State inaction on right-wing crimes enabled Nazi terror to grow

Evidence

This kind of mass terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased steadily because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political offenders on the so-called Right. It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has aptly called “power propaganda”: it made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a loyal Republican. … The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too obvious to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangsterism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 809

Categorization

• XREF: The state-leniency-converts-to-power mechanism connects to the reader’s scaffold on how bureaucratic structures enable exclusion — official inaction performs its own form of authorization. — connects to: Nazi power consolidated within months via invasive surveillance and bans — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 255