The Nazi secret police was a movement-rooted community, not a state institution

Evidence

The jurist and Obersturmbannfuehrer, Professor R. Hoehn, has expressed this in the following words: “And there was still another thing which foreigners, but Germans, too, had to get used to: namely, that the task of the secret state police …was taken over by a community of persons who originated within the movement, and continue to be rooted in it. That the term state police actually makes no allowance for this fact shall be mentioned here only in passing” (Grundfragen der deutschen Polizei, Report on the Constitutive Session of the Committee on Police Law of the Academy for German Law, October II, 1936. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2728

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding theme of how a ‘movement’ institution deconstructs the state-bureaucracy distinction — echoes the later readings on hegemonic organization superseding formal state structures. — connects to: Nazism made the movement, not the state, the spiritual centre of totalitarianism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1127