We started by talking about the trials, and talking about the excuse of "I was just following orders." We had some great initial discussions about any and all of the following:
-Is all fair in love and war?
-Because the Nazi's believed that exterminating Jews was the right and "moral" thing to do, can we use
"general lack of morality" to describe their activities? Obviously from our angle, but from theirs?
-Is it fair to expect someone to subject themselves to court martial/imprisonment/death in order to
disobey a direct order?
Obviously, the courts at Nuremberg and Tokyo needed to send a message that genocide is not to be tolerated, and that punishment would result. And in the years after WWII, much of the prevailing social and scientific thought was that there was just something "wrong" with the Germans...either a cultural or genetic abnormality that allowed them to carry out such heinous crimes against the Jews...something that made them obedient to a fault.
Stanley Milgram, a sociologist, decided to test that theory. I asked the class "What percentage of people would inflict physical pain on another person, simply because an authority figure asked them to?" The stipulations would be that there would be no negative consequences (court marshall, etc.) and that the authority figure would not be somebody you knew or influenced any significant part of your life.
Most of the kids answered 10-20%, or 1-10%...there were a couple of kids that chose higher increments, but most stayed pretty low. We had a good discussion about that, and the kids were excited to give their feedback.
At this point in class, we watched this set of videos:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
The kids were floored. And then....they wanted to talk about it. We discussed the overall concept for about 25 minutes in each class, and it was some of the best discussion we've had thus far in the semester.
The main concept? We as people are VERY obedient, and that's pretty scary!
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