Depersonalization is ubiquitous under totalitarianism, and nowhere more so than in the camps. Writing of his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim disconcertingly uses the third person singular: “… right from the beginning he become convinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to ‘him’ as subject but only to ‘him’ as an object … this attitude was corroborated by many statements of other prisoners … the prisoners had to convince themselves that this was real, was really happening and not just a nightmare. They were never wholly successful” (Bettelheim, 1943). People who doubt the reality of their own experience and their entitlement to inclusion in the human community merely demonstrate what perpetrators have always known: that the more monstrous the crime the greater the likelihood that the victim will not be believed.
The Abused and the Abuser: Victim-Perpetrator Dynamics (2018, ed. Warwick Middleton, Adah Sachs & Martin J. Dorahy): Knowing and not knowing: A frequent human arrangement by Sylvia Solinski
