Nazis masked their state-destroying aim to win elite sponsorship

Evidence

Even though the totalitarian movements and their predecessors, the pan-movements, were not “parties above parties” aspiring to seize the state machine but movements aiming at the destruction of the state, the Nazis found it very convenient to pose as such, that is, to pretend to follow faithfully the Italian model of Fascism. Thus they could win the help of those upper-class and business elite who mistook the Nazis for the older groups they had themselves frequently initiated and which had made only the rather modest pretense of conquering the state machine for one party. The businessmen who helped Hitler into power naively believed that they were only supporting a dictator, and one of their own making, who would naturally rule to the advantage of their own class and the disadvantage of all others. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 646

Categorization

• XREF: The elite self-deception motif connects to Milgram’s analysis of rational-actor self-interest misreading genuinely radical movements, and to the Islamophobia field’s moneyed elites funding movements they think they control.