The camps’ economic uselessness made their horrors unbelievable

Evidence

The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness. The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth. In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 995

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘anti-utility’ destruction that flies in the face of military expediency is a rich angle — utility as a lens that makes atrocity literally unbelievable, applicable to reading other genocides.
• XREF: connects to: Journals rejected Bettelheim’s camp paper because the camps seemed unbelievable — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1619