THE CONCENTRATION
CA~.fPS
property a definite value. The concentration camp inmate has no
price, because he can always be replaced and he belongs to no one.
From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous,
although in times of acute labor shortage, as in Russia and in Germany
during the war, he is used for work.
The concentration camp as an institution was not established
for the sake of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economic
function of the camps has been the financing of their own super–
visory apparatus; thus from the economic point of view the concen–
tration camps exist mostly for their own sake. Any work that has been
performed could have been done much better and more cheaply
under different conditions.
2
The example of Russia, whose concentra–
tion camps are usually referred to as forced labor camps, because
the Soviet bureaucracy has given them
this
flattering title, shows most
clearly that the main point is not forced labor; forced labor is the
normal condition of the whole Russian proletariat which has been
deprived of freedom of movement and can be mobilized anywhere
., at any time.
The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their
economic uselessness. The Nazis carried this usele$ness to the point
of open antiutility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage
of rolling stock, they transported millions of Jews to the east and set
up enormous, costly extermination factories. In the midst of a strictly
utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and
military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad un–
reality.
However, such unreality, created by an apparent lack of pur–
pose, is the very basis of all forms of concentration camp. Seen from
outside, they and the things that happen in them can be described
only in images drawn from a life after death, that is, a life removed
from earthly purposes. Concentration camps can very aptly be divided
into three types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of
a life after death: Hades, purgatory, and hell. To Hades correspond
those relatively mild forms, once popular even in nontotalitarian coun–
tries, for getting undesirable elements of all sorts-refugees, stateless
persons, the asocial and the unemployed--out of the way; as DP
camps, which are nothing other than camps for persons who have
become superfluous and bothersome, they have survived the war.
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