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18 SOCIAL SCIENCE TECHNIQUES AND THE STUDY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS Hannah Arendt Every science is necessarily based upon a few inarticulate, elementary, and axiomatic assumptions which are exposed and exploded only when confronted with altogether unexpected phenomena which can no longer be understood within the framework of its categories. The social sciences and the techniques they have developed during the past hundred years are no exception to this rule. It is the contention of this paper that the institution of concentration and extermination camps, that is, the social conditions within them as well their function in the larger terror apparatus to totalitarian regimes, may very likely become that unexpected phenomenon, that stumbling block on the road toward the proper understanding of contemporary politics and society which must cause social scientists and historical scholars to reconsider their hitherto unquestioned fundamental preconceptions regarding the course of the world and human behavior. Behind the obvious difficulties of dealing with a subject matter in which the mere enumeration of facts makes one sound "intemperate and unreliable"] and on which reports are written by people who during their very experience were "never wholly successful" in convincing "themselves that this was real, was really happening, and not just a nightmare,"2 lies the more serious perplexity that within the framework of commonsense judgments neither the institution itself and what went on within its closely guarded barriers nor its political role make any sense whatsoever. If we assume that most of our actions are of a utilitarian nature and that our evil deeds spring from some "exaggeration" of self-interest, then we are forced to conclude that this particular institution of totalitarianism is beyond human understanding. This article is reprinted here by permission of the editors of Jewish Social Studies, where it originally appeared in vol. 12, no. 1 (1950); 49-64. 365 Copyrighted Material 366 I PART FOUR: CHALLENGES TO THE UNDERSTANDING If, on the other hand, we make an abstraction of every standard we usually live by and consider only the fantastic ideological claims of racism in its logical purity, then the extermination policy of the Nazis makes almost too much sense. Behind its horrors lies the same inflexible logic which is characteristic of certain systems of paranoiacs where everything follows with absolute necessity once the first insane premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems clearly does not lie only in their first premise but in their very logicality which proceeds regardless of all facts and regardless of reality, which teaches us that whatever we do we can't carry through with absolute perfection. In other words, it is not only the nonutilitarian character of the camps themselves; the senselessness of "punishing" completely innocent people, the failure to keep them in a condition so that profitable work might be extorted from them, the superfluousness of frightening a completely subdued population, which gives them their distinctive and disturbing qualities, but their antiutilitarian function, the fact that not even the supreme emergencies of military activities were allowed to interfere with these "demographic policies." It was as though the Nazis were convinced that it was of greater importance to run extermination factories than to win the war3 It is in this context that the adjective "unprecedented"4 as applied to totalitarian terror receives full significance. The road to total domination leads through many intermediary stages which are relatively normal and quite comprehensible. It is far from unprecedented to wage aggressive war; massacres of enemy populations or even of what one assumes to be a hostile people look like an everyday affair in the bloody record of history; extermination of natives in the process of colonization and the establishment of new settlements has happened in America, Australia, and Africa; slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind, and forced labor gangs, employed by the state for the performance of public works, were one of the mainstays of the Roman Empire. Even the claim to world rule, well known from the history of political dreams, is no monopoly of totalitarian governments and can still be explained by a fantastically exaggerated lust for power. All these aspects of totalitarian rule, hideous and criminal as they are, have one thing in common which separates them from the phenomenon with which we are dealing: In distinction from the concentration camps, they have a definite purpose and they benefit the rulers in much the same way as an ordinary burglary benefits the burglar. The motives are clear and the means to achieve...

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