Abstract

Shortly after the end of World War II and just prior to the resumption of their correspondence, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt attempted to articulate the significance of the Nazi death camps for philosophy.¹ In 1949 Arendt finished the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, a resolutely ambitious book in which she sought to explain the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism by analyzing the formation of the modern masses and the creation of superfluous human beings.² In the book's last sections, she discussed the “mass production of corpses” in the Nazi death camps, referring more than once to what…