The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

The Baltic states were directly incorporated into the Soviet Union and fared considerably worse than the satellites: more than half a million people were deported from the three small countries and an “enormous influx of Russian settlers” began to threaten the native populations with minority status in their own countries.

For the first time after the Great Purge, Stalin had a great number of high and highest officials executed, and we know for certain that this was planned as the beginning of another nationwide purge.

A group of mostly Jewish physicians were accused of having plotted “to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR.”

which Stalin planned in the last years of his life, was a decisive shift in ideology, the introduction of a Jewish world conspiracy.

MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews.

The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough.

the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.

Their nationalist propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never allowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics.

not only the Nazis, but fifty years of antisemitic history, stand as evidence against the identification of antisemitism with nationalism. The first antisemitic parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century were also among the first that banded together internationally.

motives for the violent hatred felt by the French masses for the aristocracy at the outbreak of the Revolution—a hatred which stimulated Burke to remark that the revolution was more concerned with “the condition of a gentleman” than with the institution of a king.

neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.

The Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions

What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.

An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other. The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat implies that the scapegoat might have been anyone else as-well.

scapegoat necessarily ceases to be the innocent victim whom the world blames for all its sins and through whom it wishes to escape punishment; it becomes one group of people among other groups, all of which are involved in the business of this world.

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.

The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events.

What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within.

The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect.

avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.

Why the Jews of all people?—if only with the question begging reply: Eternal hostility.

in the extermination camps Jews were murdered as if in accordance with the explanation these doctrines had given of why they were hated: regardless of what they had done or omitted to do, regardless of vice or virtue. Moreover, the murderers themselves, only obeying orders and proud of their passionless efficiency, uncannily resembled the “innocent” instruments of an inhuman impersonal course of events which the doctrine of eternal antisemitism had considered them to be.

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

Their immediate result has been to expose all those components of our history which up to now had been hidden from our view. This does not mean that what came crashing down in this crisis (perhaps the most profound crisis in Western history since the downfall of the Roman Empire) was mere façade, although many things have been revealed as façade that only a few decades ago we thought were indestructible essences.

antisemitic slogans proved the most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government,

Jews received their citizenship from governments which in the process of centuries had made nationality a prerequisite for citizenship and homogeneity of population the outstanding characteristic of the body politic.

The breakdown of the feudal order had given rise to the new revolutionary concept of equality, according to which a “nation within the nation” could no longer be tolerated.

the new state business to grant the Jews certain privileges and to treat them as a separate group. Under no circumstances could the state afford to see them wholly assimilated into the rest of the population,

political and legal structure of a new body politic which could function only under the conditions of political and legal equality.

it was the clear result of a gradual extension of specific Jewish privileges, granted originally only to individuals, then through them to a small group of well-to-do Jews;

Equality of condition, as the Jacobins had understood it in the French Revolution, became a reality only in America, whereas on the European continent it was at once replaced by a mere formal equality before the law.

class membership on the continent was bestowed upon the individual and, up to the first World War, almost guaranteed to him by birth, could nevertheless exist side by side with political equality. Only politically backward countries, like Germany, had retained a few feudal remnants.

Their social inequality was quite different from the inequality of the class system; it was again mainly the result of their relationship to the state,

a Jew would either mean that one was overprivileged—under special protection of the government—or underprivileged, lacking certain rights and opportunities which were withheld from the Jews in order to prevent their assimilation.

granting of privileges, which up to then had been necessary only for court Jews, to the larger wealthy class, which had managed to settle in the more important urban and financial centers in the eighteenth century.

the rise of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century when capitalist business in the form of expansion could no longer be carried out without active political help and intervention by the state.

The Jewish communities were no longer financially organized, and although individual Jews in high positions remained representative of Jewry as a whole in the eyes of the Gentile world,

to a Europe with no sense of balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidarity, the non-national, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power.

end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the new ruling class, that is to identify itself with the government as the nobility had done for centuries.

a deepening of the split between state and society upon which the body politic of the nation rested. Without it, there would have been no need—or even any possibility—of introducing the Jews into European history on equal terms.

the Bordeaux and Avignon Jews protested violently against the French government’s granting equality to Jews of the Eastern provinces—it became clear that at least the Jews were not thinking in terms of equal rights but of privileges and special liberties.

the need of the nation-states for Jewish services developed slowly and logically, growing out of the general context of European history, the rise of the Jews to political and economic significance was sudden and unexpected to themselves as well as their neighbors.

for the non-Jews a brand of liberal antisemitism which lumped Jews and nobility together and pretended that they were in some kind of financial alliance against the rising bourgeoisie.

the Jews were as much afraid of losing their privileges and used the same arguments against equality as members of the aristocracy.

the nobility was on the decline and that the Jews, on the contrary, were continually gaining in status, and also because the aristocracy itself, especially in Prussia, happened to become the first class that produced an antisemitic ideology.

The peace treaties of Versailles were the last in which Jews played a prominent role as advisers.

the Jews would have become Nazis as easily as their German fellow-citizens if only they had been permitted to join the movement, just as they had enlisted in Italy’s Fascist party before Italian Fascism introduced race legislation, is only half true.

Nazism, even without antisemitism, would have been the deathblow to the existence of the Jewish people in Europe; to consent to it would have meant suicide,