That one wanted to eliminate all personal motives and passions during the “exterminations” and hence keep the cruelties to a minimum is revealed by the fact that a group of doctors and engineers entrusted with handling the gas installations were making constant improvements that were not only designed to raise the productive capacity of the corpse factories but also to accelerate and ease the agony of death.
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160 This is very prominent in Rousset’s work. “The social conditions of life in the camps have transformed the great mass of inmates, both the Germans and the deportees, regardless of their previous social position and education ...into a degenerate rabble, entirely submissive to the primitive reflexes of the animal instinct” (p. 183).
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161 In this context also belongs the astonishing rarety of suicides in the camps. Suicide occurred far more often before arrest and deportation than in the camp itself, which is of course partly explained by the fact that every attempt was made to prevent suicides which are, after all, spontaneous acts. From the statistical material for Buchenwald (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 800 ff.) it is evident that scarcely more than one-half per cent of the deaths could be traced to suicide, that frequently there were only two suicides per year, although in the same year the total number of deaths reached 3,516. The reports from Russian camps mention the same phenomenon. Cf,. for instance. Starlinger, op. cit., p. 57.
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162 Rousset, op. cit., p. 525.
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1 In his funeral speech 011 Marx, Engels said: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic life, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” A similar comment is found in Engels’ introduction to the edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1890, and in his introduction to the Ursprung der Familie, he once more mentions “Darwin’s theory of evolution” and “Marx’s theory of surplus value” side by side.
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2 For Marx’s labor concept as “an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no metabolism between man and nature, and therefore no life,” see Capital, Vol. I, Part I, ch. 1 and 5. The quoted passage is from ch. 1, section 2.
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3 “Stalin’s speech of January 28, 1924; quoted from Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 33, Moscow, 1947.—It is interesting to note that Stalin’s “logic” is among the few qualities that Khrushchev praises in his devastating speech at the Twentieth Party Congress.
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4 “Ein solcher (sc. einsamer) Mensch folgert immer eins ans dem andern und denkt alles zum Argsten.” In Erbauliche Schriften, “Warum die Einsamkeit zu fliehen?”
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5 De Civitate Dei, Book 12, chapter 20.
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Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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