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In this chapter, Russell provides the reader with an insightful yet concise overview of Volume 1’s key arguments and conclusions (in fact, if the reader is cognizant of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience studies, this overview makes it possible for those most interested in the Holocaust to read Volume 2 without having read Volume 1). Russell also presents the intended direction that, in the remainder of Volume 2, he plans on pursuing—the specific Milgram-Holocaust linkage.

In this chapter, Russell delineates the Nazi regime’s construction and promulgation of an ideology that saw many ordinary and mildly antisemitic Germans condone or feel indifferent about the infliction of harm on Jews and other “sub-humans.” Much like the Obedience study’s persuasion phase (see Volume 1), Russell argues that the Nazi regime ensured that Germany’s “informational and social field” underwent a “calculated restructuring.” A key consequence of this indoctrination process for many Germans was that the harming of certain others was morally inverted into a social good.

Between 1939 and mid-1941, as Himmler and Heydrich debated where to send Jews and other conquered peoples, events of central importance to the Nazi’s subsequent attempt to exterminate European Jewry took place. That is, between these dates largely moderately antisemitic Germans started demonstrating an uncanny ability to kill fairly large numbers of defenseless civilians using what became by the war’s end the three most common killing methods: (the Polish intelligentsia), (of the Polish Jews), and (those with disabilities). With the repeated failure of Himmler and Heydrich’s apparently more “realistic” policy of emigration, Russell argues that in light of the above killings, the SS leadership then envisioned potential in the radical and initially dismissed idea of exterminating the Jews. Furthermore, the up-and-coming invasion of the Soviet Union provided them with an excellent opportunity to test the feasibility of this new and radical solution.

In this chapter, Russell explores the top-down forces utilized by the SS leadership to encourage largely moderately antisemitic Germans to participate in the genocide of Soviet Jewry. More specifically, Russell delineates the SS leadership’s central role in driving the mass shooting extermination process. This chapter effectively outlines Himmler and Heydrich’s attempt to socially engineer the so-called Führer’s wish into reality. Russell also argues that the SS leadership’s rational goal to convert Hitler’s desires into reality shares some similarity with the initially uncertain Milgram as he invented his baseline procedure and then attempted to maximize his participants’ participation in harm doing.

Having examined the top-down forces the SS leadership exerted on the extermination campaign, in this chapter Russell explores the bottom-up forces generated by those in the killing field. This chapter demonstrates that when managers and their functionaries work within an organizational process, they typically move toward “improving” an initially rudimentary system, much like Milgram and his actors did during the Obedience studies. With time and experience some innovators add efficiencies and eliminate inefficiencies, a process which helps advance the organizational system in the desired direction of goal achievement. As this chapter shows, during the Nazi regime’s pursuit of the Holocaust by bullets, many of the innovations introduced aimed to make the act of killing for the German executioners both more efficient and sufficiently palatable.

In this chapter, Russell details what evolved into the large-scale gassing programs in the East, with a particular emphasis on Operation Reinhard—the extermination of Jews in the city ghettos of the General Government. What follows shares much in common with the pattern of escalation depicted in the previous chapters: initially low rates of killing, top-down pressure to increase those rates, the application of formal rationality from the bottom-up (increased experimentation, bureaucratization, and the honing of a less stressful killing process), resulting in increased kill rates that only served to stimulate new top-down pressures to meet new and even more ambitious goals, thus occasioning an ever-expanding cycle of destruction.

At face value, Operation Reinhard and the Auschwitz concentration camp system appear similar: both aimed to kill massive numbers of human beings. Then again, both were governed by different policy objectives: Operation Reinhard’s policy was to kill all the “useless mouths” in the Polish ghettos while Auschwitz focused on extermination through work. As Russell shows in this chapter, although both camp systems were different, Auschwitz moved toward its objective using the same mechanism as Operation Reinhard and, later, Milgram did—the application of intuition, past experience, and pilot testing. As this chapter will also demonstrate, for three main reasons Auschwitz became the most preferred solution to Germany’s “Jewish problem”: greater efficiency, profitability, and (from the Nazi perspective) “humaneness.”

When Nazis of all ranks spoke of a “humane” method of killing other human beings, what exactly did they mean? One outcome of this book is a tentative outline of the key characteristics—a Weberian Ideal-Type—of what the Nazi’s regarded as the most humane method of killing. As Russell argues in this chapter, when Nazis spoke of such matters, what they seemed to desire was a method of killing that rated highly on four main conditions. First, victims should remain totally unaware that they are about to die. Second, perpetrators need not touch, see, or hear their victims as they die. Third, the death blow should avoid leaving any visual indications of harm on the victims’ bodies. And finally, the death blow should be instantaneous.

In this final chapter, Russell provides a concise summary of Volume 1 and 2’s arguments and then briefly explores how Stanley Milgram’s Obedience studies may help better understand other significant social issues confronting humankind.