Mauthausen was but one extreme example of the way in which the ideology of the master race and the dogma of terror, besides encouraging and, for its practitioners, excusing depravity, was senselessly wasteful and counter-productive. Mauthausen had been classed in 1941 as a Category 3 camp for incorrigible criminals and asocials incapable of re-education; while the distinctions between categories of camps tended to disappear in the pressures of total war, Mauthausen preserved a specially vicious aura.
