During holocaust, many innocent people were killed. These killings were done by people who were under the instruction of the government. It is due to these killings that Stanly Milgram decided to conduct experiments known as obedience to the authority to find out it was possible to conduct such massive killing of the ordinary people in the society. The finding from these experiments is very useful in explaining the reason for the massive killings.
Obedience is a common thing especially in society where we have very powerful leaders. When people are very powerful, the others tend to obey their commands without question. According to the experiments, it was realized that people will fail to obey a command if they feel that the order is not acceptable in the society on condition that the person giving the orders is not powerful. However, when there is a command from a powerful person, people obey in fear of the consequences of failure to obey. The massive killings of the ordinary people were possible because the orders were from powerful individual who could retaliate if anyone failed to obey their commands.
The study also found out that some attributes that are common among the members of the society makes people weak creatures in a way. These attributes can be easily manipulated by powerful individuals. Attributes such as obedience and loyalty were found to be dangerous even though they are regarded as important in every society. The killings of the ordinary people were done because the citizens trusted their leader too much and were loyal to him. This is why they obeyed his orders without considering that they were bringing to an end the lives of innocent individuals.
When powers of the government are concentrated in a certain institution or on an individual, the results may be that crimes of the highest level may be committed to satisfy the needs of these institutions. Such powerful institutions have the powers to make orders that cannot be questioned by any other member in the society. However, when there is distribution of power among individuals and institutions, every decision is carefully evaluated and the powers of each individual and institution are effectively checked. This is according to the experiments that were done by Milgram. According to the experiments, killing of the ordinary people can be explained by the fact that dictatorship that was present during the period of the killings had powers that had no control and hence made decisions that were not questioned. One of the decisions was to kill certain groups of people. This is why people were killed.
The experiment also revealed that when the systems of communication are controlled by the powerful people in the government, there are possibilities of spreading propaganda that can lead to crimes all over a country. When wrong information is passed to people, it creates emotions and they have a tendency to respond without further investigating the issue at hand. This result can explain the killings in that the Nazi party associated with the killings could have spread rumors through the media they had control over. These rumors and propaganda could have incited people against certain groups leading to the massive killings.
The experiments conducted by Stanly Milgram seem to be too persuasive in explaining how the killings of the ordinary people occurred. These experiments have logical arguments that can make an individual understand the circumstances that led to the massive killing of the ordinary people.
