Extreme camp torture made prisoners identify with their SS captors

Evidence

The article’s explosive quality was the way it showed how the SS brought about a personality change in prisoners by torturing and humiliating them until they finally conformed to camp existence and identified with the SS itselfeven in the case of political prisoners. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 403

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight — that extreme humiliation produces identification with the perpetrator even in political prisoners — reframes how readers think about selfhood, coercion, and complicity.
• XREF: Directly prefigures and interconnects with Adorno and the Frankfurt School’s later work on the authoritarian personality and identification with the aggressor.