"The Image of Hell": Arendt on the "factories" of the Holocaust

The "factories" of Heidegger's one mention of the Holocaust are already in Arendt's 1946 "The Image of Hell".

But these "factories" - if one were to use that term - came later.  Arendt is not a witness from Poland or Lithuania. She had not seen that photographic documentation of human slaughter, open, in public, of the early days of Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) and the like.

She uses the word "cattle".  She is mistaken.  We owe a debt to Oliver Sacks for his chapter devoted to Temple Grandin on the slaughter of cattle.

When mobile units were first in use, we have Eichmann's testimony (see Ernst Klee, The Good Old Days) of how slaughter proceeded.

The failures of engines generating exhaust fumes have no counterpart in the slaughter house, the abatoir.

Her account is utterly flawed: the mother sheltering her child has not been reduced to "organic life" - she may have fated her child to a death of having been buried alive.

Nor are these naked women filing into a shallow ravine to be likened to sheep.  These are not the buffalo driven over the cliffs on the prairies of the new world.

When Arendt humiliated Mary McCarthy by saying that she had been in a concentration camp, her lie betrays a wound to narcissism. Somehow her vulnerable admission ties into their friendship. Arendt was not there, was not truly a survivor. To some extent, in some respects, she will be a poseur.

Concerning slaughter and Schlacht: Elias Canetti on the camel market; Robert Walser on the march to Sempach.