Concentration camps were economically useless and self-financing

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. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 995

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that the camps had no economic rationale and ‘exist mostly for their own sake’ — worth interrogating against the forced-labor scholarship that emphasizes economic exploitation.