Hannah Arendt. The banality of evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem (№ 348846)

... former prisoner of Buchenwald, David Rousset has described what we now know happened in all concentration camps: "the Triumph of the SS required that the tortured victim was permitted to take himself to the gallows, without showing any protest that the victim renounced himself, forgot about me, so it has lost its identity. And it was done not just out of pure sadism, the SS were needed, that the victim admitted defeat. The SS understood that the system, which is able to destroy the victim before she ascends to the scaffold... is the best of all possible systems, designed to keep in slavery a people. In slavery. In submission. And there is no worse spectacle than this procession of human beings, obediently, like puppets, walking to death" (LesJours de notre mart, 1947).