Concentration camp death rates could be consciously regulated at will by the regime

Evidence

For it had turned out that of the 136,000 new arrivals, 70,000 were already dead on reaching the camp or died immediately thereafter. … Later reports from Soviet Russian camps unanimously confirm that after 1949—that is, when Stalin was still alive—the death rate in the concentration camps, which previously had reached up to 60 per cent of the inmates, was systematically lowered, presumably due to a general and acute labor shortage in the Soviet Union. This improvement in living conditions should not be confused with the crisis of the regime after Stalin’s death which, characteristically enough, first made itself felt in the concentration camps. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2821

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the biopolitics/necropolitics strand — the camp as a site where sovereign power makes life-and-death a matter of administrative policy, not circumstance.