The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

Nazi propaganda was ingenious enough to transform antisemitism into a principle of self-definition, and thus to eliminate it from the fluctuations of mere opinion.

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This gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification which not only restored some of the self-respect they had formerly derived from their function in society, but also created a kind of spurious stability which made them better candidates for an organization.

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Through this kind of propaganda, the movement could set itself up as an artificial extension of the mass meeting and rationalize the essentially futile feelings of self-importance and hysterical security that it offered to the isolated individuals of an atomized society.

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When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of ‘German’ and ‘Worker’ connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left.

Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives – for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?

It is interesting that even in their beginnings the Nazis were prudent enough never to use slogans which, like democracy, republic, dictatorship, or monarchy, indicated a specific form of government.

Every discussion about the actual form of their future government could be dismissed as empty talk about mere formalities – the state, according to Hitler, being only a ‘means’ for the conservation of the race, as the state, according to Bolshevik propaganda, is only an instrument in the struggle of classes.

In terms of mere propaganda, the discovery of the Nazis was that the masses were not so frightened by Jewish world rule as they were interested in how it could be done, that the popularity of the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rather than on hatred, and that it would be wise to stay as close as possible to certain of their outstanding formulas, as in the case of the famous slogan: ‘Right is what is good for the German people,’ which was copied from the Protocols’ ‘Everything that benefits the Jewish people is morally right and sacred.’

Apart from their cheap Machiavellianism, their essential political characteristic is that in their crackpot manner they touch on every important political issue of the time.

antinational in principle and picture the nation-state as a colossus with feet of clay. They discard national sovereignty and believe, as Hitler once put it, in a world empire on a national basis.

They promise the people that, regardless of superiority in numbers, territory, and state power, they will be able to achieve world conquest through organization alone.

It was the motif of a global conspiracy in the Protocols which appealed most to the masses, for it corresponded so well to the new power situation. (Hitler very early promised that the Nazi movement would ‘transcend the narrow limits of modern nationalism,’fn47 and during the war attempts were made within the SS to erase the word ‘nation’ from the National Socialist vocabulary altogether.)

Nazi propaganda, in other words, discovered in ‘the supranational because intensely national Jew’fn48 the forerunner of the German master of the world and assured the masses that ‘the nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world.’fn49 The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination.

This was what Himmler had in mind when he stated that ‘we owe the art of government to the Jews,’ namely, to the Protocols which ‘the Führer [had] learned by heart.’

the Protocols presented world conquest as a practical possibility, implied that the whole affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that nobody stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but a patently small people, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instruments of violence – an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discovered and their method emulated on a larger scale.

Nazi propaganda concentrated all these new and promising vistas in one concept which it labeled Volksgemeinschaft. This new community, tentatively realized in the Nazi movement in the pretotalitarian atmosphere, was based on the absolute equality of all Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference from all other people.

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After the Nazis came to power, this concept gradually lost its importance and gave way to a general contempt for the German people (which the Nazis had always harbored but could not very well show publicly before) on one hand,fn52 and a great eagerness, on the other, to enlarge their own ranks from ‘Aryans’ of other nations, an idea which had played only a small role in the prepower stage of Nazi propaganda.fn53 The Volksgemeinschaft was merely the propagandistic preparation for an ‘Aryan’ racial society which in the end would have doomed all peoples, including the Germans.

While both promised to level all social and property differences, the classless society had the obvious connotation that everybody would be leveled to the status of a factory worker, while the Volksgemeinschaft, with its connotation of conspiracy for world conquest, held out a reasonable hope that every German could eventually become a factory owner.

The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organization – the ‘accumulation of power without the possession of the means of violence.’

It is no accident that the two totalitarian movements of our time, so frightfully ‘new’ in methods of rule and ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, have never invented an ideology which was not already popular.

Hitler’s brilliant gifts as a mass orator did not win him his position in the movement but rather misled his opponents into underestimating him as a simple demagogue, and Stalin was able to defeat the greater orator of the Russian Revolution.

What distinguishes the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simple-minded, single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements from existing ideologies which are best fitted to become the fundaments of another, entirely fictitious world.

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Their art consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience.

such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized.

The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick,

Once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a ‘living organization,’ they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure.

the point was that the Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself.

for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.

Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.

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It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives.

is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back ...

The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they...

Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.

The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism as an ideology had been so fully ‘realized’ that its content ceased to exist as an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak; destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all the fanaticism of believers.

In contrast with seemingly similar parties and movements of Fascist or Socialist, nationalist or Communist orientation, all of which back up their propaganda with terrorism as soon as they have reached a certain stage of extremism (which mostly depends on the stage of desperation of their members), the totalitarian movement is really in earnest about its propaganda, and this earnestness is expressed much more frighteningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical liquidation of its opponents.

strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers.

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other typically totalitarian features, such as the appointment of functionaries from above and the eventual monopolization of appointments by one man are secondary in importance.

Every hierarchy, no matter how authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter how arbitrary or dictatorial the content of orders, tends to stabilize and would have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement.

language of the Nazis, the never-resting, dynamic ‘will of the Fuehrer’ – and not his orders, a phrase that might imply a fixed and circumscribed authority – becomes the ‘supreme law’ in a totalitarian state.

The early Communist-inspired organizations of sympathizers, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union or the Red Relief associations, developed into front organizations but were originally nothing more or less than what their names indicated: a gathering of sympathizers for financial or other (for instance, legal) help.

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Hitler, consequently, was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members strictly limited.

The front organizations surround the movements’ membership with a protective wall which separates them from the outside, normal world; at the same time, they form a bridge back into normalcy, without which the members in the prepower stage would feel too sharply the differences between their beliefs and those of normal people, between the lying fictitiousness of their own and the reality of the normal world.

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for the fellow-traveler has the same convictions, after all, albeit in a more ‘normal,’ i.e., less fanatic, more confused form; so that to the party member it appears that anyone whom the movement has not expressly singled out as an enemy (a Jew, a capitalist, etc.) is on his side, that the world is full of secret allies who merely cannot, as yet, summon up the necessary strength of mind and character to draw the logical conclusions from their own convictions.

The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations.

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through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.

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The front organization functions both ways: as the façade of the totalitarian movement to the nontotalitarian world, and as the façade of this world, to the inner hierarchy of the movement.

As party members are related to and separated from the fellow-travelers, so are the elite formations of the movement related to and separated from the ordinary members.

the fellow-traveler still appears to be a normal inhabitant of the outside world who has adopted the totalitarian creed as one may adopt the program of an ordinary party, the ordinary member of the Nazi or Bolshevik movement still belongs, in many respects, to the surrounding world:

that in case of conflict between his party allegiance and his private life, the former is supposed to be decisive.

member of a militant group, on the other hand, is wholly identified with the movement; he has no profession and no private life independent of