Concentration camps suppress the spontaneous impulse to suicide

Evidence

In this context also belongs the astonishing rarety of suicides in the camps. Suicide occurred far more often before arrest and deportation than in the camp itself, which is of course partly explained by the fact that every attempt was made to prevent suicides which are, after all, spontaneous acts. From the statistical material for Buchenwald (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 800 ff.) it is evident that scarcely more than one-half per cent of the deaths could be traced to suicide, that frequently there were only two suicides per year, although in the same year the total number of deaths reached 3,516. The reports from Russian camps mention the same phenomenon. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2844

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on necropolitics — the camp’s destruction of spontaneous individual volition, even self-destructive volition, parallels the deprivation of autonomous selfhood the Islamophobia readings explore.