The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

these last years of Nazi rule and their version of a “five-year plan,” which they had no time to carry out but which aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people,

the global interests always overrule the local interests of their own territory.

The Nazis did not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this race was only on the point of being born.

“Aryan” world empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in any event still centuries off.

One of the important differences between a totalitarian movement and a totalitarian state is that the totalitarian dictator can and must practice the totalitarian art of lying more consistently and on a larger scale than the leader of a movement.

he appeased Germans and non-Germans alike and implied that Nazi ambitions would be satisfied when the traditional demands of a nationalist German foreign policy—return of territories ceded in the Versailles treaties, Anschluss of Austria, annexation of the German-speaking parts of Bohemia—were fulfilled.

Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule,

given the power to teach a whole nation the history of the Russian Revolution without mentioning the name of Trotsky, there is no further need for propaganda against Trotsky.

It is only logical that Hitler, prior to his seizure of power, resisted all attempts to organize the party and even the elite formations on a conspiratory basis; yet after 1933 he was quite eager to help transform the SS into a kind of secret society.74 Similarly, the Moscow-directed Communist parties, in marked contrast to their predecessors, show a curious tendency to prefer the conditions of conspiracy

more conspicuous the power of totalitarianism the more secret become its true goals.

would have been wiser to distrust Stalin’s words about “socialism in one country,” invented for the passing purpose of seizing power after Lenin’s death, and to take more seriously his repeated hostility to democratic countries.

they try to overcome through a permanent and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of rule, by consciously developing a method of always doing the opposite of what they say.

a moderation in foreign policy or the political line of the Comintern is almost invariably accompanied by radical purges in the Russian party.

Evidence that totalitarian governments aspire to conquer the globe and bring all countries on earth under their domination can be found repeatedly in Nazi and Bolshevik literature.

They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential territory.

backed by internationally recognized state power, can be exported the same way contempt for parliament could be imported into a nontotalitarian parliament.

regardless of loss of manpower and serious military consequences, and introduced legislation which with retroactive force exported part of the Third Reich’s penal code into the Western occupied countries.

Totalitarian regimes are not afraid of the logical implications of world conquest even if they work the other way around and are detrimental to their own peoples’ interests.

that a plan for world conquest involves the abolition of differences between the conquering mother country and the conquered territories, as well as the difference between foreign and domestic politics,

The Nazis behaved like foreign conquerors in Germany when, against all national interests, they tried and half succeeded in converting their defeat into a final catastrophe for the whole German people;

The cost of its aggressiveness to the Russian people themselves is prohibitive: it has foregone the great postwar loan from the United States which would have enabled Russia to reconstruct devastated areas and industrialize the country in a rational, productive way.

the occupation of large Eastern territories brought no tangible benefits, but on the contrary strained Russian resources still further.

served the interests of the Bolshevik movement, which has spread over almost half...

The totalitarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and his looting is likely to benefit nobody.

Stalin’s war against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the terribly bloody German invasion and occupation.81 This is the reason why totalitarianism prefers quisling governments to direct rule despite the obvious dangers of such regimes.

behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power,

Supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests

treasures of the Soviet Union were not the riches of its soil or the productive capacity of its huge manpower, but the “cadres” of the party

To Stalin constant growth and development of police cadres were incomparably more important

Hitler to sacrifice all Germany to the cadres of the SS; he did not consider the war lost when German cities lay in rubble and industrial capacity was destroyed, but only when he learned that the SS troops were no longer reliable.

nonutilitarian attitudes in general have more than anything else contributed to making contemporary politics well-nigh unpredictable. The inability of the non-totalitarian world to grasp a mentality which functions independently of all calculable action in terms of men and material, and is completely indifferent to national interest and the well-being of its people,

we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: the dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938, and the dictatorship of Bolshevism since 1930.

It is inside the movement, which remains the center of action of the country, that all decisions are made; the official civil services are often not even informed of what is going on,

this analogy between totalitarianism and despotism holds only for the first stages of totalitarian rule,

The most striking aspect of these statements was that both were made after all political opposition had been extinguished, that the secret services were expanded when actually no opponents were left to be spied upon.

Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for “objective enemies” begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes.

The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the “suspect” and the “objective enemy.” The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it.

the Bolsheviks, having started with descendants of the former ruling classes, directed their full terror against the kulaks (in the early thirties), who in turn were followed by Russians of Polish origin (between 1936 and 1938), the Tartars and the Volga Germans during the war, former prisoners of war and units of the occupational forces of the Red Army after the war, and Russian Jewry after the establishment of a Jewish state. The choice of such categories is never entirely arbitrary;

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

Multiplication of secret services makes last-minute changes possible, so that one branch may be preparing to bestow the Order of Lenin on the director of the factory while another makes arrangements for his arrest. The efficiency of the police consists in the fact that such contradictory assignments can be prepared simultaneously.

These illegal methods of financing itself, ranging from friendly acceptance of bribes to outright blackmail, were a prominent factor in freeing the secret services from the public authorities and strengthened their position as a state within the state.

(It is noteworthy that in its various financial operations the Nazi secret police did not exploit its prisoners. Except in the last years of the war,

Not only is the organization not beyond the pale of the law, but, rather, it is the embodiment of the law, and its respectability is above suspicion.

Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the secret police, the “best organized and the most efficient” of all government departments,111 in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime.

achieved—suspicion can no longer be allayed if neither a community of values nor the predictabilities of self-interest exist as social (as distinguished from merely psychological) realities.

About every ten years, a nation-wide purge makes room for the new generation,

The government has itself established those conditions for advancement

it prevents the development of the loyalties that usually tie younger staff members to their elders,

The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one’s predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government,

even without being accused, declared unfit to live. This new category of “undesirables” may consist, as in the case of the Nazis, of the mentally ill or persons with lung and heart disease, or in the Soviet Union, of people who happen to have been taken up in that percentage, varying from one province to another, which is ordered to be deported.