In his groundbreaking experiment involving subjects being told to provide painful electric shocks to another person in the interest of science, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that human beings, much more than we would like to admit, are willing to cause others pain when they are told by an authority figure that there is a justification for the pain. Milgram’s experiment has long been taken as evidence for the notion that in environments with very strong authority, such as the military or a totalitarian regime, the individuals subject to that authority will largely commit acts that cause pain, death, and atrocity against all moral upbringing the individual subject may have received. Later analyses, however, complicate this picture. Scholars such as Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher have shown that obedience in Milgram’s studies was not purely automatic; participants were most compliant when they identified with the scientific mission and the perceived social value of the experiment rather than when they felt coerced. This refinement suggests that authority operates not only through fear of punishment but also by winning the allegiance of those who come to see its goals as worthwhile. The horrors of Nazi Germany are often partially explained by reference to Milgram’s work, and the horrors of My Lai are also related to authority.

One former German soldier who included in his memoirs accounts of atrocities and the pressure of authority is Luis Raffeiner, who served as a private and a tank mechanic on the Eastern Front. Raffeiner’s accounts vary from normal and positive interactions with Russian villagers, to witnessing (without either participating in or objecting to) the murder of “partisans”, Jews, and Russian POWs. Raffeiner even discusses his accounts of taking action directly to burn peasant homes and take food from peasants. Raffeiner acknowledges that the peasants may have died from cold or starvation as a result of his actions, but “war knows no mercy”. ³ Raffeiner describes complying with a Christmas Eve order to torch homes as they retreat, stating that “At home, the sacristan will be lighting up the candles… and meanwhile we are lighting up the huts of innocent people… but an order is an order.” When coming across a group of Jews being abused during forced labor, Raffeiner states that there was nothing to do other than to be kind on an individual basis ( Raff einer 2010 ). Raffeiner’s memoirs often come across as relatable to a degree that makes one wonder whether he is entirely honest in his portrayal of the pain of war, and he spends about half of his book describing his own challenges returning home after the war. His narrative shows how a sense of duty to military hierarchy can eclipse individual moral judgment. At the same time, Raffeiner’s insistence that he was merely following orders hints at what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility—the belief that culpability is shared across the entire unit and its commanders, so that no single soldier feels fully accountable. It may be that Raffeiner’s account is not entirely reliable in that he would be motivated to write about himself in the best possible light, yet he comes across as very much the sort of authority-driven participant who does not recognize any possibility of standing against the power structures.

Like Milgram’s subjects, Raffeiner stands behind the authority of those who gave orders in order to avoid taking responsibility himself even though he is aware that he has caused pain and very possibly death. He is a cog in a great machine, with some independence to think for himself but never enough to stand up to the machine. He seems to have a sense of humor and attempts to befriend Russian peasants, but, at a much lower level of responsibility, he makes the tanks run just as Eichman made the trains run, not to mention making the homes burn after their cellars are raided.

At My Lai, authority took two forms: direct instructions from platoon leaders as well as indirect encouragement from the military establishment as a whole, which seemed to be enabling civilian deaths if not explicitly encouraging them. The night before the massacre, the platoon’s captain, Ernest Medina, instructed the soldiers to kill anything that moves, and was reported to have confirmed that included women and children. On the ground in My Lai, Lieutenant William Calley shouted to the troops to get them to kill. ⁴

Inconsistent with the values that many Americans believed the war in Vietnam stood for, the US Military command in Vietnam enforced a structure encouraging violence, even violence against an innocent person. Military strategists in Washington D.C., some of whom came from corporations, believed that a factor in winning the war would be the US soldiers killing enemy soldiers faster than they could be replaced. ⁵ “Body count” became the indicator of success and the “fastest way to promotion”, and the body count could include civilians. ⁶ American journalist, Nick Turse describes many atrocities and writes that the Americans had created a “veritable system of suffering” where My Lai was “an operation, not an aberration” ( Turse, 2013 ). Edward Opton points out that the massacre at My Lai was only one minor step beyond the standard, official, routine United States policy in Vietnam ( Opton , 1971 ). In such an environment, the soldiers committing the atrocities at My Lai could be expected to assume that their actions would fit the expectations of the U.S. military hierarchy—or, as diffusion of responsibility predicts, that their own part was only a small fragment of a collective act and therefore less morally significant. Believing that they had that authority behind them, the men in Charlie Company continued to kill civilians much like the subjects in Milgram’s study continued to deliver electric shocks.

Yet My Lai also contained a critical example of resistance. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., piloting a helicopter that morning, witnessed the killings and landed between U.S. troops and fleeing villagers. He ordered his crew to open fire on American soldiers if they continued shooting civilians and evacuated survivors by helicopter. Thompson’s defiance—later recognized with the Soldier’s Medal—demonstrates that even within a culture of obedience, individuals could and did refuse unlawful orders. His actions highlight that authority, while powerful, is not absolute; moral courage and personal conscience can override the pressure to conform.

In The Quest for Order and the Pursuit of Terror, Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel write about how the Nazi ideology involved a quest to create Order based on ethnicity, where ethnicities from the outside would be excluded. ⁷ Baberowski defines order as: “preventing spaces of violence”, arguing that a functional social order is maintained through a state’s monopoly on force. Though, he also admits that these very spaces have the capacity to turn violent. ⁸ To the Nazis, the utopian world was one that combined modern technology with anti-modern rhetoric and thinking, a world in which new orders were established that included some people and excluded others and the rest of the world. The desire to organize people around ethnicity arose out of experiences during the First World War, when many Germans first encountered the multiethnic cultures in Eastern Europe which, because they could not understand these cultures, they found to be inferior ( Baberows ki, 186 ). In response to the humiliating defeat in World War One and the loss of German speaking lands to the East, these ideas of inferior cultures and peoples grew to fit well with the National Socialist ideology to justify expansion to the East ( Baberowski , 187 ). The Nazis held a widespread belief that the outside world was an assortment of dangerous counter orders that threatened the existence of their exclusionary order ( Baberowski , 181 ). The enemies to the Nazi regime needed to be classified and dealt with based on racial, social, and national classifications. Baberowski and Doering-Manteuffel argue that Nazi genocide occurred because Nazis actually believed it to be possible to eradicate all of a population of excluded peoples. Soon after the invasion of Poland, the Wehrmacht had largely accepted the idea that the war would involve mass killings of civilian populations ( Baberowski , 189 ).

Though Nazi Germany was publicly committing a variety of war crimes including the largest genocide in history sanctioned by the government, the Jurisdiction Decree Barbarossa of May of 1941 contained language that was intended to avoid other atrocities by the Wehrmact. For example, the decree clearly outlined that “grave actions that are caused by a lack of sexual restraint” ( Kay & Stahel, 2018 ), indicating that rape was illegal and reprimandable. ⁹ Additionally, “… rape in the Wehrmacht was officially a crime under the classification of crimes and offenses against morality” ( Kay & Stahel, 2018 ). In light of these rules intended to avoid atrocities, the Wehrmacht soldiers who committed atrocities were doing so in defiance of the orders of those higher up. However, it is clear that the soldiers viewed those outside their group as lesser and, especially during wartime, dangerous. Wehrmacht troops often lodged with Russian or Ukrainian peasants, and memoirs such as Raffeiner’s describe attempts to socialize—he famously played a gramophone for villagers—while also requisitioning food and destroying property. Scholars caution, however, that such anecdotes risk romanticizing moments of “humanity” and can obscure the systemic nature of Nazi occupation policy, which deliberately blurred the line between civilian and partisan to justify collective punishment.

Although racial cleansing was not the goal of the Vietnam War, American soldiers similarly failed to understand Vietnamese culture and saw it as inferior ( Turse, 2013 ). American soldiers grew to believe that Vietnamese citizens were hiding affiliation with the enemy, and justified their actions by labeling “Everything that walked and didn’t wear any uniform was a VC… and [we] had no respect for them… The lack of respect was apparently infectious” ( Hersh, 1970 ). The Americans created “free fire” zones where soldiers were given the right to fire at whomever they found ( Turse, 2013 ). In this way, the Americans created people or geographies that were included in their protection, and people and geographies that were excluded. Even if American soldiers had not, as they mostly had, grown up exposed to racism and societal dehumanization of people, the fact that they were allowed to shoot anyone in a free fire zone conveyed a strong message to them about the perceived value of those people. Although Vietnamese civilians were allowed and perhaps even encouraged to leave their homes in free fire zones, many of them stayed and, in fact, there was not sufficient housing for all of them outside the zone ( Turse, 2013 ).

In My Lai, Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, Howard Jones describes William Calley, one of the main My Lai participants, as feeling frustrated to have been in Vietnam for four months and never seen the enemy even though he had been shot at ( Jones, 2017 ). Calley learns that women in market stalls may be turning baskets a certain way to send a message about the presence of an American soldier, for example ( Jones, 2017 ). When members of the Platoon were killed, the soldiers wondered whether the townspeople had purposefully failed to warn the soldiers about the mines, or perhaps had even worked to place them there. Furthermore, the account from Charlie Company soldier, Eusebio B. Santellana accounts for the distrust between soldiers and the entire Vietnamese population, that “Villagers won’t tell you nothing. How come they won’t tell you? They ought to know. Why don’t they like GI’s?” ( Hersh, 1970 ) Even before the American soldiers arrived in Vietnam, from the beginning of training, they were taught to use vulgar terms for the Vietnamese, making it clear that the Vietnamese were outsiders, and there was a term used to express a lackadaisical response when something bad happened to Vietnamese people: the “Mere G—Rule” ( Turse 2013 ). Whether or not these conclusions about Vietnamese civilian involvement with the enemy were true, and particularly with the common use of derogatory words, in the minds of many American soldiers, the local Vietnamese people became excluded from the American order.

In both the Eastern Front and in Vietnam, the imposed social Order that categorized civilians as outsiders was one factor pushing the soldiers’ psyches towards war crimes and atrocity.

In Male Bonding and Shame Culture: Hitler’s Soldiers and the Moral Basis of Genocidal Warfare, Thomas Kühne describes the need that Wehrmacht soldiers had for acceptance from their “Zug”, and how the resulting cohesion of the platoon, combined with anti-semitism, enabled members of the Zug to engage in or at least condone atrocities perpetrated on civilians. A new set of ethics was adopted by the 1930s based on membership in, conformity to and loyalty to a group of comrades. ¹⁰ Kühne suggests that “shame culture”, a culture of needing to be accepted by a group that had a tendency to exclude and shame members who do not conform, became prevalent in Germany after the failure of the First World War ( Kühne, 2008 ). In the context of military platoons, shame culture would work to encourage participation in illegal activities and atrocities even among reluctant soldiers. Those who did not participate would feel enough fear of exclusion that they would not criticize the actions ( Kühne, 2008 ). Kühne argues that this culture, along with the existing dehumanization of Jews and other victims of Germany atrocities, led to the otherwise ordinary and sometimes unimpressive Wehrmacht soldiers participating in atrocities and illegal activities.

Given that platoons often had to survive on their own, with nobody to rely but one another, comradeship can take an even darker turn. When comrades were hurt, comradeship would demand retribution, and soldiers would let go of their pre-war standards of behavior more easily. Kühne gives an example of a German Wehrmacht officer who at first is appalled by the treatment of Russian civilians, but after some of his men are killed by a mine presumably placed by “partisans”, he drops his scruples and requisitions food from a civilian town, making jokes with his men about how the cow was paid for ( Kühne 2008 ).

In Vietnam, oral histories and after-action interviews with Charlie Company soldiers—including Paul Meadlo’s admission that he fired because he “lost buddies”—offer a window into the perpetrators’ mindset, but they must be weighed against contemporaneous investigations, court-martial records, and journalists’ findings ¹¹ . Seymour Hersh’s reporting and Nick Turse’s archival research reveal that My Lai was part of a broader “system of suffering”, challenging any notion that it was merely the work of a few rogue men.

This climate of escalating violence and dehumanization produced dynamics strikingly similar to those seen on the Eastern Front. Paul Meadlo, who shot into a ditch full of civilians at My Lai on orders from Lieutenant Calley, explained that he did it because “I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like… I was doing the right thing, because, like I said, I lost buddies”. Several days earlier, a well-liked member of the company had been killed by a booby trap ( Jones, 2017 ). Jones notes that “They were young men anxious to prove their manhood to comrades and, perhaps more importantly, to themselves. They were determined to avenge their buddies’ deaths. Most of all they were afraid to die. Basic training had taught them that the Vietnamese were merciless, a belief that justified equal mercilessness” ( Jones, 2017 ). Comradeship and ego became more important than personal morality, and—especially when combined with dehumanization—could lead to atrocities such as My Lai.

Yet Thompson’s intervention underscores that comradeship need not always lead to atrocity. His helicopter crew followed his order to protect civilians even against fellow Americans, showing that group solidarity can also be harnessed for restraint.

This contrast between the men of Charlie Company and Hugh Thompson’s crew underscores a central tension in any analysis of wartime behavior: the same social forces that can erode individual conscience can also enable moral courage. Comradeship, obedience, and the search for order are not inherently destructive; their impact depends on the ethical choices of those who embody them. Thompson and his team demonstrated that loyalty to one another need not require loyalty to injustice, and that solidarity can be directed toward protecting the vulnerable rather than harming them. Their actions remind us that even in environments designed to normalize violence, individuals retain the capacity to defy immoral commands and to redefine what duty and honor mean in the midst of war.

Psychologists identify diffusion of responsibility as a key mechanism by which individuals commit harmful acts when they perceive responsibility to be shared among many. As first described by John Darley and Bibb Latané (and anticipated in Stanley Milgram’s early analyses of obedience; see Milgram, 1974 ), the presence of others performing or condoning an action allows each participant to feel less personally accountable, weakening the normal restraints of conscience. ¹²

Evidence from both the Eastern Front and Vietnam illustrates this process. In the Wehrmacht, soldiers frequently justified brutal actions by noting that “everyone was doing it”, or by pointing to the sheer scale of the operations that made individual restraint seem meaningless. Raffeiner’s own memoir, despite its self-exculpating tone, reveals this dynamic when he recounts torching peasant huts on Christmas Eve because “an order is an order” and because his comrades carried out the same command. Responsibility dissolved into the collective will of the unit and the state.

At My Lai, diffusion of responsibility was equally visible. Paul Meadlo’s statement that he shot civilians because he “lost buddies” and felt ordered to do so reflects not only obedience to authority but also a sense that moral weight was spread across the entire company. Soldiers reported that nearly everyone around them was firing, creating an atmosphere in which refraining might appear both futile and socially isolating. Milgram’s own interpretation of his obedience experiments anticipated this pattern: when an action is carried out as part of a group and sanctioned by a recognized authority, “each individual feels only part of a fragmented responsibility” ( Milgram, 1974: p. 848 ).

By explicitly applying the concept of diffusion of responsibility, the atrocities on the Eastern Front and at My Lai can be understood not merely as failures of individual character but as predictable outcomes of group psychology. Authority provided legal and hierarchical cover, order defined who was excluded from moral concern, and comradeship intensified the sense of shared action—all combining to erode personal accountability.

As horrifying and unthinkable as war crimes and atrocities are, it is important to recognize that they occur as a result of a number of influences, some of which can serve a positive purpose in daily life. Authority and Order are important in society, and comradeship can be a source of joy and strength. Yet in the wrong circumstances, and war may always be a wrong circumstance, these factors can work together to make men lose their humanity and act ruthlessly for no apparent reason. Their actions may be quiet, as people who simply do their job without questioning, or more explicit such as the men at My Lai, but all of these people nonetheless committed acts against humanity.

War crimes emerge not from a single cause but from the convergence of structural authority, imposed social orders, and the powerful pull of comradeship. Memoirs such as Raffeiner’s or interviews with Charlie Company soldiers are valuable windows into the psychology of perpetrators, yet they are also mediated, self-protective texts. Reading them critically—alongside court documents, operational orders, and the wider historical scholarship—reveals how individuals rationalized participation while still retaining the possibility of moral choice, exemplified by Hugh Thompson Jr.’s intervention at My Lai. Authority, order, and group loyalty are indispensable elements of social life, but in war they can be weaponized to erode moral judgment. Recognizing both the evidentiary limits of personal testimony and the systemic forces that enable atrocity is essential if we hope to design military and policing institutions that resist such dynamics in the future.

This paper demonstrates the connections between the work of Milgram, Baberowski, and Kühne and the experiences of men on the Eastern Front and at My Lai to show that each of the forces they identify—authority, order, and comradeship—can play a decisive role in driving war crimes and atrocity. Milgram’s experiments reveal how ordinary individuals can be induced to harm others when obedience is framed as a moral duty; Baberowski highlights how a state’s quest for a rigid social order can create “spaces of violence” in which civilians are deliberately excluded from protection; and Kühne’s analysis of shame culture and male bonding shows how the human need for acceptance within a close-knit group can erode personal moral boundaries. Together these frameworks illuminate why soldiers who may have begun their service with conventional moral compasses could come to participate in acts of extraordinary cruelty.

Ultimately, the evidence suggests that these forces rarely act in isolation. Authority provides the moral and legal justification that allows individuals to believe their violence is sanctioned; exclusionary order supplies the target by defining who falls outside the circle of protection; and comradeship exerts the social pressure that makes refusing participation feel like betrayal. Together they create a powerful feedback loop in which each factor reinforces the others, eroding personal responsibility and making atrocity not only possible but, to those involved, almost inevitable. Recognizing this interaction is crucial if societies hope to interrupt the cycle and build institutions capable of resisting the descent into collective violence.

Further research could extend these insights beyond the Eastern Front and Vietnam. Comparative studies of conflicts such as the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Rwandan genocide could test whether similar combinations of authority, imposed order, and group cohesion operated there and how local cultural or political contexts might alter the balance. Oral histories and memoirs from combatants in those settings, when critically analyzed alongside archival records and tribunal proceedings, could reveal both parallels and key divergences.

These dynamics are not limited to formal war zones. Modern instances of police brutality—including the murder of George Floyd in 2020—raise pressing questions about how militarized training, hierarchical command structures, and tight-knit police culture can mirror the psychological mechanisms seen in military atrocities. Scholars and policymakers have debated the extent to which the increasing militarization of U.S. police forces fosters an “us versus them” mentality that normalizes excessive force against civilians, particularly marginalized communities. Examining these parallels with the same critical tools applied to historical war crimes could help identify the structural and psychological factors that turn ordinary law enforcement officers into perpetrators of violence.

By integrating historical case studies with contemporary criminology, psychology, and sociology, future research may better illuminate the pathways from obedience and group loyalty to violence. Such understanding is not merely academic. It can inform concrete reforms in military training, rules of engagement, and police oversight—helping to design institutions that foster accountability and moral courage rather than blind conformity. Only by recognizing how these forces operate across time and setting can societies hope to reduce the conditions that allow atrocities, whether on foreign battlefields or city streets, to occur.