The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

The Nazis placed the Jewish issue at the center of their propaganda in the sense that antisemitism was no longer a question of opinions about people different from the majority, or a concern of national politics,fn34 but the intimate concern of every individual in his personal existence; no one could be a member whose ‘family tree’ was not in order, and the higher the rank in the Nazi hierarchy, the farther back the family tree had to be traced.fn35 By the same token, though less consistently, Bolshevism changed the Marxist doctrine of the inevitable final victory of the proletariat by organizing its members as ‘born proletarians’ and making other class origins shameful and scandalous.