Why do animals confess to allying with Snowball in Animal Farm, despite seeing others die?

The animals confess to being in league with Snowball because they get caught up in the mass hysteria.  Mass confessions are actually not uncommon, and they are a kind of mob mentality.  They are related historically to the Great Purges of Stalin (see last link).

Snowball is run off the farm, and then used as a scapegoat.  In order to keep the scapegoating going, pigs are accused of being in league with Snowball and summarily executed.  Other animals then get caught up in the hysteria. 

The executions serve to distract the animals from the fact that the hens have to give up their eggs.  As Boxer says, “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” (ch 7).  Not every animal feels that way, but most are too afraid to speak up.

The four pigs waited, trembling, with guilt written on every line of their countenances. Napoleon now called upon them to confess their crimes. They were the same four pigs as had protested when Napoleon abolished the Sunday Meetings. (ch 7)

They confess because they are afraid.  They know they are going to die.  The other animals also confess out of fear, and because they follow the mob.  Most of the animals who confess are the simple-minded ones, and some, like the chickens, probably figure they are next anyway.

Why did the animals confess to being traitors in Animal Farm?

Orwell provides no explanation for why the pigs and the hens confess to being traitors. At this point, Napoleon is busy discrediting Snowball as far as he can. Napoleon insists that Snowball was secretly in league with Farmer Jones from the beginning. Squealer insists that that Snowball tried to engineer the animals' defeat at the Battle of the Cowshed. Boxer denies this, reminding everyone that Snowball was wounded defending the cowshed. However, when Squealer invokes the authority of Napoleon, Boxer backs down. This appears to signal that a new version of the truth has been sanctioned.

Knowing what we do of the animals, we can try to piece together their logic in confessing. The pigs are intelligent, so it is possible that they confess in a failed attempt to get clemency. They have already been identified as traitors and already attacked by the dogs, only to gain a temporary reprieve due to Boxer's intervention. However, the confession fails to work and the dogs rip the four pigs' throats out. 

The hens, we are told, are not very bright. In fact, they are part of the group of animals that can't even manage to remember the Seven Commandments. It is also true that hens, for a time, fought back against Napoleon's plan to sell most of their eggs. It is very possible that the three hens who step forward and confess that Snowball came to them in a dream and told them to rebel believe what they are saying is true. This would be consistent with Orwell's idea that less intelligent people are more likely to be swayed by suggestion into believing ludicrous propaganda. We know that the hens tend to be honest, because they have worked so hard in the past toiling to gather every last wisp of hay and stealing none. They are part of the true believers in the revolution, which it makes it all the more poignant that they find themselves brutally sacrificed to Napoleon's ambitions. 

The animals have invested themselves, body and soul, in the success of the farm. They're passionately committed to the political ideology of Animalism and to making it work in practice. The animals are so certain that Animalism is 100% correct that, when things start to go wrong, it's hard for them to believe that the whole revolutionary project was deeply flawed from the outset. The only possible explanation for the numerous setbacks on the farm is deliberate sabotage.

Napoleon cynically plays upon the other animals' passionate commitment to the Animalist cause by inventing convenient scapegoats to take the rap for his own incompetence. A number of animals are subjected to show-trials, at which they confess to all kinds of non-existent crimes. In some cases, they're undoubtedly scared and intimidated. But the most likely explanation for their confessions is that their whole mindset has been so warped by ideology that they're prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they believe is the wider good.

This is precisely what happened in the Soviet Union during Stalin's notorious series of show-trials. People publicly confessed to the most ludicrous crimes, telling the whole world that they'd betrayed the cause of communism. They'd spent the whole of their political lives believing the Party was always right, so when the Party said they were guilty of crimes against the state, they were duty-bound to comply.

The pigs and hens that are called forth for having challenged Napoleon's leadership mistakenly believe that their confessions will provide them with some mercy.  It is the theory confession shows a sense of responsibility.  Thus, the leader will have respect for the criminal and therefore grant some leniency.  It is a policy of parole boards here in the U.S..  A convicted felon who refuses to admit his crime will not be granted parole.

Unfortunately, Napoleon is a ruthless dictator.  He executes all the pigs and hens, despite their confession.  You might expect that the fear this would create would keep everyone else quiet.  However, paranoia often makes us behave irrationally.  The animals become so scared that they will be executed that they begin to confess everything in the hopes of appearing honest and loyal to their leader.

There are several reasons why the animals might confess to having been traitors. First and most simply, they may actually have betrayed the farm, or wanted to. By the time the mass confessions started in Chapter VII, there's a lot to not like about the farm—reasons to be disloyal. They may also simply be tired of all the hard work. There are, though, two more important explanations. They may have been caught up in the groupthink mindset, carried along by the political slogans. Most likely, though, is that Orwell was making an analogy with what actually happened under Stalin, and taking his inspiration from history.

In Animal Farm, why do some animals confess to crimes they didn't commit?

In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, some animals confess to crimes they didn’t actually commit because they symbolize human beings who did the very same thing in the mid- to late-1930s in Stalinist Russia. Since much of the purpose of Orwell’s novel is to satirize conditions in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule, Orwell was almost obligated to present something resembling the infamous “show trials” that did so much to damage the Soviet Union in the eyes of anyone genuinely concerned with justice.

In these trials, people often confessed to crimes of which they were not guilty. Some of them did so because of torture; some of them did so to avoid torture; some of them did so because they feared that their families would be harmed if they failed to confess; some of them even did so because they could not believe that they had been falsely accused and therefore felt that they must, somehow, be guilty.

The show trials were one of the main ways by which Stalin eliminated some real opponents, intimidated anyone else who might even think of opposing him, and inspired fear in many Soviet citizens, including such persons as Dmitry Shostakovich, the great composer whose only “crime” was writing music of which Stalin disapproved. Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase near his door in case the secret police should come for him unexpectedly.

The confessions in Animal Farm, like those in the Soviet show trials, are significant for a number of reasons, including the following:

• They indicate that the farm has now fallen under a complete dictatorship in which any legitimate justice is no longer possible, at least for anyone who might be perceived as a possible threat to the new regime.
• They indicate that not only deeds are now punishable but even thoughts.
• They serve to intimidate anyone who might even think of opposing the regime, especially since the confessions are usually followed by vicious and bloody executions.

As the narrator puts it in a particularly memorable passage,

The three hens who had been the ringleaders in the attempted rebellion over the eggs now came forward and stated that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders. They, too, were slaughtered. Then a goose came forward and confessed to having secreted six ears of corn during the last year's harvest and eaten them in the night. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool – urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball -- and two other sheep confessed to having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon, by chasing him round and round a bonfire when he was suffering from a cough. They were all slain on the spot. And so the tale of confessions and executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood . . . .

Why did the hens confess to Napoleon in Animal Farm?

Everything seems to be going wrong with the Animalist revolution, and the absent Snowball has been made the scapegoat for all the problems that beset the farm. But Napoleon has got in into his head that Snowball must've had accomplices in his dastardly plot to destroy the revolution. So he accuses a number of pigs of being in secret contact with Snowball and demands that they confess their crimes. The charges are utterly ridiculous, of course, but the pigs confess anyway—largely out of fear but also because they think that Napoleon will leave them alone if they say what he wants them to say.

However, they are profoundly mistaken, and Napoleon literally sets the dogs on them, tearing their throats out. Napoleon then demands that other animals, such as the three hens who led the recent rebellion against the forced appropriation of their eggs, also confess their alleged crimes. The hens are scared stiff that they will suffer a similar fate to the pigs, so to save themselves, they make up the ridiculous story that Snowball came to them in a dream and inspired them to lead a rebellion. Unfortunately, their desperate plan to save their necks doesn't work, and all the animals who confess, including the three hens, are brutally put to death.