Totalitarian torture began as rational interrogation but gained a separate sadistic strand

Evidence

Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed. To this rationally conducted torture another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo. Carried on for the most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and was not systematic, but depended on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The mortality was so high that only a few concentration-camp inmates of 1933 survived these first years. This type of torture seemed to be not so much a calculated political institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal and abnormal elements, who were thus rewarded for services rendered. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1018

Categorization

• XREF: The rational-vs-sadistic torture distinction connects to later readings on bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion — the shift from purposive to purposeless violence, relevant to the necropolitics toolkit.