79 Years ago today, on April 11, 1945, the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp was liberated by the United States Army.  The camp had housed over 280,000 prisoners during World War II, and nearly 60,000 of those prisoners died there, either by execution or starvation.   

Buchenwald was just one of the many Nazi concentration camps throughout German-occupied Europe during the war.  Nearly one million prisoners died at the hands of soldiers who later explained their evil, murderous actions by saying that they were “just following orders.”

Years after, in the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram conducted experiments, wondering how it was possible that so many people—those Nazi soldiers, for example—could participate in such terrible acts, even when they knew what they were doing was wrong.  He found—surprisingly to many—that an unusually high percentage of ordinary people (but not all) would follow orders, even to do things that they knew were wrong and would harm someone else.

It is easy to tell ourselves that people who commit monstrous things are themselves monsters—different from us, that there is just something uniquely evil about those Nazi soldiers that is not inside me.  But Alexandr Solzhenitsyn—who himself was a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag prison for 8 years—said that’s just not the case, and that “the line between good and evil passes…right through every human heart….”

So, my question for us today is: How would I have responded to orders to do evil?  And, if the time ever comes when I am forced to make such an awful choice, how can I be sure that I’ll be on the right side of that dividing line?

Have a wonderful day.