Not just 'following orders': Nazi prison camp bosses 'took pride......

FULL TITLE: Not just 'following orders': Nazi prison camp bosses 'took pride in what they were doing' new study claims

Nazi concentration camp bosses who claimed they were just 'following orders' truly believed and took pride in what they were doing, researchers have claimed.

Landmark studies on human behaviour in the 1960s and 1970s had founded the theory that people carried out evil act because they naturally follow orders from figures of authority.

But Scottish psychologists have challenged the fifty-year-old findings after going back and re-examining the original experiments.

Professor Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Prof Alex Haslam of the University of Queensland, Australia, began their research ten years ago with a prison study which was broadcast on the BBC.

They found that volunteers given the role of 'guards' only acted brutally when they identified with their role and believed their actions were necessary to maintain control.

In a series of more recent experiments, they found that people will only bow to authority if they believe it is necessary to serve a greater good.

Professor Haslam said: 'Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous.'

That’s some slick communist propaganda - implying that they were being “herded away from” those who would “free them”. Whichever allied army reached a camp would liberate the camp - all the death camps were liberated.

Russian death camps are just as infamous and NAZI camps, having killed tens of millions of Russians, and, similarly, were populated with an array what the Soviet government considered to be of enemies of the state, criminals, undesirables, etc.

Anti-semitism on both an institutional and personal level in Russia, in fact, all over the world, has a long yet conveniently forgotten history.

In the closing days of the war, a number of German units ignored fantasy orders coming from Hitler and moved west so they could surrender to the Americans. One can only surmise that if prisoners were being herded westward this was not done to be mean to them, but, like most everyone seemed to know at the time, because surrender to the Americans presented a fate infinitely preferable to surrender to the Russians.

After WWII, everyone trapped in the Soviet bloc was stuck in a Godless, communist, politburo-run, militaristic, corrupt, command economy in which the domestic political and commerce scene can only be described as savage.

This guy has written some interesting books about Russia during the cold war; this article on his life is well worth a read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

I’ve seen documentaries on the military channel which contained interviews with Jews who were in the camps and were put to the task of doing the hands-on carrying out of the order of the camp command - and these men said that this was, unfortunately, the way things worked. These men carry the burden of what they themselves saw and were forced to do. Though we can’t find righteousness in what they chose, and though authority and hence responsibility flows uphill from them, we understand that we are all mere men.

Just as in no way can we paint the Jews forced to carry out orders as bearing responsibility for the orders being given, we can not impute the orders given from the top on cowering civilians either. Should they have fought against a killing machine that would mean certain death for them and their loved ones - of course. But that’s easy for us to say, worlds removed from the confrontation.

There is the persistent historical rewrite, one book at a time, which little by little attempts to brand every German citizen as bearing the full guilt for the death camps.

This is simply not the case, and it changes the focus from a) ideology to b) ethnicity, nationality and race.

Some people today ceaselessly try to blame those darned German factory workers, farmers and housewives, delving into history to prove that “they all knew”. They point to the German businessman who “enabled” the NAZI regime to develop it’s powerful military.

IMHO, everyone is aware of what happened in WWII to the extent that, if they’re honest with themselves, they understand enough to learn from it the lessons they should.

IMHO, people of today should wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and ask themselves if they can live with what they’re doing and not doing for the cause of covenanting with God by their own nation.

Without God, the nation will succumb to yet another human-devised ideology that promises justice only to yield corruption and evil. To me, that would mean despite all our detailed research dedicated to assigning blame, we failed to learn the lesson we should have from the tragedy which resulted in millions dying in death camps: the tragedy of too many thought leaders in society abandoning God’s Law Word.

If the nation continues to place it’s faith in secular humanism and moral relativity, we may well all get a chance to see whether we have the courage to make the ultimate sacrifice, knowing that it will not stop the killing machine anyway.

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