"People of the Lie"
When the Christian psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote his unsettling analysis of human wickedness, he titled it People of the Lie because the perpetration of self-serving lies to oneself and others, he found, was a signature trait of the persons he would classify clinically as "evil."
Here the welcoming message to incoming prisoners at the camp's front gate is a falsehood of darkest cynicism, a cruel joke of the most acrid, hope-crushing sort. Displayed at several Nazi death camps, the taunting phrase made its appearance first with this sign, at Sachsenhausen: "work sets you free." By work, of course, the tormentors meant worked to death.
TITLE - "People of the Lie"
WHERE - Entry gate, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Oranienburg, Germany (2015)