The few Nazi-era protests against mass atrocities came from mob men, not respectable philistines.

Evidence

It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis’ mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the co-ordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those “armed bohemians” (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself “more normal,” that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.” He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Göring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 802

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ thesis, later developed around Eichmann, and to the good-family-man-perpetrator figure studied in Browning’s Ordinary Men.