Camps experimentally eliminate spontaneity to transform humans into mere things

Evidence

The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 981

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the camp’s ultimate purpose: not mere extermination but eliminating spontaneity itself, producing a thing lower than animals.
• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s bare life and homo sacer — the reduction of the human to a thing indistinguishable from biological life.