Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We...
by scotty79 on Friday December 15, 2023 @06:34AM
(#38653123)
Still you can't ensure they were normal people to begin with. And you can't say that they weren't under strong influence. I bet there was a bit of "peer pressurre" from propagandized psychos where the poor Austrians were already on the "job".
Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We...
by watwut on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:53AM
(#38655965)
The original claim was made about "large number of normal Germans". By the time of WWII, Ukraine was subject of genocide from two sides. And again, local camps guards were especially selected, coached and punished if they were not cruel enough.
OP referred to supposed process in which people spontaneously become super cruel. The claim that "it is possible to make people cruel by authorities" is something completely different.
This only applies to Altreich citizens, who lived in Germany as of 1933. But the Holocaust involved a lot of people who weren't Altreich citizens.
Austria was only annexed in March 1938, and yet supplied its share of war criminals to the Nazi effort.
The Trawniki men, who guarded a lot of the concentration camps in the East, were Ukrainians who only came under German rule in summer 1941 and didn't even speak German. I would say that the influence of German propaganda on them was negligible compared to an Altreich citizen.