Koenigsberg's Lecture at California State University (excerpt)

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Death camps as insane asylums (Hannah Arendt)

Only people no longer ruled by motives of self-interest could indulge in convictions that “for practical purposes (winning the war or exploitation of labor) obviously were self-defeating.” Social scientists have difficulty understanding that “motives identified with human psychology are abolished.”

        Observed from the outside, Arendt says, victim and persecutor look as though they were both insane and the interior life of the camps “reminds the onlooker of an insane asylum.” Common sense is offended by the senselessness of a world where “punishment persecutes the innocent more than the criminal, 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.”