On the morning of 16 October 1906, a fifty-seven-year-old shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt put on a second-hand captain's uniform of the First Foot Guards, bought in pieces from junk shops, and went to a barracks in Berlin.
He stopped four grenadiers and a sergeant returning from duty, and ordered them to follow him. They did. He collected six more soldiers at a shooting range. He told them their previous orders were cancelled and that they were now under his command, gave them beer money, and took them by train to Köpenick, then a small town on the edge of Berlin.
At the town hall he posted his men on the doors, walked in, arrested the mayor and the treasurer in the name of His Majesty, ordered the local police to maintain order in the streets, and requisitioned the contents of the treasury — 3,557 marks and 45 pfennigs — for which he wrote a receipt, signing it with the name of a prison governor he had known. He sent the mayor to Berlin under guard for interrogation, told his soldiers to hold their positions for half an hour, changed into civilian clothes and left.
Nobody at any point asked to see written orders, which German military regulations required.
Voigt was an ex-convict who had spent twenty-seven years in prison, could not obtain residence papers because of his record, and could not work without papers. He was arrested ten days later after an informant identified him.
The case is the cleanest historical demonstration of what Bickman measured experimentally in Brooklyn sixty-eight years later and what Milgram measured at Yale: compliance tracks the appearance of authority rather than its verification, and it does so without the subject experiencing themselves as having decided anything.
Ellen Langer's concept of mindlessness describes the state precisely. Behavior in familiar scripted situations runs on the script rather than on analysis, and the trigger for the script is a small number of surface features. A captain's uniform issuing an order to enlisted men is one of the most heavily rehearsed scripts in Wilhelmine Prussia. The soldiers did not evaluate the order and find it plausible. They executed it, which is what the script is for.
The mayor did the same. A civil servant in a militarized state has a script for military authority, and it is deference.
The German public found it very funny, and the Kaiser is said to have laughed and called Voigt an amiable scoundrel. He was sentenced to four years and pardoned by the Kaiser after twenty months. The story became a play, several films, and a permanent piece of German political vocabulary.
The laughter is worth noticing. What was being enjoyed was a public demonstration that the deference the state depended on was mechanical, and could be operated by anyone with the right coat.