Introduction
I often encounter people who say the Nazis were socialists. It seems a standard part of current day rightist theory. supporters of the proposition don’t generally present much evidence beyond the name Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist, German Workers Party), this implies that they will then tell me that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea shows how bad democracy is.
Historically, the party did grow out of Anton Drexler’s Deutsche Arbeiterpartei which seems to have been both authoritarian and anti-capitalist, blaming Jewish people for the problems of capitalism, but after Hitler essentially took over (the original party lasted just over a year) any focus on the rights of German workers declined considerably, although Otto and Gregor Strasser did tie the nationalism to socialist rhetoric, perhaps to drag workers away from communism. In 1926 at the Bamberg Conference Hitler denounced the remaining socialist-inclined members as “communists” and ruled out land expropriations and popular decision-making or consultation. Otto Strasser either broke away from the Nazis in 1930 after Hitler allied with the German aristocratic and corporate elite, or he was pushed, or both. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor, through Conservative support, he soon had Gregor Strasser murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. In the 1930s the Nazis openly told business that democracy and business were incompatible, and received about two million Reichsmarks in funding from big industrialists as a result. Hitler was also financed and supported by American Corporations and the British Aristocracy because of his anti-communism and the fact he was not socialist.
Hitler was a fan of Henry Ford, and vice versa, probably because of their shared anti-Semitism. In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Henry Ford helped lead the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. Ford had a car company in Germany, helped provide war material for the Nazis, and may have used Nazi provided slave labour.
As far as I know, Hitler never seems to have been interested in supporting worker power, or redistribution of wealth to the general populace. The Nazi critique of capitalism seems to have been largely confined to criticism of international bankers (ie a code term for Jews). Inequalities in property ownership were supported and sanctified.
So we can say that even if the Nazis once had been socialists they were not before or after they got into power.
What did the Nazis promote?
Lets look at what the Nazis were. They were:
Nationalists
Making Germany great again. Germany first. Germans are the master race etc…
Racists
Comes with the Nationalism and the master race stuff. Everyone who they defined as non-German or non-Aryan, was inferior no matter how long they had been living in Germany.
Inferior races, at best, deserved to be slaves under the control of the white Christian German people. Inferior races had no rights, they could be shot and detained at whim.
The “jewish threat” gave them internal people to hate and blame for anything that went wrong, gave them a scapegoat to produce unity, and provided an excuse for theoretical inaccuracy.
Authoritarian and Hierarchical
The Fuehrer was top of the heap. Everyone should honour and obey him. His immediate circle came next. All of life was a chain of competitive authority. Zealous obedience was a key to success. Of course non-Germans and inferior races where at the bottom of the chain, and of little value except as labour. If they could not labour then death was the reward.
Hierarchy was officially, about race, ability and heroism.
Having a hierarchy means people need to have an easy way to identify those inferior to them, so they don’t get mistaken for those inferiors and can attack them.
Nazis abolished Trade Unions as these were incompatible with Party Authority, and likely to be socialist and disrupt corporate power.
Statist
The Reich/State was the Nation, and the Nation the State – and the State was a hierarchy of obedience. The Fuehrer and the State should master everything. People should serve the State, not the State the people. State is unified by race. Self-governance by those lower down, was not acceptable. Autonomous non-government zones where not acceptable.
It is true that Hitler did not believe in rule by corporations, but he did protect them.
Ideological
Education exists to promote “Aryan values” whatever they are. The values were said to be under threat by degenerates, and foreigners, and such people must be silenced as much as possible. Education was to aim at producing people for the workforce, the military and the party. Any university person who disagreed with these values, or this position, was to be removed as a marxist or as non-Aryan. Obviously Jews should not teach – Heidegger, for example, got rid of Jewish lecturers. Aryan students should spy on their teachers and report those who deviated. Only Aryan research which supported the official ideology was to be allowed. No research which openly checked on the accuracy of party policy, economics, authority, hierarchy, racism etc. was acceptable – it was to be denounced.
Heroes
Heroism was important. This involved self-sacrifice for the Fuehrer. It involved perpetual struggle against those who would undermine the Fuehrer. It involved leaping into combat with degenerates without thinking. It meant fighting for the Reich and one’s fellow fighters without question. It meant group loyalty. You should never be disloyal to the party. Disloyal people should be punished. Heroism was also about the survival of the fittest, most talented etc. Strangely it often involved official denials that they had engaged in the violence they promoted.
Cultivation of heroism, in this case, leads to the unheroic being despised and open for slaughter.
Militarist
Another consequence of Nationalism, and the implied inferiority of others. The Germans where the supreme fighting force in the world. They were only defeated by betrayal. All Aryan men should contribute to the military effort. All other Nations where inferior and deserved to be conquered, to provide land and resources for German heroes. Military combat was the supreme expression of heroism.
There is no evidence that Hitler espoused anti-colonial policies, other than in an attempt to conquer the colonies of his enemies. He certainly did not support self-determination and independence for people Germans conquered.
Sexist
This was reinforced by the militarism. Women exist to please men, to be obedient to men, and to produce more soldiers and breeders for the Reich. That’s it.
Corporate
German corporations where the backbone of the German State. They should produce the resources and equipment needed by the State, when the State commanded. As long as corporations realised their place they were given authority, and slave labour. No workers rights or unions were to disrupt production or wealth extraction, so corporations were relatively happy.
Mystical
The Fuehrer was close to God or Spirit, mysterious and inspired with an understanding beyond that of mortal men. If you could not understand him that was to be expected, but you should should still obey. Germany was dominant because of its spirit and its fate. Many Germans seemed to find Hitler a source of religious and mystical comfort. They had a special relationship with him, even if they had never met.
Aryan Christianity was the official religion (with as much relationship to real Christianity as evangelical prosperity preachers), although the elites may have had their own rituals. They found it easy to accommodate with most Churches, who helped support them as they represented authority, and the choice of God.
“The völkisch-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.”
Mein Kampf p.562.
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 – August 1939. Vol. 1
Propagandists
They lied about the forces against them, to build support. They did not like people checking their ‘truths’. They repeated slogans endlessly to give them the certainty of truth. They made ‘agreements’ for as long as it was convenient. This may have been a mistake as it gave Russia and the UK time to prepare for the inevitable war. Deniability was high. You may have had to divine what the Fuehrer wanted and give it to him, especially if it could be disreputable.
The truth of any statement was a matter of how much it supported the Party, Reich and triumph etc….
For what it is worth the U.S. Office of Strategic Services claimed:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend
Of course Nazis are unlikely to claim that they lie.
Support
Nazis were supported by many conservatives in Germany, and by many Republicans and US corporations (even after it was made illegal to trade with them), because they were not communist or socialist, and recognised property hierarchy. This helped keep the US out of the war and gave the Nazis freedom to strike.
Conclusion
Non of these features of Nazism has any necessary connection to socialism, unless you define socialism in a very odd way so as to try and make the connection ‘true’.
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Appendix Some extra remarks
The ideologies and theories of communism and fascism are completely different as a little research in reading the original materials should show you.
Communism aspires to the withering away of the state, the birth of people power, and relative economic equality under the control of the workers. It begins by attacking the power of bosses, plutocrats, aristocracies, established churches, and bureaucrats. Its contradictory failing, is that after the revolution it needs a strong State to demolish the previous social arrangements and to defend the revolution against attack. This has always been the point of fracture between communitarian anarchists and communists.
Previously powerful and wealthy people, often have their money offshore and keep trying to undermine progress, while other states which fear revolution attack it, just as the US, Australia and the UK fought against the Soviets after the revolution, or just like Cuba has been attacked and isolated ever since the revolution, even though they initially tried to ally with the US.
Given this, the people who come to control the State then have no real inclination to give up their power and make the new state vulnerable, so the revolution never comes to fruition, even if it could.
Without fail, given this kind of situation, dictators have always arisen, even though the fundamental aim of communism was to remove authoritarian aristocrats, monarchs or plutocrats.
On the other hand, fascists aim to establish an authoritarian nationalism. Dictatorship is part of the scheme from the beginning. Usually the would-be dictator is the focus of the party, the policies of the party are whatever the leader says, the leader is proclaimed to be a genius with an indissolvable tie to the people. The only issues are how to apply the leader’s wishes, and how to purge the party of those who still cling to ideas of democracy, worker’s revolution, or fairness.
The Dictator and the party are usually supported by some of the existing power elites, such as the aristocracy or the corporate wealth elites – often, ironically, as a bulwark against communism. As they are nationalists, usually aiming to restore the nation’s greatness in the eyes of the world, and to restore discipline and obedience amongst the people, they are often supported by conservatives. Eventually the aristocracy, corporate sector and conservatives find they have supported an effective, as opposed to bumbling, dictatorship and have to go along with it to keep their positions. However, capitalists almost never find collaborating with a force that helps them make money a problem.
To keep its momentum, fascism depends on finding an internal enemy, which is not that powerful but which can be pretended to be powerful: whether it be people they can call communists, jews, blacks, academics, gays, liberals etc. This enables fascism to justify its policies, excuse its failures, and give its people something to hate and distinguish themselves from. As a result, fascism tends towards racism, incarceration or mass murder as a normal process, although it always pretends not to, as people are generally just not hard enough to want to murder whole classes of other people. Without a created enemy, it withers. The enemy gives it legitimacy when the leader challenges election results, or ignores elections altogether, as the enemy is duplicitous by definition. Constant denunciation of the enemy helps get its supporters angry and motivated – it liberates violence and a sense enemies are being defeated.
Eventually, finding internal enemies leads to finding external enemies and the use of warfare to keep the people together. Fascism tends to be militaristic in orientation: it likes uniforms, parades and mass rallies to build unity amongst the favored, and strike fear into the unfavored. This is part of its building discipline, order and lack of empathy towards victims. Initially, warfare also means more money for large parts of the corporate world, so it helps to keep corporate support.
So they are quite different in approach and hopes, even if the result is similar.
Tags: fascism, history, social category theory
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