The Holocaust functioned as anticipated revenge discounting Germany’s own ruin

Evidence

What the Germans have done passes understanding, particularly by psychology, just as, indeed, their horrors seem to have been committed rather as measures of blind planning and alienated terrorization than for spontaneous gratification. According to eye-witness reports, the torturing and murdering was done without pleasure, and perhaps for that reason so utterly without measure. … The thought obtrudes that the German horror is a kind of anticipated revenge. The credit system, in which everything, even world conquest, can be advanced, also determines the actions which will put an end to it and the whole market economy, including the suicide of dictatorship. In the concentration camps and the gas-chambers the ruin of Germany is being, as it were, discounted. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 118

Categorization

• XREF: The credit/discounting figuration of catastrophe anticipates economic metaphors later used in trauma theory (borrowed melancholy, deferred mourning).
• QUESTION: Adorno’s claim that the torture was done ‘without pleasure’ and therefore ‘without measure’ is worth chasing — does it survive against later testimony about enjoyment in the camps?