Nazi secrecy about extermination emerged only during the fully totalitarianized wartime phase

Evidence

There was, in the prepower stage of the movement, hardly anything which the Nazis consistently kept secret. It was only during the war, when the Nazi regime became fully totalitarianized and the party leadership found itself surrounded from all sides by the military hierarchy on which it depended for the conduct of the war, that the elite formations were instructed in no uncertain terms to keep everything connected with “final solutions”-i.e., deportations and mass exterminations-absolutely secret. This was also the time when Hitler began to act like the chief of a band of conspirators, but not without personally announcing and circulating this fact explicitly. During a discussion with the General Staff in May, 1939, Hitler laid down the following rules, which sound as if they had been copied from a primer for a secret society: “1. No one who need not know must be informed. 2. No one must know any more than he needs to. 3. No one must know any earlier than he has to” (quoted from Heinz Holldack, Was wirklich geschah, 1949, p. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2678

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘need-to-know’ principle as a definitional marker of fully totalitarianized secrecy — useful contrast to ordinary state secrecy in the toolkit.
• XREF: The need-to-know compartmentalization rules connect to Weberian bureaucracy and to Arendt’s later ‘rule by nobody’ — the banality of bureaucratic secrecy. — connects to: Nazi power consolidated within months via invasive surveillance and bans — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 255; Totalitarianism eluded systematic study until war’s end because of its secrecy and deliberate fact-torsion — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1128
• SHARE: Hitler’s three need-to-know rules are a striking quotation for anyone interested in the sociology of secrecy; compare against modern classified-compartment protocols.