When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point.

The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another.

Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity.

> Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think"

It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.