Nazi propaganda’s racial indoctrination failed to produce fanatical last-man resistance.

Evidence

In this respect postwar Germany offers many illuminating examples. It was astonishing enough that American Negro troops were by no means received with hostility, in spite of the massive racial indoctrination undertaken by the Nazis. But equally startling was “the fact that the Waffen-SS in the last days of German resistance against the Allies did not fight ‘to the last man’” and that this special Nazi combat unit “after the enormous sacrifices of the preceding years, which far exceeded the proportionate losses of the wehrmacht, in the last few weeks acted like any unit drawn from the ranks of civilians, and bowed to the hopelessness of the situation” (Karl O. Paetel, “Die SS,” in Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, January, 1954. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2548

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt presents this as evidence that indoctrination’s hold dissolves under hopelessness — worth tracing how this squares with her broader totalitarian theory.