Nazi ideology deliberately operated on millennial time scales to justify extreme measures

Evidence

The Nazis were especially fond of reckoning in terms of millennia. Himmler’s pronouncements that SS-men were solely interested in “ideological questions whose importance counted in terms of decades and centuries” and that they “served a cause which in two thousand years occurred only once” are repeated, with slight variations, throughout the entire indoctrination material issued by the SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt (Wesen und Aufgabe der SS und der Polizei, p. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2762

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete evidence of totalitarianism’s millennial temporal imagination — a transferable mechanism for the reader’s toolkit.
• XREF: connects to: Nativist extremists also felt the war’s millennial optimism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1616; Post-1960s millennialism freely blends traditions into conspiracist bricolage — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 110; Conspiracism and millennialism relate but not causally or simply — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 103 (+1 more)