Hitler's National Socialism Was Socialism

Reading 'Hitler's National Socialism' by Rainer Zitelmann

There are relatively few color film photographs of Adolf Hitler, as the technology was still expensive and uncommon during the interwar period. This Life magazine cover photo was part of a trove of more than 2,000 color photos of Der Führer discovered in 1945. He looks like the most annoying debate club kid in history

North Korea calls itself a Democratic People’s Republic and claims to represent all of Korea, thus the acronym DPRK. If you are an intellectual heir of Vladimir Lenin who believes in ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, then it does make a certain sense. Simply define ‘democracy’ a dictatorship ‘expressing the popular will’ — because as Orwell famously observed, totalitarianism inverts the meanings of words to master them— and freedom becomes slavery, ignorance becomes strength, and democracy becomes dictatorship, thus the Democratic in DPRK.

It is therefore natural to be suspicious of the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), better known by the Stalinist epithet ‘Nazis’. This choice of word, socialist, turns out to have been conscious branding by Mr. Toothbrush Mustache himself. Adolf the Austrian wanted to win the workers over from the communists and their labor unions. It worked. “Between 1925 and 1933, 40 percent of new NSDAP members were blue-collar workers — working class Germans”, Rainer Zitelmann writes in Hitler’s National Socialism. “They were disproportionately the most-educated workers”, the ones who understood that what Der Führer offered them was social advancement commensurate with their abilities.

Hitler did not put the word ‘socialism’ in the name of his party to fool people. He put the word in the name of his political party because he was doing socialism. The NSDAP was supposed to be the chief means of levelling German society into a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) after the revolution, which he believed had been completed with the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. It was the resolution of the “social issue”, he said, and what followed was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Ernst Röhm, who was far more radical than Hitler and compared him favorably to Lenin, had to die before he could reveal his economic thinking. “We had a class society!” he declared of the violence seven years later. “Only by abolishing it could the forces of the nation be set free!”

Hitler then resolved the German class struggle by “increasing social mobility and improving opportunities for workers to move up the ranks”. Secured in power, his regime began “granting equal opportunities for advancement to members of all social classes, eliminating status-specific privileges for professional appointments, improving living and housing conditions for workers, increasing the amount of paid vacation and expanding the scope of old-age provision for the weakest members of society” — i.e. progressive socialism. Hitler fully embraced the progressive welfare state.

At an NSDAP leadership meeting in 1933, Hitler confided that his revolution “will only be ended when the whole German world has been completely restructured inwardly and outwardly.” Full employment and rising wages followed a series of maximalist policy actions. This social-economic restructuring was intrinsic to the Weltanschauung, or world-view, that Hitler projected on the postwar peace. He never intended to take it all back and give it to the capitalists. On the contrary, the longer the war went on, the more frustrated Hitler became that he could not control his capitalists.

Hitler did not despise communism. He feared the Soviet state and wished to emulate it because he thought it was superior to the German system of free enterprise and a liberal regulatory state. “He naturally felt himself to be closer to the brave and courageous Communists, who were fighting for the ideal of a Weltanschauung like he was, than to the bourgeois reactionary forces”, Dr. Zitelmann writes. Because he believed communist propaganda was very effective, Hitler chose red for the flag of the Third Reich; it was “the color of the revolution”, in his words. While we cannot describe Hitler as a leftist, we also cannot simply assign him to the political right and think we are finished describing his politics. Zitelmann writes that “National Socialism should not be primarily interpreted as anti-Marxism. It was rather an alternative, competing revolutionary movement which did not have the destruction of Marxism as its main objective but which had to destroy it, not despite, but because of its proximity to it” (emphases original). On the other hand, Hitler never had to fight the German right because he held so little in common with them, and by 1944 “the resistance which actually became dangerous for Hitler recruited itself from the ranks of the old nobility and bourgeois power élites”, which had never accepted Hitler precisely because they valued their social rank so much.

Unique to Germany, Hitler’s vision of socialism — his Weltanschauung — had very little in common with Italian fascism. This is a distinction without a difference, of course. Just as the socialism of Giuseppe Mazzini had been very different from the socialism of Karl Marx in the 19th century, the socialism of Hitler was also very different from the socialism of Mussolini, even though they were both avowed socialists. Hitler’s nationalism was also very different from Francisco Franco’s even though both heads of state were avowed nationalists. As Dr. Zitelmann demonstrates with abundant examples, Hitler considered both Franco and Mussolini examples of what not to do. His alliances were entirely strategic rather than ideological.

If we are honest, this is the present state of communism in our world. North Korea and China do not agree on what socialism ought to look like because Stalin and Mao disagreed on what socialism ought to look like. The same is true of Venezuela/Chavez and Cuba/Castro. As much as socialists like to accuse each other of being fake socialists, they are all, in the end, socialists doing socialism. Like all socialists who have ever lived, Hitler simply differed with the other socialists of his time about what socialism ought to look like in the future. The socialists making strident denials that Hitler was a socialist are exactly the same socialists who claim that the real socialism simply has not been tried yet, and the next iteration will be the one that works.

Dr. Zitelmann recently appeared on the Dad Saves America podcast with John Papola to discuss his 2022 book, Hitler’s National Socialism. The tome contains almost 800 pages of evidence that Hitler genuinely meant “socialism” when he said it. I have read the whole thing. The rest of my review is below the paywall — because I am not a socialist.