Blind obedience may seem funny, but if people are willing to take orders from a total stranger, how far will they go when it really matters? As the pages of history attest, the implications are sobering. In World War II, Nazi officials were complicit in the deaths of millions of Jews, as well as of Poles, Russians, gypsies, and homosex- uals. Yet when tried for these crimes, all of them raised the same defense: “I was following orders.”
Surely, you may be thinking, the Holocaust was a historical anomaly that says more about the Nazis as a group of bigoted, hateful, and pathologically frustrated individuals than about the situations that lead people in general to commit acts of destructive obedience. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, historian Daniel Goldhagen argued on the basis of past records that many German officials were willing participants in the Holocaust—not mere ordinary people forced to follow orders. Citing historical records, others have similarly argued that Nazi killers knew, believed in, and celebrated their mission.