PARTISAN REVIEW
and unwanted, while millions of human beings were made econom–
ically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemployment. This
in tum could only happen because the rights of man, which had
never been philosophically established but merely formulated, which
had never been :eolitically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in
their traditional form, lost all validity.
Meanwhile, however, totalitarian regimes exploited these devel–
opments for their own purposes. In order to understand these pur–
poses,
we must examine the process of preparing living corpses
in
its entirety. After all, loss of passport, residence, and the right to
work, was only a very provisional, summary preparation, which could
hardly have produced adequate results.
The first essential step was to kill the juridical person in man;
this was done by placing the concentration camp outside the normal
penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial
procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty. Thus
criminals, who for other reasons are an essential element
in
concen–
tration camp society, are ordinarily sent to a camp only on comple–
tion of their prison sentence. Deviations from this rule in Russia must
be attributed to the catastrophic shortage of prisons and to a desire,
so far unrealized, to transform the whole penal system into a system
of concentration camps.
The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plaus–
ible the propagandistic claim that the institution exists for asocial
elements. It is equally essential, as long as there is a penal system
in the country, that they should be sent to the camps only on com–
pletion of their sentence, that is, when they are actually entitled to
their freedom. It is, paradoxically, harder to kill the juridical person
in a man who is guilty of some crime than in a totally innocent man.
The stateless persons who in all European countries have lost their
civil rights along with their nationality, have learned
this
only too
well; their legal position improved automatically as soon as they
committed a theft: then they were no longer without rights but had
the same rights as all other thieves. In order to kill the juridical per–
son in man, the concentration camp must under no circumstances
become a calculable punishment for definite offenses. Criminals do
not properly belong in the concentration camps;
if
nevertheless they
constitute the sole permanent category among the inmates, it is a
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