Camps served no economic purpose and existed mainly for themselves.
Evidence
The concentration camp as an institution was not established for the sake of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economic function of the camps has been the financing of their own supervisory apparatus; thus from the economic point of view the concentration camps exist mostly for their own sake. Any work that has been performed could have been done much better and more cheaply under different conditions. Especially Russia, whose concentration camps are mostly described as forced-labor camps because Soviet bureaucracy has chosen to dignify them with this name, reveals most clearly that forced labor is not the primary issue; forced labor is the normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedom of movement and can be arbitrarily drafted for work to any place at any time. The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness. The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 995
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- CANDY: The Nazis built expensive extermination ‘factories’ and shipped millions around during a war-material shortage — a strikingly absurd detail for conversation.
Related
- Concentration camps were economically useless and self-financing (similarity 0.92)
- Concentration camp labor was deliberately useless, not economically productive (similarity 0.88)
- The camps’ economic uselessness made their horrors unbelievable (similarity 0.85)
- Nazi camp labor served torture, not rational profit, until late in the war (similarity 0.84)
- Camps serve as laboratories verifying totalitarianism’s core belief that everything is possible (similarity 0.81)
- Concentration camps are essential power instruments, not pointless atrocities. (similarity 0.81)
- Iconic camp images from liberation were atypical of the system’s normal operation (similarity 0.81)