The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

whole history of the Nazi party can be told in terms of new formations within the Nazi movement. The SA, the stormtroopers (founded in 1922), were the first Nazi formation which was supposed to be more militant than the party itself;fn68 in 1926, the SS was founded as the elite formation of the SA; after three years, the SS was separated from the SA and put under Himmler’s command; it took Himmler only a few more years to repeat the same game within the SS. One after the other, and each more militant than its predecessor, there now came into being, first, the Shock Troops,fn69 then the Death Head units (the ‘guard units for the concentration camps’), which later were merged to form the Armed SS (Waffen-SS), finally the Security Service (the ‘ideological intelligence service of the Party,’ and its executive arm for the ‘negative population policy’) and the Office for Questions of Race and Resettlement (Rasse- und Siedlungswesen), whose tasks were of a ‘positive kind’ – all of them developing out of the General SS, whose members, except for the higher Fuehrer Corps, remained in their civilian occupations.