"The Fuhrer's Orders have the Force of Law"

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Befehlsnotstand & the Führerprinzip "Orders from above", and the Fuhrer's Orders have the force of Law": implied or stated directly, these were expressions repeated over and over at Nuremberg and other tribunals as the Nazis were put on trial at the end of World War II. One of the most common questions people have about the Shoah, is how in the 20th Century, in a 'civilized society' the enormity and tragedy of the holocaust could have occurred. The extreme of evil and cruelty demonstrated in the genocide of millions seemed only a few years before impossible and unfathomable. The degeneration of the human heart came progressively as the war progressed, but probably one of the most definitive and central reasons were the principles of "fuhrerprinzip and befehlnotstand so firmly taught and indoctrinated in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi Party, and German Society in general. Fuhrerprinzip Today when we hear the word, "fuhrer" we mostly apply it only to Hitler. The Fuhrer, now in the vernacular means the despotic leader of Germany in WWII. The term however has a broader meaning and concept in the context of the German military and society of the day. "Fuhrer" literally, means 'leader'. There were many 'fuhrers' in Germany at the time, in fact the term is incorporated in the military rank names (e.g.oberfuhrer), to indicate the rung of leadership. Fuhrerprinzip reads literally, "fuhrer principle" and has to do with the structure of the order of obedience to authority in the Third Reich. Early in the development of the National Socialists one theme ran strong: law and order. Germany had disintegrated into a weak country from a strong prussian military sovereignty, and the problems of a weak republic were rampant: crime, social upheaval and unemployment. But law & order meant more to the Nazis than to most: it meant a system in leadership and society in which everyone was answerable to 'orders from above' in a hierarchal arrangment. Additionally, the leader one reported to held the responsibility of the actions and decisions of his underlings. Therefore one of the premiere moral values in 3rd Reich Germany was loyalty and obedience, even above concepts of right and wrong This meant that if a person especially in a government position or military position was asked by a superior to do an unconscienable act, such as order the death or deportation of Jews, the highest moral value to the nazis was to obey orders, even above conscience. In the thinking of the indoctrinated 3rd Reich members, even if they were troubled by the decision, the responsibility for the action would rest upon their superior, and therefore, they were not accountable for moral reasoning or wrongdoing. This was one of the primary 'defenses' of the nazis on trial at Nuremberg, and of Eichmann on trial in Israelx Befehlsnotstand: Blind Obedience & 'Orders from Above' The "Führerprinzip" had to do with the order of leadership and is reflected in Military rank: there were under-führers and over-führers (uberführer & oberführer) even in the naming of the ranks.(see Nazi Party) The concept of Befehlsnotstand had more to do with the blind obedience: orders were to be obeyed at all cost, without question, and the penalty for non-obedience in many cases was death. German participants in the 3rd Reich at first had difficulty with the utterly blind obedience required (although the principle was ingrained in the German family dynamic and workplace), but facing death for disobedience, the principle became a defense mechanism allowing many to commit abominable acts and pass responsibility on to their superiors, who in turn, passed culpability upwards. In the end, no one was ultimately responsible, as the leadership would claim they had no idea what was going on while the underlings claimed 'orders from above' and 'befehlnotstand'" The oft repeated principle of "the fuhrers words have the force of law" also served to overwrite even legal concerns in immoral acts, leaving the German military and domestics barrier-free in committing unconscienable cruelty. Experiments in Obedience to Authority The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. S.Milgram(1974) In the 1960s in America, Stanley Milgram, a Professor of Psychology became interested in the dynamics of this distortion of obedience to authority and proceeded to conduct experiments both at Yale and in the field in Bridgeport, observing how far normal people would go in harming another person if they thought they were under orders and that another would take responsibilty.* He first had student 'volunteers' sit at a panel of buttons,each of which was supposed to deliver a small 'shock' to a 'learner' in another part of the room behind a partition or door. As the 'learner' got questions on a list incorrect, the panel-operator was to deliver progressively greater shocks for each wrong answer. The learner was actually a confederate or 'planted' staff member who pretended to experience distress at the shocks. In the end of the session with many incorrect responses, the reaction feigned was that of a impending heartattack with the 'learner' hammering on the door begging the 'shocker' to stop. The experimenter, dressed in a white coat at a lab at Yale, calmly told each 'shocker' to continue despite the reaction. (the participants thought they were delivering shocks up to 500volts). One might think that only a few would continue to deliver the shocks all the way to the end, with violent reactions from the 'learners' and only a 'reassurance' to continue from the experimenter. Over 80% continued to deliver what they thought were real shocks, despite the confederate weeping, screaming and begging to be let out of the experiment. When the experiment was taken out of the lab and into the community without white coats, a university-sanction and lab, and with the population at large from a newspaper ad instead of psychology classes, still a phenomenal number of 'shockers' continued to shock their confederate victims all the way to near-death. Even Milgram was surprized at the results, determining that even in a free society such as ours, the same dynamics of blind obedience could occur. These results were in peacetime, without anymore penalty for disobedience than possible social disapproval (not death) and still, most participated in what they thought was cruelty for the sake of obedience or small reward. Similar Results were found in the Zimbardo Prison experiments at Berkeley.note OUTSIDE LINKS Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Social Obedience The Milgram Experiments The Zimbardo Prison Study Obedience & the Nazi State FOOTNOTES 1Boelke, Secret Conferences of Josef Goebbels 2Stanley Milgram (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, pp. 371-378. in JPSP1968 3Zimbardo,P.Prison Studies:JPSP noteBoth of these studies were considered highly questionable from a ethical point of view in the Psychological Community. While some argued 'science for science's sake, others argued that to put experimental subjects through that intense of a stress, facing their own moral failings in thinking they were harming or even risking another's life, was no different morally than the immoral phenomenon they were studying. Many of the students even years later were in counseling dealing with the stress of realizing what they were capable of, having believed as we all do, that we are moral. Zimbardo's experiment was looking at randomly assigning students to be be either 'prison' guards or 'inmates' in a study of depersonalization. He found that students quickly took on their respective roles becoming cruel or passive. The experiment had to be stopped after several weeks, as Zimbardo himself lost perspective. Both studies led to the establishment of rigid ethics and methodologies in the performance of human subject experiments. © 2003,5 Elizabeth Kirkley Best Phd