The Nazis saw revolutionary ideologues, not bourgeois states, as their true peers.

Evidence

Hitler recognized in the early twenties the affinity between the Nazi and the Communist movements: “In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and the students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements… The Communists were the idealists of Socialism…” See Heiden, op. cit., p. 147. Röhm, the chief of the SA, only repeated a current opinion when he wrote in the late twenties: “Many things are between us and the Communists, but we respect the sincerity of their conviction and their willingness to bring sacrifices for their own cause, and this unites us with them” (Ernst Röhm, Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters, 1933, Volksausgabe, p. 273). During the last war, the Nazis more readily recognized the Russians as their peers than any other nation. Hitler, speaking in May, 1943, at a conference of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, “began with the fact that in this war bourgeoisie and revolutionary states are facing each other. It has been an easy thing for us to knock out the bourgeois states, for they were quite inferior to us in their upbringing and attitude. Countries with an ideology have an edge on bourgois states…[In the East] we met an opponent who also sponsors an ideology, even though a wrong one…” (Goebbels Diaries, p. 355). … This estimate was based on ideological, not on military considerations. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2551

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader argument that totalitarian movements share a revolutionary ethos that transcends left/right; relates to the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit on how ideological movements define themselves against the capitalist-bourgeois order.