“Ordinary Men,” Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust

For historians the Holocaust is among the most complex historical situations in which to explain perpetrator obedience. There has been a long tradition of trying to comprehend the “Nazi mind,” but Milgram's obedience experiments came at just the point when judicial proceedings in West Germany were shifting the focus to the collective behavior of the cohorts of regular policemen and security officers who actually had to do the face-to-face killing, and whose ideological commitment was muted or even nonexistent. This explains why Milgram's experiments had an immediate appeal to anyone trying to explain obedience to commit atrocity once it was evident that those who had perpetrated it were not psychopaths or criminally abnormal. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between history and psychology as it has evolved over the past 50 years and to suggest ways in which Milgram's work still stimulates current history writing.