Observed from the outside, victim and persecutor look as though they were both insane and the interior life of the camps reminds the onlooker of nothing so much as an insane asylum. Our common sense, trained in utilitarian thinking, is offended by nothing so much as by the complete senselessness of a world where punishment persecutes the innocent more than the criminal, where labor does not result and is not intended to result in products, where crimes do not benefit and are not even calculated to benefit their authors.

However, what historian writes about the death camps as forms of insanity? Not even the best writers on the Holocaust such as Omer Bartov and Stephen Fritz. Who writes about the Holocaust as a collective psychotic episode? The tendency of history is to "normalize the fantastic."

If a young man in the United States shoots fifteen people--becomes a "mass-murderer"---the immediate assumption is that he is severely mentally disturbed.

However, when the leader of a nation-state guides his people to  murdering millions of people, this is rarely written about as  a manifestation of severe mental disturbance or mental disorder.  We assimilate insane behavior into the historical process. We don't like to think about this sort of thing. We shy away from the obvious: the insanity of the human race.