here's a sample quote, eternally relevant:

There were three main political groups among the Polish prisoners, and the adherents of each fought violently against the others. The strongest was the chauvinistic nationalist group. Each group competed with the others for the most influential posts. When one man managed to obtain an important position in the camp, he would quickly bring in other members of his own group and would remove his opponents from his domain. This was often accomplished by base intrigue. Indeed I dare say that many cases of spotted fever or typhus resulting in death, and other such incidents, could be accounted for by this struggle for power. I often heard from the doctors that this battle for supremacy was always waged most fiercely in the hospital building itself. It was the same story in regard to the control of work. That and the hospital building offered the most important positions of power in the entire life of the camp. Whoever controlled these, ruled the rest. And they did rule too, in no halfhearted fashion. A man who held one of these important positions could see to it that his friends were put wherever he wished them to be. He could also get rid of those he disliked, or even finish them off entirely. In Auschwitz everything was possible. These political struggles for power took place not only in Auschwitz and among the Poles, but in every camp and among all nationalities. Even among the Spanish Communists in Mauthausen there were two violently opposed groups. In prison and in the penitentiary I myself had experienced how right and left wing would fight each other.

In the concentration camps these enmities were keenly encouraged and kept going by the authorities, in order to hinder any strong combination on the part of all the prisoners. Not only the political differences, but also the antagonisms between the various categories of prisoners, played a large part in this.

However strong the camp authorities might be, it would not have been possible to control or direct these thousands of prisoners without making use of their mutual antagonisms. The greater the number of antagonisms and the more ferocious the struggle for power, the easier it was to control the camp. Divide et impera! [divide and conquer] This maxim has the same importance, which must never be underestimated in the conduct of a concentration camp as in high politics.

Also, maybe, if this above interests you, have a look at Agamben's Homo Sacer, whose main thesis is that the camp has become global and we live in it.

The thing about how he started out as commander of Auschwitz is bone-chilling. It is basically a middle manager bitching about office politics and about how the incompetence of those below him ruins his brilliant plans and good intentions. He could just as well have been running a furniture factory as a murder factory.

His evil is banale. The Nazis were not uniquely monstrous people, they were ordinary, unremarkable people who committed some of the most monstrous crimes in human history for trivial and petty careerist reasons because of Nazi ideology. They were not cartoonish supervillains who were defeated for good in 1945. People like Höss are as common today as they were back then. If a new genocidal system arises it will have no trouble finding willing henchmen to do the murders.

In the same vein, I want to recommend “Into That Darkness” by Gita Sereny. Written after a series of extensive interviews with the commandant of Treblinka, which is notable for being an outright extermination camp as opposed to “just” a concentration camp.

It interweaves the man’s life story, almost verbatim as he narrates it in the interview, with stories from the camp survivors, other guards, and local resistance fighters, so we get a Rashomon like view one of the most terrible places in modern history.

One portion that I found to be of particular interest was his induction into the extermination program. His superiors sold it to him (not untruthfully) as something that was already being done “quite successfully” in America.

You can read it on the Internet Archive

but I have read it.

I’d also reccomend Inside The Third Reich by Albert “I’m a fucking liar” Speer, The German Dictatorship by Karl Dietrich Bracher and The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert in terms of learning about how normalised and horrifically unremarkable much of the Nazi beuracracy and rise to power really was.

There’s also a hard to find book called “hitler’s propaganda war” that is genuinely insightful and yet out of print.

Terrifying to think of that the Nazis could do with modern technology and the surveillance state.

Thanks for this. I also appreciate the other reading recommendations that have been posted here. I just want to add a few things that I've found helpful in understanding "this shit." To defeat the bug, we must know the bug.

The Nazi Party Platform —before they seized power, the Nazis were an actual political party and as such they had to operate in Weimar Germany. They used both legal and illegal methods, although I think their stormtroopers are much more famous than their legal attempts to win over voters. In looking at their platform, you can see that they pretty much promise all things to all people—except for Jews, of course. Understanding that National Socialism really is a (contradictory) combination of nationalism and socialism can help you see the same ideology today even as it tries to cloak itself in places like the American two-party system. This quote from Mussolini, the official inventor of fascism, is also useful: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Wherever corporatism exists, you will likewise see the same results as Nazism.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism—Wilhelm Reich was a star pupil of Freud's and psychoanalyzed members of the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat in central Europe during the 1930s. Also an activist member of the KDP (who was expelled I believe for criticizing the USSR when it turned against abortion and divorce), he sprinkles his most famous book with plenty of quotes from Marx and clearly views the world in a dialectical materialist way. (Reich is also despised by the kinds of idealist petite bourgeois shrinks many of us hate.) Basically, Reich's thesis is that when it's obvious that the workers and the petite bourgeois should overthrow capitalism—as it was obvious during the Great Depression—but they don't, something else is clearly at work. Yes, it's cultural hegemony, but propaganda doesn't work unless it falls on fertile ground, and Reich believed that sexual suppression during puberty transforms people into fascists during late capitalism, which is why we see the same material circumstances producing the same sorts of people today: a rural religious male living under late capitalism who owns or expects to own a house or a business (and who belongs to the majority ethnic group) has a strong chance of being a fascist / QAnon nut / voting for Republicans. This is not a dichotomy of course, but a dialectic: the capitalist system encourages this kind of suppression, which in turn encourages the capitalist system.

The Psychopathic God—really thorough history of Germany going back several centuries combined with a thorough analysis of virtually every aspect of Hitler's existence. To the surprise of very few, Hitler was an absolute shitstorm of a human being—abused and neglected by his father, coddled by his mother, and encouraged to rise to the top by a dying socioeconomic order.

The Reactionary Mind—I've only read the beginning of this book because it honestly was repeating itself a lot and looked like it needed an editor or possibly even a total rewrite, but until the author started repeating himself I found a lot of his analysis useful. Reactionaries seem incredibly sensitive to challenges to their power, which may help to explain why American Republicans constantly panic over every last little thing the Democrats do, while socialists typically view Republicans and Democrats as almost being indistinguishable in their evil/incompetence.

This post is really fucking problematic (it currently is the second post you see on this website). If there is one thing we don't need it is pushing information about Nazi thought and their own Point of View (after the war).

You might think there are nice passages, but are they any more good to read than the accounts of survivors and reconstruction of the processes by historians?

We also got so much theory already we could read, and you suggest a Nazi (who is revered by Nazbols, too). Makes me kinda sick honestly.

deleted by creator