Deliberately vague Nazi orders relied on subordinates inferring violent intent beyond their literal words.

Evidence

The re-examination of the command echelons has shown …that the active National Socialist molded in the prepower struggle [Kampfzeit] takes it for granted that actions in which the party does not wish to appear in the role of organizer are not ordered with unequivocal clarity and down to the last detail. Hence he is accustomed to understand that an order may mean more than its verbal content, just as it has more or less become routine with the order giver, in the interests of the party …not to say everything and only to intimate what he wants to achieve by the order… Thus, the …orders—for instance, not the Jew Grünspan but all Jewry must be blamed for the death of Party Comrade vom Rath,…pistols should be brought along,…every SA-man now ought to know what he had to do—were understood by a number of subleaders to mean that Jewish blood would now have to be shed for the blood of Party Comrade vom Rath… — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2731

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Illustrates how ‘the will of the Fuehrer’ as supreme law replaces textual/legal orders — a mechanism of totalitarian rule.
• XREF: Connects to biopolitics and the sovereign’s will-as-law in Agamben/Hobbes, relevant to the necropolitics strand of the Islamophobia toolkit.

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian elites obey vague orders meant to convey intent, not explicit commands #corroborates (0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 909