Police Battalion 101 Summary

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Browning recounts that the men of police battalion 101 were given the option whether or not to shoot and were not coerced into doing so. However, only 10-20% of these men decided not to become killers. Browning interpreted that the men continued to murder the Jews because they would respect and defer to the authority figures in the battalion. Browning references an experiment by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, which was used to test participants obedience to authority. They were told that they would participate in a paid experiment, to examine the relationship between pain and learning. The man in charge was given scientific authority (wearing a lab coat, and holding a clipboard), and he takes the second participant of the group into …show more content…
The subject is seated at a panel where there are levers and buttons to control the electric shocks administered to the man. He is told that for each wrong word, he is to move the button, to increase the voltage. The man in the chair, is an actor, and starts with an escalating series of complaints, cries of pain, calls for help and fateful silence. In this experiment two thirds of all participants complied, to the point of inflicting extreme pain. The people of the experiment believed that they had an obligation to the scientist that outweighed that of the man in the chair, who they thought was being electrocuted. Browning believed that the men of police battalion 101, had a ‘deeply ingrained behavioral tendency’ to comply with those who were positioned hierarchically above, even if they were ordered to perform actions that were not morally acceptable within their society. Those in the battalion, took their leader’s perspectives on the situation therefore overriding any identification with the victims they were murdering. They performed the commands of their leader, and didn’t feel ‘personally accountable for the content of their actions but only for how well they
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