Nazism’s core cadre was a new class of rootless, armed intellectuals

Evidence

This is the central theory of K. Heiden, whose analyses of the Nazi movement are still outstanding. “From the wreckage of dead classes arises the new class of intellectuals, and at the head march the most ruthless, those with the least to lose, hence the strongest: the armed bohemians, to whom war is home and civil war fatherland” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2563

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The ‘armed bohemians’ as a rootless intellectual class parallels the uprooted, marginal figures Arendt elsewhere ties to mass-movement recruitment — a scaffolding concept for later readings of mobilizing populations.