Nazi camp labor served torture, not rational profit, until late in the war

Evidence

(It is noteworthy that in its various financial operations the Nazi secret police did not exploit its prisoners. Except in the last years of the war, when the use of human material in the concentration camps was no longer determined by Himmler alone, work in the camps “had no rational purpose except that of increasing the burden and torture of the unfortunate prisoners.”108) However, these financial irregularities are the sole, and not very important, traces of the secret police tradition. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 957

Categorization

• QUESTION: This counterintuitive claim — that camp labor was primarily torture, not production — deserves chasing: how does Arendt reconcile it with the earlier slave-labor financing logic, and what does it imply about the non-instrumental quality of totalitarian violence?
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that totalitarian-instrumental economic logic coexists with violence whose ‘rational purpose’ is only suffering is genuinely paradigm-shifting about the nature of totalitarian power — not merely a data point.