Superior Ordeers

Superior Orders

How well do you know yourself? Would you have the strength to disobey a boss, elder, or even a friend? According to most studies, you wouldn’t. So why, when the superior orders defense is used in a war crime trial, is it almost always defeated? Stanley Milgram, who preformed one of the most highly known studies on obedience, said that, “The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his action” (323). According to Milgram we, as humans, all need some system of authority. From the day we are born we have authority figures who, for most people, are our parents. They teach us all of the things we need to know; they also teach us things they don’t even know they’re teaching us. From day one they teach us to obey authority. This lesson sticks with us throughout our lives; first we obey our parents, then our grandparents, then our teachers, then our bosses. This of course is a necessary lesson for children, but another lesson must be taught in order to avoid problems later in life. A hard thing to explain to a little kid is the idea of morals. A good example of this is an older brother telling his younger brother to do something stupid like, jump off the roof. When the younger brother is being reprimanded by his parents, he tells them that his brother told him to do it. This is where the parents must explain to him that he has to use his own judgment. Milgram found that only forty percent of adults could use their own judgment in situations with much higher consequences.

We as a people want to believe that only the worst of the worst are capable of doing the horrible things that we hear about on the news. That’s why we’re all so surprised when someone uses superior orders as a defense. We say to ourselves, I wouldn’t do that if I was in that situation. How could they do something like that? But, how do we really know what we would do if put in the same situation? We ask these questions because it should not matter what the circumstances are. It does not matter whether or not Adolf Eichmann was ordered to organize the deportation of over three million Jews during WWII, whether or not the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre were under extreme psychological and physical pressure, or whether or not Imre Finta actually killed any of the 8,617 Jews he allegedly put on trains traveling toward the death camps. All of these are cases where the accused used the superior orders defense. And in all of these cases these men should have shown that they can make better decisions than their superiors.

Adolf Eichmann was not an evil man under normal circumstances. However, when put in situations where he had to choose between disobeying his superiors and killing millions of innocent Jews, for some reason he could not make the right choice. Eichmann was born in March of 1906. His mother died when he was young his father remarried soon after so some one could take care of his five children. In school he had Jewish friends; he even worked for a Jewish oil company when he got out. This is where he learned to be a mass murderer (Suter). They did not actually teach him to kill anybody but he did learn how to transport oil throughout the country with extreme precision. He joined the Nazi party in 1932 and later became a member of the feared SS, where he worked at Dachau concentration camp. Then in 1937 he wrote a paper on why the Jews were a threat to Nazi Germany, and from then on he traveled around Europe promoting the migration of the Jewish people. Finally in 1942 he was part of the decision to implement the final solution, which was the killing of over three million Jews. When Eichamann realized that the Nazi’s were losing the war, he fled, first into the woods of Germany. Like many other Nazi war criminals he fled to Argentina; he used the name Ricardo Klement. He lived there with his wife and children for ten years until the Israeli government captured him in 1960 (Adolf). He was brought to Jerusalem where he was put on trial for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and crimes throughout WWII. Hannah Arendt was sent, by the New Yorker, to cover the trial. She went on to write a couple of books about it, in one she recalls what Eichmann’s lawyer had to say on his behalf,

“Eichmann fells guilty before God, not before the law, under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but ‘acts of the state,’ over which no other state has jurisdiction, and that it had been his duty to obey” (21).

This was Eichmann’s defense throughout the entire case. He stated many times that he was not an anti-Semite, and that he never killed anyone.