The secret police is the totalitarian regime’s true executive branch.

Evidence

Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of “psychological warfare”; but terror is more. Terror continues to be used by totalitarian regimes even when its psychological aims are achieved: its real horror is that it reigns over a completely subdued population. Where the rule of terror is brought to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely; it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany. Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 808 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Closely connected with this transformation of the suspect into the objective enemy is the change of position of the secret police in the totalitarian state. The secret services have rightly been called a state within the state, and this not only in despotisms but also under constitutional or semiconstitutional governments. The mere possession of secret information has always given this branch a decisive superiority over all other branches of the civil services and constituted an open threat to members of the government. The totalitarian police, on the contrary, is totally subject to the will of the Leader, who alone can decide who the next potential enemy will be and who, as Stalin did, can also single out cadres of the secret police for liquidation. Since the police are no longer permitted to use provocation, they have been deprived of the only available means of perpetuating themselves independently of the government and have become entirely dependent on the higher authorities for the safeguarding of their jobs. Like the army in a nontotalitarian state, the police in totalitarian countries merely execute political policy and have lost all the prerogatives which they held under despotic bureaucracies. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 952 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State administration, secret police, and camps are the three organs of totalitarian rule; The secret police, not the army, forms the true power core of totalitarian regimes; Totalitarian rule deliberately multiplies offices and conceals the true seat of power (+2 more)

Related

• Totalitarian secret police lose autonomy and become wholly dependent on the Leader (similarity 0.89)
• The secret police is totalitarianism’s true executive, bypassing the ostensible hierarchy (similarity 0.88)
• The totalitarian secret police becomes the embodiment of law, not its exception (similarity 0.85)
• Terror is the essence of totalitarian government, not a means to an end (similarity 0.84)
• Totalitarianism feeds on the misconception that it is ordinary despotism (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian police multiply and layer competing spy agencies to prevent any stable authority (similarity 0.82)
• The Leader’s infallibility structures the movement, not the truth of his words (similarity 0.82)
• Totalitarian movements borrow secret-society forms while broadcasting their aims openly (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian police need no enemy pretext because victims are anonymous and arbitrary (similarity 0.80)
• Duplicated secret services let totalitarian power keep contradictory options open (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian leaders absorb total responsibility for all subordinates’ acts (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian secret police expand after all opposition is destroyed (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Terror is the essence of totalitarian government, not a means to an end #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 808
• Totalitarian rule deliberately multiplies offices and conceals the true seat of power #expands (0.78)
• Totalitarian secret police lose autonomy and become wholly dependent on the Leader #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 952