Follow @xristospsyart What the Nazi photographic albums of the Wold War 2 might reveal about human nature.

In the famous experiment directed by Stanley Milgram, it has been said that people would conform to authority even if that authority is regarded as evil. In case you haven't heard about the experiment, the experiment has taken place at Yale university, in which the participants were randomly chosen and told that the experiment was about a study of memory and learning. In the experiment, a white-coated experimenter was in charge of two subjects, the one given the role of the teacher and the other the role of the learner. Then, the experimenter would tell the learner to remember some words, and in case he wouldn't remember them, the teacher would have to press a button that would create an electric shock hurting the learner. Meanwhile, with each wrong answer the voltage would get more intense and by the end of the experiment the learner would scream and cry for help. What the teacher didn't know about, was that there was actually no electricity involved in the experiment and that the learner was actually an actor that was asked to participate and scream when the subject would press the button.

What has been revealed in the experiment, was that people would obey authority even though they knew that they would hurt someone. To cope with any feelings of guilt they would develop coping mechanisms that would justify their sadistic, bad behaviors of hurting the learners. Some of these coping mechanisms was to choose to believe that their actions was justified because they were part of a greater cause (in the case of Milgram's experiment, science), or to devaluate the learner: too dumb, doesn't remember anything, deserve to be punished. A notable element in Milgram's observation was that people's sense of morality didn't disappear but instead was reoriented to the authority figure (the person that gives the order, in the case of Milgram's experiment the experimenter) instead of the person they harm. For example, they would feel obligated to follow the wishes of the experimenter (so that they would be polite to him) and would -to a great extend- overlook the harm they did to the learner. For them, to please authority was more important than the learner's cries and screams. To justify their hurtful actions they would make up excuses, like the ones that mentioned above.

Milgram's experiment has been taken place in a post-war era in which sociologists, psychologists and philosophers were trying to explain and understand the mechanism involved in the obedience to one the most cruel regimes in the world history: Nazism. Many explanations were given, and many experiments were run. But what if we ask a Nazi soldier, what would he tell us about his participation to the third reich project. Would he admit that what he was doing was unjustifiable, or would he somehow justify his actions as in the case of the subjects of the Milgram's experiment?

Instead of directly asking one, that would be difficult; we can look at his photographs. Through his photographs we can expose some of his deepest and more complex psychological processes impressed on his photographic frame. But first a little history about photography during the Nazi Germany.

During that time, the shooting through photographic roll film was becoming the mainstream photographic method. That flexible and easy to store medium, was perfect for amateur photography. In Nazi Germany, the ministry of propaganda has taken advantage of that ability, by giving each Nazi soldier a personal camera to shoot their experiences from the war. By the end of the war, the soldiers had created a vast number of photographic albums that show their experiences from the war and through that, giving us an alternative perspective to World War II. According to Nazi ministry of propaganda, the photographic albums was a way of connecting the soldiers of the various fronts to the Germany, akin to a social network site of the era. The albums were -for some reason- only recently exhibited in museums, such as the Historical Museum of Frankfurt in 2010 and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

If we accept that Milgram's experiment describes the way a whole nation was misled by obeying an authoritarian regime, then it is possible that in those albums is where the defense mechanisms that Milgram explains meet application.

Looking closer to these photographic albums, one would perceive that the most photographs inside it, are either depicting the war as a liberation of the subdued countries, or identify the other (foreign people) as inferior or they represent the war as if it was just a game.

In their photographs, there is an unconscious tendency to justify and even idealize their role as occupiers in a foreign country. In the picture below, in which a mother and her two children are depicted, the title of this photograph is Russland, das Kinderparadies (translated as: Russia, the children paradise). In the photo, the depicted persons are obviously poor (dirty, old clothes). The decision of the soldier to take and keep that picture, was an intention to distinguish his identity from that of the other (the foreigner). Through the action of shooting this picture, he creates an identity dipole that separates the photographer (Nazi soldier) from the depicted (poor local) person. That separation, reveals that the photographer needed to distinguish himself from the other (that he depicted as poor, unhealthy, "uncivilized" and dirty), to exalt his self-image, and consequently justify the reasons that he is an occupier; the same tendency that we have seen when the teachers in milgram's experiment were devaluating the learners - I am better than you, you deserve that.The same happens with another picture depicting a poor local person, exhausted, probably taken from the invaded eastern front. Also, the same could be found in more photos, as in the one below in which the title says: hinter diesem ofen ist das bett fuer alle translated as: behind his furnace is the bed for all that through sarcasm they connote inferiority. Some other images are showing migrating people from the occupied areas with titles such as the gave up the fight', some others are showing Nazi soldiers mockingly dancing with local people and so on... All generally depicting the occupied people as "inferior" or "uncivilized".

Another way to "justify" their actions, would be to seem "compassionate" towards the people they occupied. A supposedly compassionate picture, could be used as a "justification" of their actions as occupiers. The soldier through the sarcastic title he gives to the photo: Russland, das Kinderparadies, his reference to children enhances his feelings of justification, as if he was saying: we came here to protect the children. Even though this motif has been always used in propaganda (targeting the emotion of the audience is a common method used in propaganda) in that case the photos are coming from an amateur photographer that is not concerned with creating propaganda, something that might reveal that the emotional conflicts impressed on these images are valid.

What generally is being revealed through these albums and the reason why they kept them long after the war was over, might be that the individual identity of the Nazi soldiers of that time, was -at the end- consumed by these justifications. The act of many Nazis to keep their albums "safe" after the war indicates just how strong was this constructed myth they created to justify their actions and how this constructed, fake narrative has permeated into their self-perception and identity. Generally, this false identity or shadow identity as I call it, formed with the internalization of all the justification they created to justify their unjustifiable acts, is the result of the repression of their individual self from an external authority. Additionally we can see how this cognitive dissonance-evoked myth created by the Nazis could intensify the propaganda and give them a sense of identity that would unify them all towards the fulfillment of the narrative of their collectively constructed fairy tale. Maybe that's what the ministry of propaganda of Nazi Germany was trying to achieve.

Maybe, what we can learn from here, is that who we think we are might just be a justification, the resolve of a congitive dissonance that resulted from the sacrifice of our individuality to the obedience of an irrational authority (an ideology, a person, a standard). We might not have (at least in most countries) a totalitarian regime, but the sacrifice of our individual sense of self exists nowadays mostly in the form of consuming identities. In our culture dominated by image and information we tend to consume ideas, identities and knowledge more often than we produce. While trying to be as someone else or by acknowledging an external, cultural standard or theory as if it is the ultimate truth, we automatically subject ourselves to the same dynamics that I describe above.The more we do it, the more we need to justify this sacrifice of our individual self and consequently the more we create an illusion that justifies it in which we dwell and believe as if it is real. So ultimately, this alienation - the shadow identity - becomes our only valid sense of self and because without it we are lost (our sense of self collapses), we tend to cherish it as the Nazis did with their albums. We will keep it safe from anything that threads it: even from liberating things.