Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Total Domination

Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Total Domination

Michal Aharony

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 24, Number 2, Fall2010, pp. 193-224 (Article)

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Hannah Arendt and the Idea of TotalDomination

Michal Aharony

Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, The Hebrew University of

Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt argued that the goal of totalitarianism was total domina-

tion; namely, to eliminate spontaneity and hence to destroy “man” as a

moral agent and as an individual. This essay explores the problem of total

domination as a core aspect of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, tracing

the problematic connection between Arendt’s concept of total domination

and her description of the Nazi totalitarian regime. It reveals certain

ambiguities and inconsistencies in Arendt’s understanding of totalitarian-

ism, in particular concerning the question of whether the Nazis actually

achieved total domination. Noting the survival of moral life in the camps,

as manifested in acts of mutual aid among the prisoners, the author con-

tends that the concept of “total domination” does not capture accurately

the complexity of life in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

In this light, she explores the limitations of Arendt’s theory of

totalitarianism.

“The supreme goal of all totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt argued in a

1950 essay, “is not only the freely admitted, long-ranged ambition to global rule

but also the never-admitted and immediately realized attempt at the total domina-

tion of man.”1 Arendt’s discussion of total domination in her first major work, The

Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is fairly concise, consisting of about twenty pages

of a lengthy book that treats three distinct though related topics: antisemitism,

imperialism, and totalitarianism. Nevertheless, the problem of total domination is

at the core of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. How, then, did she perceive

attempts to implement total domination in the real world? Was total domination

over humans achieved by the Nazis? Was it attempted in German society as a

whole, or merely in what Arendt conceived as “the laboratories” of the totalitarian

regime—the concentration and extermination camps?2

In Arendt’s view, it seems, total domination was most fully realized in the

concentration camps—a realm in which the assumption that “everything is poss-

ible” was tested and proven. By inflicting permanent terror on the inmates of the

camps, the totalitarian regime rendered individuals superfluous and eliminated

doi:10.1093/hgs/dcq023Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 193–224 193

their spontaneity—as if in an “organized attempt” to “eradicate the concept of the

human being.”3

This essay explores Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, and in particular her

reflections on total domination, focusing on The Origins of Totalitarianism

(hereafter OT) and several early texts collected in Essays in Understanding.4 The

first section traces the roots of Arendt’s conception of total domination to her

general theory of totalitarianism, emphasizing her perception of this type of regime

as unprecedented. The second section analyzes the stages in the process of achiev-

ing total domination: first, the revocation of legal rights, then a decline of morality,

and finally the destruction of the individuality of man. The third section reveals

significant ambiguities concerning the question of whether Arendt thought the

Nazis had in actuality achieved total domination. Finally, the concluding section

suggests some empirical considerations that may help us to reevaluate the idea of

total domination in light of the vast literature published since the 1950s on the

concentration camps.

As Jerome Kohn notes, the complexity of OT arises in large part from its

interweaving of a concept of total domination with a description of the Nazi and

the Soviet totalitarian regimes.5 The main purpose of this essay is to trace this pro-

blematic connection and to illuminate certain ambiguities, limits, weaknesses, and

inconsistencies in Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism. I contend that the

concept of “total domination” fails to accurately capture the complexity of life in

the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Applying this concept to the

camp’s population, Arendt overlooked the survival of moral life in the camps and

thus missed important manifestations of mutual help and solidarity among the

victims.

It should be noted that, although Arendt included both the Nazi and Soviet

regimes in her analysis of totalitarianism, in this essay I focus primarily on the Nazi

case. This methodological decision stems largely from Arendt’s own emphasis in

her writing of OT. As several commentators have argued, Arendt’s parallel treat-

ment of Nazism and Stalinism is conspicuously unbalanced; her extensive discus-

sion of antisemitism and racism seems to have little concrete connection to the

Soviet variant.6 As we learn from early outlines of OT, Arendt originally did not

intend to write about the USSR. In fact, almost all of parts I and II of OT (antise-

mitism and imperialism) is adapted from articles published separately between

1942 and 1946, in which Arendt is not concerned with Stalinism. Only in 1947 did

she change her plan and decide to write an additional chapter, not on Nazism, but

on totalitarianism in general; it was then that Arendt incorporated the Soviet case

into her analysis.7 Although, in Arendt’s mind, Soviet Russia was undoubtedly no

less totalitarian, it seems she believed that the Nazi camps were the epitome of

evil—the incarnation of “Hell on Earth.”8

194 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Total Domination: The Inner Logic of Totalitarianism

In 1953, reflecting on OT, Arendt remarked that she had not intended to write a

comprehensive history of totalitarianism or antisemitism; rather, she wanted to

analyze the essential elements of totalitarianism.9 Her aim was not to explain totali-

tarianism as a historian might, but to begin to understand the constellation of

factors that made the phenomenon possible.10 OT, in fact, deals not with the

“origins” of totalitarianism, as the title of the book suggests, but rather with the

“elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.”11 These elements include “anti-

semitism, [the] decay of the national state, racism, expansion for expansion’s sake,

[and the] alliance between capital and mob.”12

According to Arendt, none of these elements were totalitarian in themselves;

only after they were welded into a new form did they become totalitarian.13

Antisemitism and imperialism, as Arendt illustrates in the first two parts of OT,

had already developed in the nineteenth century; only after World War I did they

“amalgamate” into a new and modern phenomenon.14 It is worth emphasizing,

however, that although Arendt conceived total domination as an essential aspect of

a distinctively modern pathology, she did not believe that either totalitarianism, or

total domination, were inevitable outcomes of modernity. On the contrary, Arendt

was convinced that human affairs were always and invariably contingent.15

Arendt held that totalitarianism was the curse of the twentieth century, and

that understanding it was fundamental to understanding contemporary politics and

society.16 As she argued in several of her works, totalitarianism was a new form of

domination, a phenomenon that could not be understood according to our tra-

ditional political concepts, or by traditional standards of judgment.17 An unprece-

dented form of government, it embodies “the most radical denial of freedom.”18

Drawing on Montesquieu’s analysis of the nature of various forms of govern-

ment, Arendt distinguishes between a republic, traditional forms of tyranny, and

totalitarianism.19 Whereas in a republic the law defines the boundaries of the body

politic, and thus regulates the public-political sphere in which individuals can act,

tyrannical rule is “lawless.”20 Both lawful government and legitimate power, on the

one hand, and lawless rule and arbitrary power, on the other, are known to us in

political philosophy. Under totalitarianism, by contrast, law and power transform

into ideology and terror: “If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government

and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian

domination.”21

Terror was not invented, of course, by totalitarian regimes; it has been a tool

of traditional tyrannies, and used by various regimes during times of revolution.

However, in tyrannical regimes, whose mechanism of control is fear, violence and

terror are used simply to suppress political opposition. In contrast, Arendt stresses,

genuinely totalitarian terror begins only when the regime has no more enemies to

suppress. When terror is used not as a means to intimidate opponents, but rather

Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Total Domination 195

is directed against “absolutely innocent people” who do not know why they are

being arrested—“objective enemies” of the regime—it becomes total terror.22

Totalitarian terror stands on its own “as a power functioning outside the law,”

Arendt writes; its primary aim is to eliminate any spontaneous human action.23

Defying positive law, totalitarian regimes adhere to the “law of the movement,”

namely, to their own ideology. An ideology, Arendt notes, “can explain everything

and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise.” The ideology of

Stalinism revolved around the “law of History”; that is, a belief in the struggle of

classes. In Nazism, it involved a “law of Nature”—a belief in the struggle of races.

Following these historical or natural “laws,” the totalitarian regime ensures that

“dying classes and decadent peoples,” “inferior races,” and individuals who are

“unfit to live” disappear from the stage of history.24 “Eventually, the proper

execution of the laws of History and Nature will produce a single ‘Mankind.’”25

Totalitarian leaders seek total domination to make reality conform to their

ideology; that is, “for the sake of complete consistency.”26 The end of total domina-

tion, achieved by the means of terror, thus is to create “an iron band which presses

[individual men] all so tightly together that it is as though they were melded into

each other, as though they were only one man.”27 Under these conditions, which

according to Arendt were fully manifested in the concentration camps, space for

free action disappears.28

Before I turn to the three dimensions of total domination, I will outline some

of Arendt’s observations regarding the steps by which totalitarian regimes seize

power. As Roy T. Tsao notes, Arendt “distinguishes three formally successive

‘stages’ of totalitarianism—the ‘pre-power’ stage, the consolidation and exercise of

state power, and finally ‘total domination.’”29 According to Arendt, totalitarianism

began in Soviet Russia only after 1930 and in Nazi Germany by about 1938.

Before these points, the respective regimes used terror in the manner of traditional

tyrannies. After, however, the number of concentration camps actually increased

despite the fact that both regimes had already liquidated all effective resistance.30

The last stage of totalitarianism is reached once the “institutions of the state

are fully assimilated to the movement.”31 At this point the totalitarian “experiment”

achieves its deepest aims, when, under “scientifically controlled conditions,”32

human beings who had already been deprived of their juridical status are robbed

of their moral agency, their individual identity, and their capacity for spontaneity.33

What is beyond human understanding, in Arendt’s view, is not the utilization

of terror, the implementation of racist policies and laws, or even the massacre of

millions of people. Extermination of native populations, Arendt stresses, occurred

even before the European colonization of America, Africa, and Australia.

Imperialists’ claims to world domination can be explained in terms of their lust for

power, just as slavery, which has existed since antiquity, can be explained in terms

of the slave-owners’ pursuit of their economic self-interest. What is unprecedented,


according to Arendt, is the utterly anti-utilitarian nature of the concentration

camps created in Nazi Germany.34

The concentration and extermination camps were “another planet,” existing

only for their own sake.35 Comparing the initial stages of the Nazi policies with the

establishment of the extermination and concentration camps, Arendt concludes that

the Nazi policies of the 1930s, though hideous and criminal, were “entirely

rational.”36 The Nuremberg laws of 1935, the elimination of Jews from public life

between 1936 and 1938, and even the pogroms after 1938 were all direct conse-

quences of the seizure of power by an antisemitic party. The next stage, the estab-

lishment of ghettos in Eastern Europe and the attempt to concentrate most Jews in

them can also be understood, according to Arendt, within the same framework.37

The gas chambers, however, did not appear to benefit anyone. In a time of

war, when Germany desperately needed manpower and its railway network was

overwhelmed, the establishment of costly death factories served no military or

economic purpose.38 It seems, Arendt notes, that Hitler believed it was more

important to run the extermination camps than to win the war.39 The senselessness

of these camps is unique. She goes on to point out that “the unprecedented is

neither the murder itself nor the number of victims and not even ‘the number of

persons who united to perpetrate them.’ It is much rather the ideological nonsense

which caused them, the mechanization of their execution, and the careful and cal-

culated establishment of a world of the dying in which nothing any longer made

sense.”40

In this context, it is important to distinguish between the earlier and the later

concentration camps. As Arendt notes, “concentration camps existed long before

totalitarianism made them the central institution of government.”41 The first camps

were designed to deal with “undesirable elements” in society—meaning, criminals

and political opponents of the regime. Those camps, though deadly and terrible,

were for Arendt quite comprehensible; their purpose was to spread terror among

the regime’s opponents. Only after the pogrom of 1938, with the arrests of thou-

sands of German Jews, did the concentration camps take on their new role. This

type of concentration camp, whose population consisted primarily of people who

had committed no crimes and taken no actions against the regime, is what Arendt

describes as a new and incomprehensible phenomenon. In these camps, which

were administered by the SS, there was a “regulated death rate and strictly orga-

nized torture, calculated not so much to inflict death as to put the victim into a

permanent status of dying.”42 Similarly, Arendt notes, mass murder, either by

gassing or by shooting, became mechanized.

The inmates of the totalitarian concentration camps, Arendt contends, were

isolated from the surrounding world in a way that can hardly be compared to that

of inmates of prisons, ghettos, and forced-labor camps.43 The isolation of people in

the ghettos of the Nazi type was similar in a way to that in the camps; however, in


the former, families and not individuals were isolated and thus, Arendt asserts, an

appearance of normal life and community relationships was maintained.44 The

inmate of the concentration camp, on the other hand, was completely isolated. “It

is as if he had disappeared from the surface of the earth,” she wrote; “he was not

even pronounced dead.”45 The camps became what Arendt calls “holes of oblivion

. . . into which victims [were] made to disappear without a trace, erasing their very

existence.”46

It is important to distinguish here between concentration and extermination

camps. The latter, Arendt stresses, “appear within the framework of totalitarian

terror as the most extreme form of concentration camps.” Extermination, she con-

tinues, “happens to human beings who for all practical purposes are already

‘dead.’”47 The goal of creating a society of the living dead can be achieved, accord-

ing to Arendt, only under the extreme circumstances of a human-made hell.48 As

Dana R. Villa points out, in the section on “Total Domination,” Arendt “tried to

identify the telos of totalitarianism, and to show why the concentration camps were

the ‘central institution’ of totalitarian regimes.” Villa asserts: “Everything Arendt

says in Origins up to this point must be filtered through the lens provided by the

camps, by their attempt to realize total domination concretely.”49

The Process of Total Domination

Killing the Juridical Person in Man

In OT, Arendt describes the three steps toward the establishment of total domina-

tion. The first step involves destroying the juridical person. This process is carried

out through the arbitrary exclusion of certain categories of people from the protec-

tion of the law, thus rendering these individuals utterly “rightless.” The Jews

became paradigmatic of this state of “rightlessness” even before their isolation in

concentration camps.50 It was a process that began with the first racist law passed

in Nazi Germany, depriving the Jews of their legal and civil rights,51 and reached

its extreme in the destruction of the Jews. The inmates of the concentration camps

were living “outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails

a predictable penalty.”52

As Arendt notes, the first group targeted for such juridical destruction was

made up of people who were “innocent in every sense.” Paradoxically, criminals,

according to Arendt, “do not properly belong in the concentration camps,” for they

retain “a remnant of their juridical person.”53 In other words, criminals in the con-

centration camps had a recognized place within the “legal order.”54 Indeed, the

criminal inmates had more privileges than the innocent prisoners, and often were

given key roles in the administration of the camps. 55

The Kafkaesque phenomenon of the arbitrary arrest that had “no connection

whatsoever with the actions or opinions of the person” revealed not only the


condition of “rightlessness” but also what Arendt calls “statelessness.” The latter is

a central category in Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism—one that stems from her

own experience of uprootedness and statelessness for eighteen years.56 A person is

stateless when he/she has lost the protection and representation of a state that

once guaranteed his/her rights. In Arendt’s words, stateless people are those who

“live and die without leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to a

common world.”57 This experience of being uprooted, having no place in the

world, is a consequence of the decline of the nation-state. The “transformation of

the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation”58 began

with the era of new imperialism in the late nineteenth century—a period during

which regimes crushed the rights of minorities and created millions of refugees

and displaced persons. This global trend was one of the contextual factors that

made it relatively easy for Hitler to massacre the Jews—the culmination of a

process that began with the abolition of their civil rights.59

However, the elimination of legal rights, Arendt asserts, was not the inven-

tion of Nazism, but was rooted in the murderous racist treatment of minorities and

the dehumanization of aboriginal populations during the imperialist “scramble for

Africa.” Lawlessness, in other words, was inherent in imperialism.60 In the “heart

of darkness,” the lives of African “savages” were disposable; massacring them was

not considered a crime. Similarly, according to Nazi ideology, the Jews, and other

“inferior” races, were treated as subhuman creatures whose annihilation was

necessary.61 “The fate of the Jews,” Margaret Canovan explains, “was bound up

with the fate of the European nation-state, which came under attack in the age of

imperialism.”62 The Nazis achieved total domination through a political process

that produced the new modern phenomenon of stateless, superfluous, and rightless

people. This was possible, Arendt stresses, only with the collapse of the theory of

the Rights of Man, as she underlines in a significant paragraph in OT:

The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically

intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and what is more important,

the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the products of those events

which in a period of political disintegration suddenly and unexpectedly made hun-

dreds of thousands of human beings homeless, stateless, outlawed and unwanted,

while millions of human beings were made economically superfluous and socially bur-

densome by unemployment. This in turn could only happen because the Rights of

Man, which had never been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their

traditional form, lost all validity.63

These observations led Arendt to conclude that the most basic human right is “the

right to have rights”; more specifically, the right to belong to a political community

and hence “to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and

opinions.”64 The events of the twentieth century have taught us, Arendt argues,

that the right “to belong to some kind of organized community” is founded and


guaranteed only by the body politic. Juridico-civil rights can serve as the foun-

dation for human and moral rights, but the reverse is not the case.65 The right “to

belong to humanity” cannot be guaranteed by “humanity” itself. In other words,

abstract human rights, in Arendt’s view, are meaningless. The loss of national

rights not only entails the loss of human rights, but also deprives individuals of the

possibility to restore such rights.66

The nation, Arendt believes, is what provides people with “a consciousness of

themselves as cultural and historical entities”—with a sense of belonging to an

abstract “we.” 67 Once individuals lose their relationship to a specific community,

what remains to them is only “the abstract nakedness of being human.”68 Of the

inmates in the concentration and extermination camps, Arendt writes that “being

nothing but human was their greatest danger.” Their nationality, she contends, was

“the last sign of their former citizenship” and their only “recognized tie with

humanity.”69 When a man is “nothing but a man”—that is, he has no civil rights—

he is nobody’s fellow man. He is not recognized by others; no one has the duty of

protecting his rights.70 The aim of the arbitrary system of the totalitarian regime is

to eventually destroy the civil rights of the whole population, not only those of

rightless and stateless people.71 Hence, Arendt concludes, eliminating the juridical

person is a prerequisite for total domination over men.

Killing the Moral Person in Man

The second step towards total domination, according to Arendt, “is the murder of

the moral person in man,” that is, the destruction of conscientious or moral

agency.72 Of the three stages of Arendt’s theory of total domination, the second is

the least self-evident. Since the philosophical tradition offers more than one way to

define “morality,” we must ask what Arendt means by “losing one’s morality.” In

OT, Arendt maintains that the extreme conditions of life in the concentration

camps and the complete separation of the inmates from the rest of the world

deprive them of any genuine moral choice.73 The destruction of the moral subject

in the camps, according to Arendt, has the following consequences:

(1) There is no space for conscientious protests.

(2) The constant struggle for life eliminates human solidarity and leads to com-

plete isolation.

(3) The victims become complicit in the totalitarian crimes.

Drawing on the books of Buchenwald survivor David Rousset, Arendt con-

cludes that in the Hobbesian world of the camps, where people constantly had to

struggle for their lives, the Nazis were able to thwart any human solidarity among

the inmates by intentionally turning the prisoners against each other. This achieved


a dual purpose: the destruction of the inmates’ morality as well as their motivation

to resist. When death was certain, the future had no meaning; all that was left was

absolute isolation.74 The total ruination of the moral person in man was realized in

the concentration camps by the lack of any genuine moral choice. “When a man is

faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or sending

his wife and children . . . to their death,” Arendt notes, “the alternative is no longer

between good and evil, but between murder and murder.”75 Hence, she con-

cludes: “Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be

adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized

complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the

victims and thus made really total.”76 This controversial conclusion, which Arendt

would emphasize a few years later in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the

Banality of Evil (1963), stems from what she perceives as the success of the SS in

rendering the inmates of the camps—criminals, political inmates and Jews—

“responsible for a large part of the administration [of the camps].”77 Rezso

(Rudolf ) Kastner,78 the Judenrate (Jewish Councils), the hated Kapos, the ordinary

men and women trying to cope with everyday life in the camps—all had to face

the terrible dilemma of trying to save themselves and their relatives at the risk of

sending others to their death. Thus, according to Arendt, “the distinguishing line

between persecutor and persecuted, between the murderer and his victim, is con-

stantly blurred.”79

The second and third hypotheses mentioned above are subject to testing: the

solidarity among prisoners, or lack thereof, can be examined empirically, and the

highly controversial and complex question of whether prisoners participated in the

camp atrocities also can be scrutinized. The first hypothesis, however, is less

readily tested. Arendt does not elaborate in OT what she believes to be a “moral”

act, other than to mention these three manifestations of the failure of morality.

Arendt’s notion of morality—a theme that preoccupied her for the rest of her

life—is developed more fully in later works such as Eichmann in Jerusalem, The

Life of the Mind, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,”80 and “Thinking and

Moral Considerations.”81

A detailed discussion of Arendt’s views on morality is beyond the scope of

this essay; however, for the sake of context, a few general points are in order.

Above all, she held that, in view of the experience of totalitarianism during the

1930s and 1940s, we could no longer claim that morality is self-evident; during the

regimes of Hitler and Stalin we witnessed “the total collapse of all established

moral standards in public and private life.”82 Arendt argued that Nazi morality suc-

ceeded in replacing the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” with the

commandment “Thou shalt kill,” and thus reduced morality to the etymological

origin of the word—a set of mores, customs, manners, or habits.83


As Canovan points out, Arendt believed that “at the root of the Western tra-

ditions lay two different kinds of fundamental moral experiences”—Socratic and

Christian.84 Further, surveying the Western tradition of moral philosophy, Arendt

refers to three major moral propositions:

(1) The first, by Socrates: “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.”85

(2) The second, by Jesus: “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” or “Don’t do unto others

what you don’t want done to yourself.”86

(3) The third, by Kant: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can

become a general law for all intelligible beings.”87

Thinking about morality in the wake of totalitarianism led Arendt to conclude

that neither one of what she believed to be the two paradigms for personal

morality—Socratic conscience and Christian goodness—were pertinent for under-

standing the unprecedented atrocities of the totalitarian regime. Morality, she

argued, was concerned with the Self, and not with the world, and therefore moral-

ity, according to Arendt, is excluded from politics.88

Destroying the Individuality of Man

After killing the juridical person and the moral person, all that the totalitarian

regime must do to realize total domination is, in Arendt’s words, destroy “the

differentiation of the individual, his unique identity.”89 Annihilating human indivi-

duality and uniqueness, Arendt believes, is the most difficult of the tasks the totali-

tarian regime sets for itself, and is carried out “through the permanence and

institutionalization of terror.”90 Arendt writes: “Total domination is achieved when

the human person, who somehow is always a specific mixture of spontaneity and

being conditioned, has been transformed into a completely conditioned being

whose reactions can be calculated even when he is led to certain death.”91 The ter-

rible achievement of the SS, then, was to reduce men to “a never-changing identity

of reactions.” The totalitarian regime succeeded in forming a creature that had

never been known before, namely, “a kind of human species resembling other

animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’”92

The supreme goal of the totalitarian regime, according to Arendt, is to eliminate

the plurality and spontaneity of men, to form “ghastly marionettes with human

faces,” and thus to turn humanity into one “individual.” Hence, “the model

‘citizen’ of a totalitarian state” is a submissive creature similar to Pavlov’s dog,

whose reactions can be predicted in advance.93

The destruction of prisoners’ individuality and uniqueness, according to

Arendt, began on the way to the concentration camps, during the terrible journey

in sealed railcars. It continued upon their arrival at the camps, with “the shaving of


the head [and] the grotesque camp clothing,” and soon afterwards with the con-

stant tortures that were not intended to kill the body—“at any event not quickly.”94

The aim of these humiliations, Arendt notes, was to control the body and make it

go through unlimited suffering.

Arendt distinguishes between the torture inflicted by the SA men in the first

concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo, and that inflicted by the SS

men in the death camps by 1942. The spontaneous “blind bestiality” of the former,

Arendt contends, was an irrational sadistic torture, motivated by “a deep hatred

and resentment” towards the victims, who were superior to the SA men in terms of

social class and intellect.95 Interestingly, Arendt finds in this type of torturer “a last

remnant of humanly understandable feeling.” The real horror, she stresses, began

when “perfectly normal men” who were trained to be members of the SS, took

over the administration of the camps.96 It is here that we are faced with the “absol-

utely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human

dignity.”97

This unprecedented phenomenon of a systematic, calculated attempt to

annihilate human dignity is what Arendt called “radical evil,” a term first coined by

Immanuel Kant in his work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793–

1794).98 If Kant’s definition of radical evil was the will to ignore the Moral Law,

for Arendt it was a will that was, as Villa puts it, “irreducible to any set of recogniz-

ably human motivations.”99 By “radical evil” Arendt did not mean diabolical evil,100

but rather a systematic (human) program of producing evil, behind which stood

reason. According to Arendt, radical or absolute evil was unknown to us prior to

the emergence of totalitarian regimes; it is beyond the evil we knew and thus

requires new knowledge and understandings.101 Radical evil is new in the sense

that it destroys not only a life; it destroys “the fact of existence itself.” Whereas

murder is limited evil because the murderer lives in “the realm of life and death

familiar to us” and “does not pretend that his victim has never existed,” radical evil

is unlimited. It erases the identity of the victim, and the ability to remember and

mourn him, and thus turns murder into something “as impersonal as the squashing

of a gnat.”102 As Villa notes, in Arendtian terms, “to live and die in the camps . . . is

to be deprived of one’s appearance in the world, to be absolutely erased from the

realm of appearances and (thus) memory.”103 Arendt indeed believes that the

victims of the concentration camps disappeared into “holes of oblivion.”

The camps made “death itself anonymous”; they “robbed death of its meaning as

the end of a fulfilled life.”104

The core of the radical evil that revealed itself in the concentration camps

was the attempt to destroy human individuality, and thus human spontaneity itself.

Spontaneity—a word derived from the Latin word sponte, meaning “of your own

will”—is, for Arendt, “man’s power to begin something new out of his resources,

something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and


events.”105 Arendt here follows Kant, who believed, as Richard J. Bernstein notes,

that “spontaneity is the essential characteristic of our human rationality and

freedom.” However, as Bernstein points out, whereas Kant believed that it was ulti-

mately impossible to destroy spontaneity in the human being, Arendt contends that

it could indeed be “eliminated empirically, by totalitarian means.”106 Arendt thus

writes: “The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human

beings, but also to serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically

controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and

transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even

animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which as we know, was trained to eat not when it

was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal.”107

The lack of spontaneity in the concentration camp inmates, Arendt argues, is

evidenced by their weak resistance to Nazi control (there were few attempts to kill

SS soldiers or organize protests), as well as the strikingly low rate of prisoner

suicide.108 What remained, she claimed, was passivity; inmates marched to their

deaths.109 Arendt concludes that the only thing that can explain why “millions of

human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas

chambers” is the destruction of individuality, which was achieved only in the con-

centration camps of the totalitarian regime.110

Arendt argues that the camps obliterated individuality not only through the

destruction of plurality and spontaneity, but also through a radical perversion of

labor, work, and action—the three fundamental human activities that Arendt desig-

nates in The Human Condition (1958) as constituting the vita active. While the

human condition of labor is life itself, the human condition of work is worldliness.

The activity of work, for Arendt, “is the capacity to add something of one’s own to

the common world.” The result of action is plurality.111 That is, humans’ ability to

act allows them to distinguish themselves from one another as individuals. For

Arendt, spontaneity—the human capability to begin something new—gives rise to

plurality, the unpredictable appearance of individual, unique perspectives and

acts.112

Destroying the essential human activities of work and action, the totalitarian

regime abolishes the experience of “belonging to the world.”113 Not only is the

public realm of life destroyed, as in any other tyrannical regime that isolates

people and prevents their political participation, but private life is destroyed as

well.114 Ironically, the sign above the gate of the Auschwitz I read Arbeit macht

Frei (“work makes one free”), but the most productive work in Auschwitz-Birkenau

(Auschwitz II) was the manufacturing of corpses. In a corpse factory, which by

definition negates not only life but also worldliness and plurality, there is no room

for labor, work, or action. As Kohn points out, at the core of Arendt’s concept of

totalitarianism lies the profound paradox between the necessity to eradicate human


spontaneity and the fact that the very “possibility of that eradication is itself

entirely new.”115

The “existential condition of being dead and yet not annihilated, alive and yet

not living,” as Mary G. Dietz puts it,116 which was created in the concentration

camps, is, for Arendt, the only form of society in which total domination over

human beings is possible.117 The biggest obstacle to total domination is spontaneity

and individuality—anything that distinguishes between people.118 Arendt’s primary

conclusion is that totalitarianism aims to form “a system in which men are superflu-

ous.” Men who are capable of human reactions, that is, something that is more

than predictable animalistic reactions, are “entirely superfluous to totalitarian

regimes.”119 As Arendt sees it, the genuine goal of the totalitarian regime “is not

the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of

society, but the transformation of human nature itself.”120 For Arendt, once again,

this was the unprecedented characteristic of radical evil—not the suffering per se

or even the immense scale of murder. “Human nature as such is at stake,” she

stressed.121

As Arendt emphasizes in OT, we are trying to classify a crime that no “cat-

egory was ever intended to cover,” and whose horror could “never be fully

embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and

death.”122 Nevertheless, the irrationality of Auschwitz does not mean that one

should not strive to understand it. In fact, this complicated project—understanding

totalitarianism—preoccupied Arendt and remained at the center of her work until

her last days.123 “What is important for me,” she explained in an interview with

Gunter Gaus, “is to understand.”124

Arendt attempts to understand total domination from within, as it were, by

examining among others things the impact of the ideology of the totalitarian

regime. Total domination, she points out, does not attempt to achieve its goal only

“through absolute terror in the camps,” but also “through ideological indoctrination

of the elite formations.”125 In analyzing the ideology of totalitarianism, Arendt con-

cludes that “totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world of no-sense.”126 The

aggressiveness of the totalitarian regime springs neither from a lust for power, nor

from a desire for expansion per se, but from the regime’s impulse to demonstrate

that its “supersense” is correct.127 Supersense, for Arendt, is the inner logic of the

racial Nazi ideology, which runs counter to common sense. In her words, “within

the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more sensible and

logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should be killed by poison

gas.”128 There is very little doubt, Arendt concludes, that Nazi perpetrators in a

sense acted logically: they committed their crimes “for the sake of their ideology

which they believed to be proved by science, experience, and the laws of life.”129

Totalitarianism became the “curse of the twentieth century,” in Arendt’s

view, because “it so terrifyingly took care of its problems.”130 As Jacques


Taminiaux remarks, what Arendt finds so disturbing is the correspondence

between the attempt of the totalitarian regime to render human beings superfluous

and the “basic experience that modern masses have of their own superfluity.”131 In

order to understand this correspondence, we have to consider the central role that

“the masses” play in Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. A totalitarian movement,

according to Arendt, depends on a mass following whose members are decisively

different from what she calls the “mob” organizations of the nineteenth century.

While the latter, like the bourgeoisie, are characterized by an individualistic atti-

tude, the former have lost any “individual claims and ambition.”132 The “mob,”

Arendt asserts, was a by-product of capitalist production; both the bourgeois-

dominated class and the “mob” retained some sense of mutual responsibility. On

the other hand, the masses that emerged from the breakdown of bourgeois society

are “organizations of atomized, isolated individuals”133 who are not bound by any

special collective interests. Belonging to no social or political body, these masses

present a chaos of individual interests and are thus “quite prepared to sacrifice

themselves.”134

Total loyalty to the movement, which is the psychological basis for total dom-

ination, can be expected, Arendt contends, “only from the completely isolated

human being” who does not have any social ties.135 In times of war, revolution, or

economic crisis, these masses of isolated people become available for mobilization

by totalitarian regimes.136 Membership in the totalitarian movement promises

these individuals a cure for their “loneliness” and feeling of “not belonging to the

world at all.”137 The totalitarian propaganda offers “a lying world of consistency

which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”

Clinging to the ideology and propaganda of the totalitarian movement, these

“uprooted masses” can feel at home “through sheer imagination.”138 However,

once the totalitarian regime seizes power, this lying world collapses and the indi-

viduals fall back into reality and total isolation.

Thus, in Arendt’s conception of total domination, the subjects of this power

move in two distinct circles: the wider circle of domination occurs in society

(Soviet Union/Nazi Germany) and its subjects are the members of totalitarian

movements—isolated individuals who lack any bond to a particular social class and

are thus prepared to provide total loyalty to the movement. The narrower circle

consists of the inmates of the concentration camps—the “laboratories” in which

the experiment of total domination is fully realized.

Has total domination ever been achieved?

One of the central questions of this essay—whether Arendt believed that total

domination had ever been achieved—may be divided along additional lines of

inquiry. Did Arendt perceive that she was writing about a historical reality, or

merely presenting a model or ideal type?139 If it is true that total domination can


be realized, did the Nazi totalitarian regime achieve it? And last, if it was achieved,

did it exist only in the Nazi concentration camps, or was it to be found elsewhere

under the Nazi regime?

If we examine several of the essays Arendt wrote between 1948 and 1953, we

find different answers to these questions—answers that are not always mutually

consistent. In her 1950 essay, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of

Concentration Camps,” for example, Arendt wrote that the goal of the totalitarian

concentration camps was to eliminate “from the human psychology every trace of

spontaneity; but we can only guess how far this is actually possible.”140 In OT, on

the other hand, she seems to imply that total domination was achieved, but only in

the German concentration camps: “If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and

refuse to be misled by the common-sense assertion that they are utopian and

unrealizable, it develops that the society of the dying established in the camps is

the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely.”141

Though the last part of the passage is quite decisive, the first part is ambiguous—

should we or should we not take the totalitarian aspirations seriously? Can we

reject common sense when dealing with an ideology of “supersense”?

In her 1948 Partisan Review essay entitled “The Concentration Camps,”

Arendt includes yet another ambiguous passage on the possibility of rendering

human beings superfluous. Here too, it is unclear whether Arendt believed that

the “ideal of totalitarian domination” had been achieved: “As long as all men have

not been made equally superfluous—and this has been accomplished only in con-

centration camps—the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved.

Totalitarian states strive constantly, though never with complete success, to estab-

lish the superfluity of man.”142 We may conclude from this passage that, in

Arendt’s view, total domination had not been achieved outside the camps. But

does it imply that it was achieved inside the camps? Is rendering human beings

superfluous Arendt’s ultimate criterion for total domination?

In her “Concluding Remarks” to the original edition of OT,143 Arendt pro-

vides a clearer formulation of the idea she had explored in the 1948 Partisan

Review essay. In these remarks, she states that total domination can never be

achieved because it cannot be realized on a global scale. Thus she writes: “So the

chances are that total domination of man will never come about, for it presupposes

the existence of one authority, one way of life, one ideology in all countries and

among all peoples of the world. Only when no competitor, no country of physical

refuge, are [sic] left can the process of total domination and the change of the

nature of man begin in earnest.”144 Here, it seems, the criterion for total domina-

tion is the success in changing human nature.

Canovan argues in this context that Arendt “was less interested in writing

history than in presenting a model of the political possibilities and dangers of

her time.”145 Referring to the passage quoted above from Arendt’s “Concluding


Remarks,” Canovan argues that, according to Arendt, “totalitarianism has never yet

been completely developed and perhaps will never be, since it could be fully rea-

lized only in an empire that covered the whole world.”146 Villa expresses a similar

view when he argues that, in Arendt’s assessment, total domination was not fully

realized by Nazism and Stalinism even at their most murderous. He writes: “It

remains an ideal type, one whose fearsome outline is glimpsed in the highly orga-

nized terror of the concentration camps. Total domination achieved a ‘local,’

limited reality in the Lagers and the Gulag. Thus, Arendt can claim that it was in

the camps that the essence of totalitarianism revealed itself, even though this

essence remained (as it were) unrealized in society at large.”147

However, even when Arendt provides her most explicit answer, such as in

her 1953 essay “Mankind and Terror,” it is still unclear whether she holds that

total domination was actually achieved in the camps. It is worth quoting the follow-

ing paragraph at length:

Totalitarian government’s failure or success therefore ultimately depends on its ability

to transform human beings into perverted animals. Ordinarily this is never altogetherpossible, even under the conditions of totalitarian terror. Spontaneity can never beentirely eradicated, because life as such, and surely human life, is dependent on it. In

concentration camps, however, spontaneity can be eradicated to a great extent. . . . If

that is to be accomplished, people obviously have to be robbed of the last traces of

their individuality and transformed into collections of identical reactions; they have to

be cut off from everything that made them unique, identifiable individuals within

human society. The purity of the experiment would be compromised if one admitted

even as a remote possibility that these specimens of the species homo sapiens had

ever existed as real human beings.148

Finally, Arendt’s wavering on the question of the theoretical nature of “total domi-

nation” can be well demonstrated in the following paragraph from OT: “And

although theoretically total domination is possible only under the conditions of

world rule, the totalitarian regimes have proved that this part of totalitarian utopia

can be realized almost to perfection.”149

As we have seen, a close examination of Arendt’s writings leaves us uncertain

whether she believed that total domination had been achieved. Her various works

on this subject present ambiguous and even contradictory views, revealing several

formulations of total domination and the criteria for achieving it. Rendering

human beings superfluous is the first criterion, but it is not sufficient. The decisive

criterion for total domination is the transformation of human nature, and this is

realized when human beings lose their capacity for spontaneity. Spontaneity can

never be entirely destroyed, according to Arendt, but it was eliminated “to a great

extent” in the concentration camps.

Yet the question remains: Is total domination possible in practice, or only in

theory? What are we to make of Arendt’s varying formulations? If total domination


is impossible even in the camps, surely it is inconceivable on a global scale. What

is the analytical value, then, of such a theoretical construct? Does the concept of

total domination reveal something about the logical core of totalitarianism (Nazism

or Stalinism) that other ideal-type concepts, such as fascism or political religion do

not? If we emphasize the passages in which Arendt asserts that spontaneity can

never be utterly destroyed, even under the extreme conditions of the concentration

camps, then total domination serves as a Weberian ideal type—an intermediary

between the philosophical and the empirical level of analyses.

To complicate matters further, the intent of total domination as a form of

government, Arendt argues in OT, is eventually to encompass the entire human

race.150 This goal, however, has yet to be realized in history. Though we can never

know for sure how far total domination could have reached beyond the camps if

Germany had won the war, Arendt suggests that the extermination of the Jews was

merely preparation for the elimination of other “undesirable” parts of the German

population. Thus she writes: “Antisemitism only prepared the ground to make it

easier to start the extermination of peoples with the Jewish people. We know now

that this extermination program of Hitler’s did not stop short of planning the liqui-

dation of large sections of the German people.”151 In practice, though, what

Arendt describes as the organized attempt of the Nazi totalitarian regime “to eradi-

cate the concept of the human being” was limited to the concentration camps.

One difficulty in determining Arendt’s views is that she did not appear to

think it mattered especially whether the Nazis did or did not succeed in creating a

true totalitarian entity in the concentration camps. What was alarming for her was

the mere fact of a regime that hoped to render “undesirable” people superfluous.

Whether “total domination” is a historically descriptive term or some kind of a phi-

losophical category is not a question that concerns Arendt. The central aim of OT

was neither to describe totalitarianism historically nor to analyze it philosophically,

but rather to understand a phenomenon that was unprecedented. Arendt’s desire

to confront the totalitarian atrocities of the twentieth century—in her mind, a dra-

matic break from any traditional political concepts or standards of moral judg-

ment—had led her to go against the trend of social scientists who claim to explain

this historical occurrence “objectively.”152

Several scholars have invoked the notion of “storytelling” to explain the gap

between Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and the objectivity of her account. Her

description of the camps as the “image of hell,” her use of oxymorons (“extermina-

tion factories,” “death factories”), and even her notions of “total domination” and

“radical evil” themselves, might have been intended as rhetorical devices.

Intentionally employing hyperbolic language and a polemical tone, Arendt drama-

tizes the extraordinary nature of the camps.153 It should be stressed, however, that

what some critics may find to be sentimentality, provocation, or exaggeration, was

for Arendt the only suitable, and, perhaps, effective way to write about the


catastrophe of the camps.154 As Arendt stressed in her “Reply to Eric Voegelin,”

for her, “the question of style [was] bound up with the problem of

understanding.”155

Total Domination Reconsidered

Arendt’s own intentions notwithstanding, in the final section of this essay I would

like to consider some of the questions raised above, and to suggest a historical

reconsideration of the concept of “total domination” in light of the vast literature

on the concentration camps available to us today.

If we trace the historical sources upon which Arendt based her conception of

total domination, it soon becomes clear that in drawing her conclusions about

camp life, she relied heavily on the handful of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies that

were published immediately after the war. The accounts of Bruno Bettelheim,

Eugen Kogon, and David Rousset156 are particularly prominent in OT. All three

were survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau, early Nazi concentration camps estab-

lished on German soil.157 Although in OT Arendt explicitly expresses her doubts

regarding survivors’ ability to “dwell on horrors” in a meaningful way,158 her

assumptions regarding the goals of the totalitarian regime, and in particular its aim

to eliminate human individuality and morality, were taken directly from Bettelheim

and Rousset.159

As we have seen, Arendt conceived of the Nazi camps as “a society of the

living dead.” The figure that more than any other confirms Arendt’s description of

totalitarianism’s efforts to reduce man to “a never-changing identity of reactions” is

that of the Muselmann, the “walking dead” person who had lost any will to live.

The Muselmanner, the “drowned” who “touched the bottom,” as Primo Levi put

it,160 and reached the most extreme form of dehumanization, indeed in many ways

come closest to Arendt’s description of total domination’s results: they had lost

much of their human dignity and other aspects of their individuality such as spon-

taneity. Unfit to work, the Muselmanner were the first to be rendered superfluous

in the eyes of the SS and were consequently sent to the gas chambers.161

More than sixty years after the liberation of the camps, our body of knowl-

edge has been tremendously extended. With vast scholarly work and the extensive

literature of Holocaust survivors, we can better evaluate the nature of the camps

and their influence on the prisoners’ behavior. The questions of losing or maintain-

ing one’s morality and individuality, I suggest, should be dealt with not only

through the perspective of the perpetrators, but also through the experiences of

the victims. For this purpose, a methodological close-up—what Clifford Geertz

has called a “thick description”—of the life of the concentration camps, from the

points of view of various prisoners, is crucial.

A closer and more nuanced look at life in the concentration camps reveals

that the Nazis’ attempt to accomplish total domination over man was only partially


achieved. Even in the most animalistic circumstances of the bitter struggle for life,

the Nazis did not succeed in utterly destroying human gestures; inmates never

ceased entirely to care for one another or to try to maintain their own dignity. Two

themes that illustrate this point are resistance and mutual aid among the camp

prisoners. I focus hereafter primarily on Auschwitz, a camp that has become vir-

tually synonymous with the Holocaust itself and with the notion of radical evil.

As we have seen, in OT Arendt emphasizes the lack of resistance and even

the lack of suicide among the camp inmates as evidential arguments for their

destroyed sense of spontaneity. The empirical examination of resistance, however,

depends on how one defines the term. Should resistance be understood as armed

acts, or could it also be manifested in more covert acts of defiance in the camps?

Indeed, under the conditions extant in Auschwitz, few situations offered the pris-

oners the opportunity to give battle, or even to make a passive protest. The camp

required of the prisoners maximum adaptation. In the entire history of Auschwitz

there was only one known incident of collective armed resistance: the uprising of

the Sonderkommando in October 1944. Individual attempts to escape—operations

that were usually coordinated by the resistance movement—were few and were

rarely successful.162 Furthermore, those who organized the resistance movement,

the sabotage,163 and the escapes; who made contact with the outside world to

provide information on the atrocities that were committed inside the camp; or who

assassinated SS-men and took part in the armed revolt—were all relatively fortu-

nate prisoners, who were better nourished than the majority of inmates.164

For the purpose of this discussion, however, I use a broader, more inclusive

definition of “resistance” drawn from the 1979 study Values and Violence in

Auschwitz. The Polish author of this sociological analysis of life in Auschwitz, Anna

Pawełczynska, was herself a former political prisoner of the camp.165 I contend

that under the extreme living conditions of the camp, sheer survival was itself an

act of resistance. Whereas the goal of Auschwitz was to erase the prisoners’ human-

ity and exterminate them within a certain length of time, the task of the prisoners

who did not passively submit to their fate was to prevent or hinder the camp offi-

cials from doing so. That is, their task was to save their own and other prisoners’

lives by whatever means possible in the camp and to remain human. As

Pawełczynska notes, “Resistance was expressed in the constant effort to maintain

inner freedom while outwardly adapting.”166

Resistance was manifested not only through overt armed action but also

through several covert modes of behavior that aimed above all to save lives.167 Acts

that served to maintain one’s personal and collective identity should be regarded

as acts of resistance, as should rituals and behaviors that were characteristic of

normal life outside the camp. Following the theoretical framework set forth by

Tzvetan Todorov in his 1996 monograph Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the

Concentration Camps, I categorize these covert acts of resistance—specifically,


caring for others or expressing concern for them—as acts of “ordinary virtue.”168

One of the most significant manifestations of resistance in the camps was the

network of mutual aid and communication among the prisoners. Aid of various

types was provided by the organized underground networks that operated in the

camp, but also took the form of spontaneous human reactions, individual strat-

egies, and expressions of solidarity among prisoners.169

In contrast to Arendt’s perception of the Nazi concentration camps as the

locus of a constant, animalistic struggle for life that eliminated human solidarity

and led to the prisoners’ complete isolation—a view that still echoes through con-

temporary research170—numerous studies have shown that interpersonal bonding

and sharing among prisoners were essential elements of adaptation and survival.171

Psychiatrist Leo Eitinger, for instance—himself a Holocaust survivor—argued that

one of the primary aids to survival in the camps was reciprocal human relationships

among the prisoners. Eitinger maintains that although prisoners could provide at

best minimal and/or symbolic assistance, such aid contributed decisively to “the

individual’s ability to retain part of his personality and self-respect,” and conse-

quently his capacity to survive.172 Sociologist Elmer Luchterhand reached similar

conclusions, arguing that the “prisoner social system” in the camps took the form

of mutual sharing that clearly enhanced survival chances. The most common type

of interpersonal relationship pattern through which the prisoners could actively

sustain one another, Luchterhand contended, was that of “stable pairing.”173

Whether it was caring for family members, countrymen, political comrades,

or complete strangers, acts of physical and emotional support occurred daily in the

concentration camps. While sharing food was the most common manifestation of

mutual help, one should not underestimate the importance of emotional/spiritual

support; for example, encouraging each other not to lose heart174 or secretly cele-

brating holidays together.175 Thoroughly tracing such examples in the extensive

body of testimonies available today is a task for a future project. My aim in this

brief outline has been to suggest a new approach to the study of the problem of

total domination.

Looking back at the reception of the Origins of Totalitarianism and its

immense influence on political theory since that time, there can be no doubt that

Arendt’s contribution to our understanding of the totalitarian regime was highly

significant. Her perceptive insights on camp life, written soon after the events took

place and based only on the few firsthand testimonies available at the time, caught

the essence of an unprecedented human experiment: the attempt to achieve total

domination over human beings. Employing the theoretical category, or “ideal

type,” of total domination, Arendt provided us with a tool for understanding a

regime that rendered people homeless, stateless, outlawed, and from the regime’s

point of view, superfluous.


In this essay I have attempted to reconstruct our understanding of Arendt’s

conception of the totalitarian project. My central purpose has been to reexamine

the “experiment in total domination” through the points of view of those who were

actually subjected to it. I have suggested that when we juxtapose Arendt’s concept

of total domination to the actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, we realize that

the concrete reality of the Nazi concentration camps does not always fit well into

Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. Applying the concept of “total domination” to

the camp’s inmates, Arendt overlooked the survival of moral life in the camps and

thus missed important manifestations of mutual help and solidarity among the

victims. The failure of Nazi totalitarianism to dominate totally demonstrates the

persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and dehuma-

nizing conditions. Contrary to totalizing discourses that subsume complex realities

under abstract conceptual formulations, we learn that absolute domination is not as

absolute as it claims or wants to be. As Arendt herself recognized when writing

Eichmann in Jerusalem, although it may be true that “totalitarian domination tried

to establish . . . holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disap-

pear. . . . The holes of oblivion do not exist.” She went on to say that “nothing

human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make

oblivion possible. One man will always be left to tell the story.”176

Michal Aharony earned her Ph.D. in political science from the New School for Social

Research. Her dissertation is titled “Total Domination: Between Conception and

Experience—Rethinking the Arendtian Account through Holocaust Testimony.” She is cur-

rently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2007–2008, she held a Miles Lerman Center for the

Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust

Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research interests include

the history of political ideas in modern political thought and Holocaust studies.

NotesI am grateful to James Miller, Agnes Heller, Richard J. Bernstein, and Andreas Kalyvas for

their helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this essay and for their advice

and encouragement. I would also like to thank Roy Ben-Shai, Keren Stein, Jerome Kohn,

Joseph R. White, Devin O. Pendas, and Martin Shuster for their insightful comments and

suggestions.

1. Hannah Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,” in

her Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace &

Co., 1994), 240. Article originally published in Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 1 (1950):

49–64.

2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1979 [1951]), 437. All quotations hereafter are from this edition, unless other-

wise specified.


3. Ibid., 440, 456; Hannah Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” in her Essays in Understanding,

304–305; Letter from Arendt to Karl Jaspers (1947), in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers,

Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace

& Co., 1992), 69.

4. Essays in Understanding, a collection of works written between 1930 and 1954 and pre-

viously unpublished, consists of several important essays on totalitarianism.

5. Jerome Kohn, “Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69,

no. 2 (2002): 621.

6. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications, 1996), 68. See also: Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation ofher Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 18–20.

7. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1982), 202–204. For a thorough account of the writing of OT, and the

changes in the third part of the book through its several editions, see Roy T. Tsao,

“The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002):

579–82, 587.

8. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 445.

9. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in her Essays in Understanding, 403.

Originally published in the Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 76–84.

10. See Dana Villa, “Genealogies of Total Domination: Arendt, Adorno, and Auschwitz,”

New German Critique 100, no. 34 (2007): 3–4, 31.

11. Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” 403.

12. Arendt, “Outlines and Research Memoranda,” unpublished notes located in Arendt

Papers, box 69, Library of Congress, cited in Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 28.

13. Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” 405–406. See also Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 42.

14. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 28; Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 588.

15. See Villa, “Genealogies of Total Domination,” 6; Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 20.

16. Hannah Arendt, “Concluding Remarks,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:

Schocken Books, 2004), 620; Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 232.

17. Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” 302. See also Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the

Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 281.

18. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in

Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 328, 338–39.

19. Arendt noted that, according to Montesquieu, “a republic is constitutional government

with sovereign power in the hands of the people, a monarchy a lawful government with

sovereign power in the hands of one man, and tyranny a lawless rule where power is

wielded by one man according to his arbitrary will.” Hannah Arendt, “The Great

Tradition—Part I: Law and Power,” Social Research 74, no. 3 (2007): 723.

20. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 334.


21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464; Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,”

341.

22. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 341; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,

464; Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” 299.

23. Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” 300; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 465.

24. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 465; Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,”

340.

25. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 340. In OT (465) Arendt expresses the

same idea: “Terror as the execution of a law of movement whose ultimate goal is not the

welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individ-

uals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the ‘parts’ for the sake of the ‘whole.’”

26. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 458; Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 25.

27. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 342. Interestingly, Arendt argues that

Stalin’s totalitarian rule was more advanced than that of Hitler (ibid., 348).

28. Ibid., 343.

29. Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 591–92.

30. In “Mankind and Terror,” Arendt mentions that during the first years of Nazi dictator-

ship there were only 10,000 inmates in the concentration camps. By 1939, the number of

camps had grown to 100, housing a population of some one million inmates by 1940 (ibid.,

299–300). In actuality, the number of inmates in the early camps was higher than Arendt

thought—some fifty to one hundred thousand prisoners. See Joseph Robert White,

“Introduction to the Early Camps,” in The United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumEncyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 vol. I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, andConcentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office(WVHA), Part A ed. Geoffree P. Megargee, foreword by Elie Wiesel (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009).

31. Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 592. Note that according to Arendt, in Soviet Russia, as

opposed to Nazi Germany, totalitarian rule was not ushered in by a totalitarian movement.

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 323.


33. Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 600.

34. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 234–25.

35. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 444. Arendt uses the phrase “another planet” in

her essay “Social Science Techniques,” 242.

36. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 235.

37. Ibid., 234–35.

38. John S. Conway, “Appendix I: The Significance of the Vrba-Wetzler Report on

Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade

Books, 2002), 300. In a 1946 article, Arendt wrote that “no matter what the rationale, real or


alleged, for anti-Semitism might be, the building of death factories, the diversion of so many

millions of people into the machinery of mass murder, made no conceivable sense in a war

situation where all available forces were needed for actual fighting.” Arendt, “Imperialism:

The Road to Suicide,” Commentary 1, no. 4 (1946): 35.

39. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 233–34, 236; Arendt, The Origins ofTotalitarianism, 411. One might argue, though, that for Hitler, exterminating the Jews and

winning the war were the same thing. It is possible that the Nazis put so much effort into

killing the Jews in 1944 instead of sending more power to the front because they truly

believed that the Jews were the real enemy and threat.


41. Ibid., 236.

42. Ibid., 238.

43. This was not true for all of the camps. In fact, in some of the concentration camps,

inmates had contact with civilians when they went to their work every day outside the camp

boundaries. However, Arendt based her arguments mainly on testimonies from Buchenwald,

a camp in which the inmates were indeed isolated.


45. Ibid., 240.

46. Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 599.


48. Ibid., 240.

49. Villa, “Genealogies of Total Domination,” 32.


51. An instructive description of this process and consequently the condition of “rightless-

ness” is found in the diaries of Victor Klemperer. See his I Shall Bear Witness: The Diariesof Victor Klemperer, 1933–1941 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998).


53. Ibid., 448–49.

54. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 33.

55. An interesting question is what constituted criminal behavior in the eyes of the Nazis.

The inmates who were identified as strictly criminals in the camps were indeed murderers,

rapists, and the like. However, other categories of prisoners were also blamed for “crimes”

against the German nation, for example, homosexuals, “asocial elements,” political prisoners,

and so on.

56. Jerome Kohn, “Freedom: the Priority of the Political,” in The Cambridge Companion toHannah Arendt, ed. Dana R. Villa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114, 116.

57. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300. Cf. ibid., 269.


58. Ibid., 275.

59. For an illuminating development of this insight, see Enzo Traverso, The Origins of NaziViolence (New York: New Press, 2003), chap. 2.

60. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 33, 35, 37.

61. Ibid., 38.

62. Ibid., 45.


64. Ibid., 296–97.

65. For an instructive analysis of the conception of “the right to have rights,” see: Seyla

Benhabib, “Political Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Reflections,” Social Research69, no. 2 (2002): 547–50.

66. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 298–99.

67. Ibid., 229.

68. Ibid., 299.

69. Ibid., 300.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 451.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid., 452. See also Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 240.

74. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 451. Arendt bases this conclusion on very early

historiographical sources of the concentration camps. Here she quotes David Rousset from

his book Les jours de notre mort (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1947). In fact, there were many

instances of mutual aid and solidarity among the camp inmates (to be discussed below).


76. Ibid. In a 1952 review of Leon Poliakov’s early work about the Third Reich and the

Jews, Arendt emphasized yet again her conclusion. The Nazis’ success in getting people “to

help carry out their own death sentences,” she remarks, was “the last turn of the screw in

the totalitarian scheme of total domination.” Hannah Arendt, “The History of the Great

Crime,” Commentary 13, no. 3 (1952): 303.


78. Rezso [Rudolf] Israel Kasztner (1906–1957), a Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist,

was a leading member of the Va’adat Ezrah Vehatzalah (the Aid and Rescue Committee)—a

small Jewish group in Budapest that attempted to help Jewish refugees escape from Nazi

Europe into Hungary during the Holocaust. Following the Nazi invasion of Hungary in

March 1944, the Rescue Committee negotiated with SS officers in an attempt to save Jewish

lives. Kasztner, who negotiated directly with Adolf Eichmann, was later accused in Israel of

collaboration with the Nazis and was assassinated in 1957.


79. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 452–53; Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” 305.

Arendt’s conclusion here is taken directly from Rousset, Les jours de notre mort, 587–88.

80. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” is the title of the courses Arendt taught in 1965

and 1966 at the New School for Social Research. The published volume was edited by

Jerome Kohn and included materials from Arendt’s University of Chicago course “Basic

Moral Propositions.” Parts of the latter were incorporated in the endnotes of the edited

essay. See: Jerome Kohn, “A Note on the Text,” in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility andJudgment, ed. and intro. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), xxxiii.

81. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38,

no. 3 (1971): 417–46.

82. Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” 52, 61.

83. Ibid., 50, 75. Note that “Thou shalt not kill” is a Catholic rendering of the biblical com-

mandment, as opposed to “Thou shalt not murder” in the Jewish tradition.


85. Plato, Gorgias, 469c.

86. Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” 68.

87. Ibid., 76.

88. Ibid., 104, 106. Several scholars have criticized Arendt’s exclusion of morality from poli-

tics. See for example: George Kateb, Hannah Arendt, Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ:

Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 29, 88, 95; and Seyla Benhabib, “Judgment and the Moral

Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought,” Political Theory 16 (Feb 1988): 46–

48. For an interesting discussion on this subject see chapter five in Canovan, HannahArendt.


90. Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review 15, no. 7 (1948): 757;

Arendt, “Social Science Techniques” 240.



93. Ibid., 455–56.

94. Ibid., 453.

95. Ibid., 453–54.

96. Ibid., 454. Cf. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 239. In her essay “Organized Guilt

and Universal Responsibility,” Arendt elaborates on the “normality” of the SS men: “In con-

trast to the earlier units of the SS men and Gestapo, Himmler’s over-all organization relies

not on fanatics, not on congenital murderers, nor on sadists; it relies entirely upon the nor-

mality of jobholders and family men.” Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal

Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding, 129. The essay originally was published in

Jewish Frontier no. 12, 1945, as “German Guilt.” For a similar interpretation—one that was


influenced by Arendt—see Christopher R. Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve PoliceBattalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

97. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 454 (my emphasis).

98. For a discussion of Kant’s notion of radical evil, see Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil:A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), chap. 1.

99. Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 32–33.

100. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt writes that she “totally rejects” the notion of “satanic

greatness,” and the tendency to “mythologize the horrible” when talking about radical evil.

Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 69, cited in Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt andthe Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 149. Dana Villa also writes about

Arendt’s rejection of the tendency to reduce radical evil “to an emanation of the demonic.”

See his Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 15.


102. Ibid., 442–43.

103. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 19.


105. Ibid., 455.

106. This is Bernstein’s phrasing. See his Radical Evil, 208.

107. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. As we shall see, in another article Arendt

expresses a different view regarding the possibility of eradicating human spontaneity.

108. It should be emphasized, however, that little is known about suicide in the concen-

tration camps, as the SS records of causes of death often are incomplete and at least partly

falsified. See Konrad Kwiet, “The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under

the Nazis,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 160–61. See also Christian Goeschel,

Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

109. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 455n161. It is noteworthy, however, that in her

analysis Arendt does not criticize or blame the Jews themselves, who, some have argued,

went to their death like lambs to the slaughter. On the contrary, in Eichmann in Jerusalem,

Arendt criticizes Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor representing the Israeli government in the

Eichmann trial, for asking the witnesses again and again “Why did you not protest?” “Why

did you board the train?” and so on. Moreover, she argues, no non-Jewish group acted dif-

ferently. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 11.

110. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 455. These central paragraphs reveal a con-

fusion between concentration camps and extermination camps on Arendt’s part, as well as a

gap in her theory of total domination. In the extermination camps, the majority of victims

were killed immediately. Therefore, though they undoubtedly lost their juridical status long

before entering the gas chambers, the victims of the extermination camps were not sub-

jected to “total domination” per se. Furthermore, in most cases they did not know that they

were being sent to their deaths.


111. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1998), 7; see also Mary G. Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” in Villa, The CambridgeCompanion to Hannah Arendt, 96–99.

112. Margaret Canovan, introduction to Arendt, The Human Condition, xii.


114. Ibid.

115. Kohn, “Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism,” 633.

116. Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” 97–98.

117. To be discussed below.


119. Ibid., 457.

120. Ibid., 458 (my emphasis).

121. Ibid., 458–59.

122. Ibid., 441, 444.

123. Kohn, “Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism,” 635–36.

124. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with

Gunter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 3.


126. Ibid., 458.

127. Ibid.

128. Ibid., 457.



131. Jacques Taminiaux, “The Philosophical Stakes in Arendt’s Genealogy of

Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002), 438.


133. Ibid., 323.

134. Ibid., 350, 348.

135. Ibid., 323–24.

136. Ibid., 315; see also Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 53.


138. Ibid., 353; see also Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 55, 53.


139. A term most associated with Max Weber, the “ideal type” is an abstract model that,

when used as a standard of comparison, can guide us to construct hypotheses about reality

and see the world in a clearer, more systematic way. The ideal type concept is not a descrip-

tion of reality but rather an abstract “idea” of the historically given phenomenon, based on

characteristic features of it. “In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild)

cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality,” writes Weber. An ideal type is not an

ethical ideal (Endpunkt) of what ought to be, but only an investigational or instrumental

(heuristic) ideal which the scientist may use for research and comparison with his/her actual

findings. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and

Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 90.

140. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques” 242 (my emphasis).

141. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 456 (my emphasis).

142. Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 761–62 (my emphasis).

143. The “Concluding Remarks” were the final chapter of the 1951 edition of The Originsof Totalitarianism. In subsequent editions, starting with the German edition of 1955, and

including the revised English-language edition of 1958, Arendt deleted this part and

replaced it with the chapter “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.” This

chapter was first published separately in 1953, and then added to the future editions of the

book. See Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarianism,” The Meridian 2, no. 2 (1958), reprinted in

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 618–32;

Hannah Arendt, “Preface to Part Three,” in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968

edition), xxiv. See also Tsao, “The Three Phases,” 580, 604.

144. Arendt, “Concluding Remarks,” 619 (my emphasis). Arendt’s argument that total

domination could not be achieved on a global scale is reaffirmed in a later piece; in that

piece, she rejects the possibility of a world government as a utopian ideal that ignores the

differences between cultures and nationalities. See: Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers:

Citizen of the World?” in her Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Book, 1968), 81–84.

See also Jeffrey C. Isaac, “A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity

and the Politics of Human Rights,” The American Political Science Review 90, no. 1

(March 1996): 69.


146. Ibid., 60–61.

147. Villa, “Genealogies of Total Domination,” 32.

148. Arendt, “Mankind and Terror,” 304–05. A very similar phrasing can be found in OT:

“Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because spontaneity can

never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but

with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It is only in the concentration camps

that such an experiment is at all possible, and therefore they are not only ‘la societe la plus

totalitaire encore realisee’ (David Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total domination in

general.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438.


150. Ibid., 323.


151. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques” 235. See also Arendt, The Origins ofTotalitarianism, 310, 424.

152. Political philosopher Eric Voegelin raised this argument in a review of OT as early as

1953. Voegelin characterized Arendt’s approach as an “emotionally determined method of

proceeding from a concrete center of shock toward generalization.” See his “The Origins of

Totalitarianism,” Review of Politics 15 (1953): 70. See also Kohn, “Arendt’s Concept and

Description of Totalitarianism,” 630.

153. See Lisa J. Disch, “More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the

Writings of Hannah Arendt,’ Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 674. See also: Seyla

Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57,

no. 1 (1990): 167–96.

154. Note Arendt’s words in her reply to Voegelin: “If I moralized or became sentimental, I

simply did not do well what I was supposed to do, namely, to describe the totalitarian

phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society. To describe

the concentration camps sine ira is not to be “objective,” but to condone them. . . . When I

used the image of Hell, I did not mean this allegorically but literally. . . . In this sense, I

think that a description of the camps as hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more ade-

quate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.”

Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” 403–404.

155. Ibid., 404.

156. Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal ofAbnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 4 (October 1943): 417–52. Bettelheim restated the

essence of this article in a declaration made to the Allied authorities on July 10, 1945. This

Sworn Deposition at the International Military Tribunal was later published as “Copy of

Document L-73” in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: A Collection of DocumentaryEvidence Prepared by the American and British Prosecution Staffs (Washington, DC:

United States Government Printing Office, 1946), 7: 818–39. Arendt cites both the original

essay of 1943 and Bettelheim’s Sworn Deposition published in 1946, but primarily the

latter; Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der nationalsozialistischenKonzentrationslager (Berlin: Tempelhof, 1947). The book appeared in English as TheTheory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behindThem (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950); David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire(Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946). This book appeared in English in two translations: TheOther Kingdom (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), and A World Apart (London:

Secker and Warburg, 1951). See also David Rousset, Les jours de notre mort (Paris:

Editions du Pavois, 1947).

157. Another important source Arendt used was an anonymous collection of testimonies

about conditions in the Soviet gulag: The Dark Side of the Moon (New York: Scribner’s,

1947). This collection included a preface by T. S. Eliot.

158. See especially Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 439, 441.

159. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 439n128, 441n129, 443, 436n123, 451,

453n156, 455n160; Bettelheim, “Copy of Document L-73,” 820, 836, 838; Rousset, Les joursde notre mort, 213, 525, 587–88.


160. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1996), 90. See also Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York:

Summit Books, 1988).

161. Influenced by Arendt, Giorgio Agamben has argued that the paradigmatic figure in

conceptions of the extermination was “the Jew who is transformed into a Muselmann.”

Following Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim, Agamben states that “In Auschwitz ethics

begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever

impossible to distinguish between man and non-man.” Giorgio Agamben, Remnants ofAuschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 52, 47.

162. For a detailed account of the escapes from Auschwitz, see Henryk Swiebocki,

“Prisoner Escapes,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and

Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United

States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 503–21.

163. Sabotage was a key expression of resistance and took place in every concentration

camp where prisoners were used as forced laborers. It was attempted several times at the

Auschwitz munitions factories, including the Union Werke, and was met with extreme vio-

lence by the SS. There were fewer instances of sabotage in camps such as

Auschwitz-Birkenau, where prisoners usually were made to perform senseless tasks. There,

as in other concentration camps where the prisoners were to be eliminated through labor,

slowing down the pace of work served the purpose of biological survival. See Anna

Pawełczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1979), 116; Hermann Langbein, “The Auschwitz

Underground,” in Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,

491–92.

164. Pawełczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz, 76, 120.

165. The original Polish edition appeared in 1973.

166. Pawełczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz, 127.

167. Ibid., 113.

168. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).

169. See Pawełczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz, 116.

170. An important study representing this approach is German sociologist Wolfgang

Sofsky’s The Order of Terror. The primary category of analysis of this approach, which is

similar to Arendt’s, is absolute terror. Sofsky’s view that the inmates could not achieve soli-

darity or retain moral life under the conditions of Nazi concentration camps can be summed

up in his statement: “The society of the concentration camp was not a social community.

Absolute power hurls humans into a social state of nature, a Hobbesian universe of theft

and bribery, mistrust and animosity, the struggle of all against all.” Wolfgang Sofsky, TheOrder of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1997), 24.

171. For a good overview of this debate by an author who holds the latter opinion, see

Shamai Davidson, “Human Reciprocity among the Jewish Prisoners in the Nazi


Concentration Camps” The Nazi Concentration Camps, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf

(Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), 555–72.

172. Leo Eitinger, Concentration Camp Survivors in Norway and Israel (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 79. See also Leo Eitinger, “On Being a Psychiatrist and a

Survivor,” in Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld

and Irving Greenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 196–97.

173. Luchterhand’s study examines the social behavior of fifty-two concentration camp sur-

vivors, the majority of whom had spent at least two years in the camps. As Luchterhand

explains, “Stable paring involved persistent, friendly relations with one or more individual

prisoners, one at a time, but not with groups. Pairs were classified as stable if they continued

until the partners were separated by events beyond their control. Brief friendships involving

only slight interaction were not treated as stable pairs.” Elmer Luchterhand, “Social

Behavior of Concentration Camp Prisoners: Continuities and Discontinuities with Pre- and

Postcamp Life” in Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, ed.

Joel E. Dimsdale (Washington, DC: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980), 264–65;

see also Luchterhand’s “Prisoner Behavior and Social System in the Nazi Concentration

Camp,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 13 (1967): 259–60.

174. See for example the writings of Charlotte Delbo, an Auschwitz survivor whose poetic

prose is among the most beautiful and poignant works of literature describing women’s

friendships in the camp. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1995), 63, 74, 92, 105, 193.

175. The case of the Sonderkommando (the “special labor detail”)—a labor unit whose

members, most of whom were Jews, were forced to work in the extermination camp crema-

toria at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps—serves as a powerful example of strong

solidarity among the camp prisoners. See Gideon Greif’s analysis in his We Wept WithoutTears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2005); see also Greif’s “Between Sanity and Insanity: Spheres of Everyday

Life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity andCompromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Jonathan Petropoulos and John

K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 46.

176. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 232–33.


Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Total Domination

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