Vague Instruction: Obedience to Authority

I thought it was interesting how the idea of obedience to authority that we learned in 1st semester still applies to many situations that we learned recently in the Holocaust. This is especially true when it comes to vague instructions.

In the beginning of the year, we had a case study about Abu Gharib, where the army's higher ups order the soldiers to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. When the soldiers complained, they were asked to not question the order and told that if they didn't get the answers out of these people, other Americans were going to be in danger.

This reminded me so much of what happened in the Nazi Germany. There were people who were against or skeptical of the policies and laws against Jews, but at the same time, there was also the popular belief of the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. The lack of clear instruction was also very evident. Most of the time, it was Hitler's men who came up with the exact ideas and plans to "cleanse" the population. There isn't much proof of what Hitler actually personally ordered in many of these cases.

We also watched this video clip about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. The commander also gave very vague order of "if they are in the way and slowing you down, then get rid of them" (somewhere along those lines).

In many of these cases, it resulted in countless innocent deaths. But can the vagueness of the instructions also have the power to save lives? In Auschwitz, Flacke's concentration camp was run much nicer than the other ones. The prisoner were actually fed real food; the place was clean. Another example would be how Albert Forster ran his part of Poland. Hitler told them to ethnically cleanse Poland using whatever methods, and Forster chose to make the Poles into German citizen whereas Graiser adopted a much crueler and inhumane methods.

So although vague instruction and the obedience to authority can result in inhumane treatment, massacre, and systematic killing, are the actions that came from the instruction ultimately dependent on the individual itself?