ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors attempt to show that obedience in its extreme form, which leads to the behavior of a torturer and which they call obedience to the "authority of violence," involves much more than was suggested by Stanley Milgram's model. The elaboration of factors binding the recruits to the authority of violence that they had to obey was both explicitly and implicitly carried out during the training of the military police. To teach obedience to the authority of violence and to the authority of the irrational, the method of overlearning was widely applied. Milgram's model of "obedience to authority" stated that the agentic state of the subject depends on the antecedent conditions and the factors binding the individual to authority. The apparent aim of the officials in command was to crush, right from the start, any will for resistance and to facilitate the changing of attitudes and beliefs.
