Concentration camps broke inmates through discipline and force, not ideology

Evidence

Bruno Bettelheim, “On Dachau and Buchenwald,” when discussing the fact that most prisoners “made their peace with the values of the Gestapo,” emphasizes that “this was not the result of propaganda …the Gestapo insisted that it would prevent them from expressing their feelings anyway” (pp. 834-35). Himmler explicitly prohibited propaganda of any kind in the camps. “Education consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2835

Categorization

• XREF: Narrows the toolkit concept of totalitarian ‘common sense’ or ideological conformity: here the mechanism is not persuasion but forced adaptation, echoing how Arendt differentiates terror from propaganda.