not allow the Nazis to walk away without facing some sort of punishment. Even though the laws were made ex post facto, the crimes committed by the Nazi leaders were crimes against humanity, and those crimes should not have to be written down in any law books. Crimes committed against humanity should be understood to be wrong and if someone should break those laws, they should expect to be punished for what they commit, even though there was no written law.Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted a classic study obedience in which the participants were forced to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands (Behrens 343). Milgram's study suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures could transform us into agents of terror (343). His experiment showed that normal people could be influenced to the point of administering great amounts of pain on another human being, just because a person in a position of authority told them to do so (343). A theory that was reached as a result of Milgram's experiment was that "it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action" (355). Milgram's results offer a possible explanation as to why the Nazis did what they did. Even though it may be easy to ignore responsibility when being told to do so by an authority figure, it is still the responsibility of the individual to do what is right, no matter what the consequences or repercussions, that is how the tribunal saw the Nazis' actions. The prosecutors of the Nazis declared that, "if an organization was found to be criminal, the prosecution could bring individuals to trial for having been members, and the criminal nature of the group or organization could no longer be questioned" (Britannica 1). "The defendants that were brought under trial were entitled to receive a copy of the...
