Concentration camp labor was deliberately useless, not economically productive

Evidence

A large pari of the work exacted in the concentration camps was useless, either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned that it had to be done over two or three times. … Even Dallin, who has built his whole book on the thesis that the purpose of Russian camps is to provide cheap labor, is forced to admit the inefficiency of camp labor, op. cit., p. 105.—The current theories about the Russian camp system as an economic measure for providing a cheap labor supply would stand clearly refuted if recent reports on mass amnesties and the abolition of concentration camps should prove to be true. For if the camps had served an important economic purpose, the regime certainly could not have afforded their rapid liquidation without grave consequences for the whole economic system. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2822

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the cheap-labor economic rationalization of camps — connects to necropolitics and how terror serves domination rather than utility.