Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

“Direct proximity to the horror of the killing significantly increased the number of men who would no longer comply,” Browning observed. Nevertheless, in places like Józefów, where the faces and screams of the victims were all too easy to see and hear, most of the battalion’s members still did comply, and one of the reasons was surely that, unlike the subjects in Milgram’s laboratory, they didn’t view the people they were harming as fellow volunteers in an educational experiment. They saw them as members of a dehumanized minority group that had to be eliminated for the good of the Fatherland.