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The psychological mechanisms used by anti-Semites have definite effects on the psychological economy of the Jew. Jews in the concentration camp built up stereotypes of the Gestapo guards in order to avoid the anxiety of having to approach the guards spontaneously and as individuals. In addition to the many critical, rejecting components of the stereotype, it was necessary for the Jews to confer extraordinary, inhuman power on the guards in order to protect self-esteem. The Jews also had to try to understand the guards on the basis of little personal contact; this situation facilitated projection onto the guards of motives within themselves that the Jews had rejected. Those Jews whose approach to the guard was in line with the guard's anti-Semitic stereotype, as by strongly appealing for sympathy or trying to outwit him, could only heighten the guard's rejecting attitude since he saw this behavior as a confirmation of his delusion and since to respond sympathetically would be to threaten his own psychological defenses and self-esteem. Behavior which did not conform to this stereotype, and which by its straightforwardness approximated the guard's self-image, put him in the position where he could not be rejecting, since to do so would be more a rejection of himself than of a Jew. A personal experience of Bettelheim during his stay in a concentration camp illustrates these points. Important determinants of the Jews' reactions to their guards in the reality situation of the concentration camp, and additional mechanisms employed in an effort to make concentration camp existence tolerable, are discussed. For a fuller and excellent description of the impact of concentration camp life on the prisoners see, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, by the same author, in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XXXVIII, 1943, pp. 417–452.