This book is based on the famous experiments conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, which concluded that given an adjusted, controlled environment, most of us will act in a manner at total odds with our normal behavior patterns. Dr. Hans Askenasy agrees with these findings, and presents, with compelling logic and scholarship, a most disquieting view: that the Nazis who carried out the murder of six million Jews were neither sadists, madmen or monsters. Most of us would like to think they were, for then the responsibility for the atrocities they committed could be placed upon a special class of criminals or lunatics essentially different from the rest of us. Auschwitz could not, we like to believe, have happened here--yet it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil. The author concludes that the main cause of large-scale destructiveness is not individual criminality, but social abnormality--a collective madness which we do not fully understand and with which we have not yet come to terms.--From publisher description.