In a very real sense, it was the horrific events of the Nazi concentration camps that formed the background to Milgram’s obedience to authority research. Milgram was originally attempting to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis (GADH), used by historians and social scientists to explain the Holocaust – the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews, Roma Gypsies, Poles, the disabled, homosexuals, communists, socialists and Jehovah’s witnesses by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the 1930s and 1940s.
One claim made by the GADH is that the Germans have a basic character defect, namely a readiness to obey without question, regardless of the acts demanded by the authority figure. It was this readiness to obey, the hypothesis claims, which provided Hitler with the cooperation he needed.
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