Rejecting bourgeois hypocrisy motivated younger Nazi recruits, including as sexual protest

Evidence

The following passage by Röhm is typical of the feeling of almost the whole younger generation and not only of an elite: “Hypocrisy and Pharisaism rule. They are the most conspicuous characteristics of society today… Nothing could be more lying than the so-called morals of society.” These boys “don’t find their way in the Philistine world of bourgeois double morals and don’t know any longer how to distinguish between truth and error” (Die Ceschkhle eines Hochverräters, pp. 267 and 269). The homosexuality of these circles was also at least partially an expression of their protest against society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2591

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of revolutionary protest against bourgeois double morality recurs throughout Arendt’s analysis and connects to the ‘moral panic’ and class-signaling material in the reader’s prior reading on immodesty panics and sacrifice.