German concentration camps by British and American armies, photographs and newsreels starkly revealed that a new level of horror had been reached. Susan Sontag later wrote: One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau…. Nothing I have seen -- in photographs or in real life -- ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously (Susan Sontag on Photography, 1990). The question asked in bewilderment was, “How could people do this?”, without ever receiving an adequate answer.