For obvious reasons, no significant party advocates Nazi socialism today. Ever since the general public became aware of the Nazi death camps, no one has wanted the stigma of being anywhere close to Nazism on any political spectrum. So, despite the Nazis literally having “socialist” in their name—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the left has made a concerted effort to label Nazis as “far-right-wingers.”
As George Watson points out: “For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative—the word is many shades too pale—at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognized the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique.”1
The description of Hitler being from the “right,” however, had largely been cemented by the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. By then, as Watson puts it, “most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead.”2
Socialism is not a direct path to genocide or military imperialism. Still, national socialism was part and parcel to Nazism from the beginning. In 1920, Hitler first presented the Nazi Party a twenty-five-point plan for national socialism. Most of the plan could be found in any Bolshevik platform except for the racial animus against Jews.
Hitler’s platform called for “THE GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY BEFORE THE GOOD OF THE INDIVIDUAL.” I think both Marx and Bernie would approve of that collectivist motto.
If you weren’t informed that the following points were from the Nazis’ twenty-five-point plan, you could be excused for believing them to be part of any socialist manifesto, even a “democratic” one. Highlights of Hitler’s national socialism included:
Hayek described “the famous 25 points drawn up by Gottfried Feder, one of Hitler’s early allies, repeatedly endorsed by Hitler and recognized by the by-laws of the National-Socialist party as the immutable basis of all its actions, . . . [as being] full of ideas resembling those of the early socialists.”4
And yet, during Hitler’s rise and fall, he and his followers fought the communists for political power in Germany. Instead of the battle being seen as a fight between different strands of socialism, purposefully or not, the dispute came to be categorized as right versus left.
Today’s left presents the argument that Hitler’s attacks on the Communist Party and Bolshevik socialism prove that he was not a socialist. In National Review, Jonah Goldberg responds that “when people say Hitler can’t be a socialist because he crushed independent labor unions and killed socialists, they need to explain why Stalin gets to be a socialist even though he did likewise.”5
The left persists in trying to convince us that the Nazis were not socialists because they were not orthodox Marxists. But, as Goldberg writes, while the “German National Socialist economics differed from Russian Bolshevik economics. So what? The question was never, ‘Were Nazis Bolsheviks?’ Nor was it ‘Were Nazis Marxists?’ The question was ‘Were Nazis socialists?’ Demonstrating that the answer is no to the first two doesn’t mean the answer to the third question is a no, too.”6
Reisman laments that today “practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed. The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.”7
But, as we will see, industries were privately owned in name only. State control over industry was so complete that, in reality, owners were essentially stripped of private control of their property.
Some argue that fascism and communism are not variants of socialism, but as Peter Drucker writes, “It’s not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”8
If you read the Nazis themselves, they never doubted their socialism and were proud of its distinct brand.
In the Independent, George Watson disputes the idea that Hitler was not a socialist. He writes, “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical.”9
Watson writes: “Hermann Rauschning, . . . a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. ‘I have learned a great deal from Marxism,’ he once remarked, ‘as I do not hesitate to admit.’”10
George Orwell, the author and socialist, although a critic of Hitler, did still agree that Hitler’s rise and dominance proved that socialism works, and that “a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.”11 As Watson describes it, “The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism ‘just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.’”12
Rather than argue that Hitler’s Germany was not socialist, Orwell acknowledged at the time: “Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state.”13
Not only did Hitler promote socialism, but he considered socialism to be the unfulfilled mission of Christianity. As Watson explains: “Socialism, Hitler told fellow Nazi Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master’s teachings.”14
Nevertheless, Hitler, in many ways, accepted and expounded traditional Marxian socialism. Like Marx, Hitler believed “the one and only problem of the age . . . was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.”15
Hitler, rather than rejecting socialism, considered his brand of national socialism to be an improvement over the Bolsheviks. Hitler believed he improved socialism by adding nationalism and a touch of his conception of Christianity—along with a side of racial hatred.
Hitler’s lieutenant Joseph Goebbels also was explicit in describing the Nazi goal of socialism.
In his diary, Goebbels described the Nazi dream for socialism. Goebbels predicted that when Germany defeated the Soviet Union, Bolshevik or Jewish socialism would be replaced by “real socialism.” Listening to the Nazis themselves in their own words, it seems they never wavered in their support of socialism. They simply believed they had a better form of socialism to offer.16
Likewise, the Nazi Gregory Strasser spoke of his fellow Nazis thus: “We are socialists. We are enemies, mortal enemies, of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!”17
Whether or not the Nazis were socialists is still important. Today’s socialists don’t want any part of their doctrine tainted with Nazism. Yet the Nazis’ history of national socialism and underlying hatred of capitalism are undeniable. None of which is to argue that today’s socialists are Nazis or will become Nazis. However, surrendering more and more freedom to the state is something socialism, fascism, and Nazism have in common.
Today’s socialists should look harder at what has happened in the past when the rights of the individual are made secondary to the desires of the collective, even in the name of fairness or social welfare. Democratic socialists argue, “Not to worry, the will of the collective will always be represented by the majority!” The question remains: is fully democratic, majoritarian rule immune from human envy, greed, or racial animus? Jim Crow and even lynching were countenanced by majorities in the South for decades. The left might argue that we need better people elected to government, to which Madison replied in Federalist Paper 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
As long as socialists continue to promote the will of the collective over the rights of the individual, it remains a danger that the determiners of the “collective will” may determine to carry out policies for their own self-interest, their own power, or even their own petty prejudices.
Hitler, like so many megalomaniacs before him, was proud of his unique modifications of Marxism. Hitler believed his great additions to Marxism were to achieve labor’s dominance over capitalists without a destructive class or civil war, to make Marxism consistent with nationalism, and to fire up and unite all classes for socialism using racial animus.
Watson summarizes Hitler’s confidant Otto Wagener: “Without race, [Wagener] went on, National Socialism ‘would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.’ Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him. Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism.”18
To Hitler, Wagener confided that “the future of socialism would lie in ‘the community of the volk,’ not in internationalism . . . and his task was to ‘convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists.’”19 Instead of class struggle killing off the bourgeoisie, the socialist workers’ state would come about without destroying the country in the process and without confiscating all property.
Hitler felt that this insight would allow him to succeed where the Bolsheviks had failed in Russia. Complete dispossession of all private property meant, Watson wrote, “Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.”20
So, rather than Hitler rejecting socialism, he found a different route to the same workers’ paradise. As Hitler told Wagener, the trick was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution.”21
As Watson summarizes Hitler’s hopes, “Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route—a long and needlessly painful route—and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had ‘averaged downwards’; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known.”22
For the past seventy years, Hitler’s horrific murder of millions of Jews and his obsession with race have, as Watson puts it, “prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist.”23 Failing to see the socialism in Nazism misses that which Hitler saw as his great insight—achieving socialism without civil war and in the name of nationalism driven by racial animus.
Hitler never denied his socialist platform. It can be argued, and easily accepted, that in the end his all-consuming desire for power made any other objectives secondary, but that really is the exact story we find when others, such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, achieved power. Power for power’s sake blinded them, but none of these dictators ever relinquished their goal of socialism.