THE CONCENTRATION CAMP S
moral person. It is this horror that gives rise to the nihilistic general–
izations which maintain plausibly enough that essentially all men
alike are beasts. Actually the experience of the concentration camps
does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of
the human beast, and that man's "nature"
is
only "human" in so
far as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something
highly unnatural, that is, a man.
After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the juri–
dical person, the destruction of the individuality is almost always
successful. Conceivably some laws of mass psychology may be found
to explain why millions of human beings allowed themselves to
be marched unresistingly into the g.as chan1bers, although these laws
would explain nothing else but the destruction of individuality.
It
is
more significant that those individually condemned to death very sel–
dom attempted to take one of their executioners with them, that there
were scarcely any serious revolts, and that even in the moment of liber–
ation there were very few spontaneous massacres of the SS men. For to
destroy individuality
is
to destroy spontaneity, man's power to begin
something new out of his own resources, something new that cannot
be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events.
Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces,
which all behave like the dog in Pavlov's experiments, which all
react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death,
and which do nothing but react. This is the real triumph of the
system-:
The triumph of the
SS
demands that the tortured v1ct1m allow
himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and
abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity.
And
it
is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the
SS
men desire this defeat. They know that the system which succeeds
in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold ... is incomparably
the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing
is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dum–
mies to their death. The man who sees this says to himself : "For them
to be thus reduced, what power must be concealed in the hands of the
masters," and he turns away, full of bitterness but defeated. (Rousset).
v
It is characteristic of totalitarian terror that it increases as the
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