War served as the symbolic equalizer dissolving class into mass.

Evidence

This generation remembered the war as the great prelude to the break-down of classes and their transformation into masses. War, with its constant murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the “great equalizer” and therefore the true father of a new world order. The passion for equality and justice, the longing to transcend narrow and meaningless class lines, to abandon stupid privileges and prejudices, seemed to find in war a way out of the old condescending attitudes of pity for the oppressed and disinherited. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 782

Categorization

• XREF: This is a core mechanism linking to the reader’s scaffolding goal: class dissolution into ‘masses’ is the precondition Arendt later builds for totalitarian mobilization, connecting directly to reading on how mass society enables exclusion.
• DEFINE: Introduces the class-to-mass transformation that anchors Arendt’s account of how modern societies become susceptible to totalitarian politics.