THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
While the classification of inmates by categories is only a tactical,
organizational measure, the arbitrary selection of victims indicates
the essential principle of the institution.
If
the concentration camps
had been dependent on the existence of political adversaries, they
would scarcely have survived the first years of the totalitarian regimes.
"The camps would have died out if
in
making its arrests the Gestapo
had considered only the principle of opposition" (Kogan). But the
existence of
.a
political opposition is for a concentration camp system
only a pretext, and the purpose of the system is not achieved even
when under the most monstrous terror, the population becomes more
or less voluntarily coordinated, i.e., relinquishes its political rights.
The aim of an arbitrary system is to destroy the civil rights of the
whole population, who ultimately become just as outlawed in their
own country as the stateless and homeless. The destruction of a man's
rights, the killing of the juridical person in him, is
.a
prerequisite for
dominating him entirely. For even free consent is an obstacle; and
this applies not only to special categories such as criminals, political
opponents, Jews, but to every inhabitant of a totalitarian state.
Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary per–
secution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to cer–
tain modes of intellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly
invented "crimes," would render the camps superfluous, because
in
the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of
so much horror; and above all it would make for
.a
new system of
justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce
a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian
domination. The so-called
u
Volksnutzen"
of the Nazis, constantly
fluctuating (because what is useful today can
be
injurious tomorrow)
and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being
retroactive, almost daily makes new groups of people available for
the concentration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued
existence of the concentration camps and hence for the continued
total disfranchisement of man.
IV
The next decisive step
in
the preparation of living corpses is the
murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by
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