The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim.

The line describes a hallmark of mature totalitarian terror: once a regime has built a machinery of surveillance, denunciation, and arbitrary punishment, it no longer needs stable categories of “enemy.” Terror becomes self-propelling, turning inward on the very cadres who carried it out. Arendt’s point is that this is not merely hypocrisy or factional infighting; it is structural. When legality is replaced by ideological “necessity” and secret-police logic, no one is secure—not even loyal functionaries—because the system requires continual purges to demonstrate omnipotence and to keep society atomized through fear.