Totalitarian regimes adopt compartmentalized secrecy only when fully consolidated

Evidence

It was only during the war, when the Nazi regime became fully totalitarianized and the party leadership found itself surrounded from all sides by the military hierarchy on which it depended for the conduct of the war, that the elite formations were instructed in no uncertain terms to keep everything connected with “final solutions”—i.e., deportations and mass exterminations—absolutely secret. This was also the time when Hitler began to act like the chief of a band of conspirators, but not without personally announcing and circulating this fact explicitly. During a discussion with the General Staff in May, 1939, Hitler laid down the following rules, which sound as if they had been copied from a primer for a secret society: “1. No one who need not know must be informed. 2. No one must know any more than he needs to. 3. No one must know any earlier than he has to” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2678

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: The three rules of need-to-know secrecy are a crisp definitional instance of totalitarian internal coordination.
• SHARE: A friend working on organizational secrecy or intelligence studies would enjoy Hitler’s three ‘no one must know’ rules as a primary source.

Related

• Nazi secrecy about extermination emerged only during the fully totalitarianized wartime phase (similarity 0.92)