PARTISAN REVIEW
event not quickly. The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to
manipulate the human body-with its infinite possibilities of suffer–
ing-in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inex–
orably as certain mental diseases of organic origin.
It is here that the utter lunacy of the entire process becomes most
apparent. Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole
totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to
make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, ra–
tional aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a
certain time, or he is killed. But to this rationally conducted torture
another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi con–
centration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo. Carried on for
the most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and was not systematic,
but depended on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The
mortality was so high that only a few concentration camp inmates of
1933 survived these first years. This type of torture seemed to be not
so much a calculated political institution as a concession of the
regime to its criminal and abnormal elements, who were thus re–
warded for services rendered. Behind the blind bestiality of the SA,
there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who
were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves,
and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in
their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the
camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling.
The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the
administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way
to an absolutely cold . and systematic destruction of human bodies,
calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or post–
poned indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for
beasts in human form, that is, for men · who really belonged in
mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were
turned into "drill grounds" (Kogon), on which perfectly normal
men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.
The killing of man's individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in
equal parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self–
evident a premise for all human relations that even identical twins
inspire a certain uneasiness, creates a horror that vastly overshadows
the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the
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