Systematized mass cruelty displaced the individual sadism of early camp administration

Evidence

Kogon, op. cit., p. 6, speaks of the possibility that the camps will be maintained as training and experimental grounds for the SS. He also gives a good report on the difference between the early camps administered by the SA and the later ones under the SS. “None of these first camps had more than a thousand inmates… Life in them beggared all description. The accounts of the few old prisoners who survived those years agree that there was scarcely any form of sadistic perversion that was not practiced by the SA men. But they were all acts of individual bestiality, there was still no fully organized cold system, embracing masses of men. This was the accomplishment of the SS” (p. 7). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2842

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s running distinction between spontaneous cruelty and bureaucratized evil — the banality-of-evil machinery — which the Islamophobia readings on modern bureaucratic rationality will build on.