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’ as 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.

Bonus video: Economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort of the Money & Macro YouTube channel tells the story of Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, the center-left politician who became Hitler’s economic miracle worker. Known as ‘the dark wizard of international finance’ in his own lifetime, Schacht used centralized policy planning tools — i.e. socialism — to build a new army and end unemployment without inflation or new debt. However, every one of those tools had trade-offs. Schacht was no longer needed after Hitler introduced his very-socialist ‘Four Year Plan’ in 1936 and he was shipped off to a concentration camp.

Published in 2022, Zitelmann’s book is the first extensive English-language volume on the topic of Hitler’s personal economic views. He has read all the still-unpublished speeches that have not been considered by prior historians. Once all the evidence has been placed on a timeline, there is no question of what he really thought, for examples of Hitler extolling socialism abound throughout his entire career.

“In Hitler’s view, the creation of a national community was not a singular act but a constant task which required, above all, the re-education of people to ‘socialist thinking’,” Zitelmann writes using Hitler’s own phrase. “Within the process of the creation of a national community, said Hitler on 6 October 1936, the decisive task of the future was ‘to educate the German people to become true National Socialists, to a living inner confession and to a genuine conduct in this sense’.” He wanted Germans to exhibit a religious level of commitment to his socialist world-view.

Socialism was a topic of too many of Hitler’s speeches and recorded conversations to simply wave off the connection with whataboutery. He was always positive. Speaking in July 1931, Hitler said “if someone asks me why are you a socialist, I say because I do not believe that our nation can survive as a nation in the long run, if it is not healthy in all its parts.” Class warfare would destroy Germany unless it was ended: “I cannot imagine any future for our nation if on the one hand I see a well-stuffed bourgeoisie ambling along, while besides it walk the figures of emaciated workers”, Hitler said, sounding for all the world like Elizabeth Warren.

Indeed, it can be nauseating to realize that Hitler actually used the phrase “equal opportunity” to describe his resolution to the class war, that he defended the “human rights” of industrial workers, that even the most ardently radical feminists today are forced to acknowledge his policies towards women were actually pretty emancipatory, compared to the rest of the western world at the time. These realizations can be shockingly hurtful to the progressive soul, which is why the ardent leftist will almost always reject them and deny that Hitler was any kind of socialist at all. They do not want to see any link between Hitler railing against “the upper ten thousand” who supposedly ran Germany and ‘the people versus the one percent’ of Occupy Wall Street, so they must deny and obfuscate the link.

One might argue about the meaning of the term ‘socialism’, but that is because it has always been arguable, indeed socialists are best at arguing with one another about socialism. It is more fruitful to ask what Hitler thought about socialism. In 1933, Hitler said that “if the term ‘socialism’ is to have any meaning at all, then it can only have the meaning that with iron justice, in other words with deepest insight, out of the maintenance of the whole we load upon each one that which equates to his innate abilities, and thereby to his worth.” This was a restatement of Marx — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — but unlike Marx, Hitler did not appeal to a global proletariat, just the German workers. He promised them “iron justice” rather than shattered chains.

Hitler constantly accused the bourgeoisie, the German middle class, of cowardice. He blamed their “class arrogance” and “false nationalism” for the divisions in German society. “Proletarian class consciousness was for him an understandable reaction to the arrogance and the class conceit of the bourgeoisie, which rejected all justified demands of the workers.” He constantly railed against special interests. Zitelmann writes that “what separated Hitler from the bourgeois parties was precisely that he proclaimed a Weltanschauung and never tired of repeating that he ‘had no promises’ to make.” He could not be bought.

Being a socialist, Hitler explicitly and repeatedly subordinated the economy to the dictates of the state. “The people are not there for business, business is the servant of the people”, he declared in 1936. He prohibited stock ownership by members of his government, as investment income was decidedly Jewish, in his mind. “On economic issues — for example on tax laws — the National Socialists in the Reichstag often voted with the Communists and the Social Democrats”, a party that Hitler openly admired for its principled stand against influence in 1919.

His populist approach worked. “On 10 December 1940 Hitler also declared that for the first time in German history ‘basically all social prejudices in recruiting have been abolished’.” The NSDAP was supposed to play the single biggest role in creating this classless meritocracy because it recruited from the whole of society rather than any one class. Compulsory labor service too was a means to social levelling, for it turned the children of burghers into “the workers of the callused fist”, as he liked to call them. He wanted industrial craft training to have the same social prestige that ‘brain work’ did among the bourgeois. It was all aimed at elevating the common German to social equality with the middle class.

Zitelmann writes that “on balance Hitler’s calculation had proved to be correct” when he won more working class participation than any party that was not communist in 1933. By 1937, Hitler was credited with the defeat of communism in Germany. “In their majority the workers no longer felt themselves as being a foreign body within the state but a respected and courted social force within the ‘national community’,” Zitelmann writes. There were no protests when Hitler shuttered the communist-run unions and replaced them with a single, government labor agency.

Hitler was utterly ordinary in important, terrifying ways. Our mythology of Hitler the monster lets us overlook our own very human potential to become monsters

This was not at all what the economic conservatives of Germany had expected. “In the eyes of Saxon business we were also Communists”, Hitler reminisced in 1941, for in their eyes, “whoever supports a social equality for the masses is a Bolshevist!” The remark points to the middle course Hitler perceived between left and right. He was hardly a fan of the German right wing, for that matter. In 1923, he described the right wing parties of Germany as “Unspeakably incapable, lacking in energy, and cowardly”, saying that “nothing to be expected from that side”. In 1945, with defeat looming, a bitter Hitler griped that he ought to have liquidated the German right wing along with the left. He had never considered it a threat to himself or his project until the end.

Hitler criticized the 1918 revolution in Germany because it was “Jewish”, and therefore illegitimate, leaving the nation defenseless. He “repeatedly cited” the notoriously feeble Third Republic of France after 1870 as the model for the 1918 revolution to highlight the weakness of the Weimar system. Still, Hitler remained a revolutionary in his own eyes. He seldom spoke of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, yet he only spoke of them positively, for example in his remarks at the launch of the battleship Bismarck. His was an “orderly and unbloody” revolution, “disciplined in its form, but which in content was deep and far-reaching”, according to Zitelmann. That did not make it any less revolutionary than communism.

Hitler departed from the mass politics of the left in his doctrine that revolutions were the work of “historic minorities”. As Zitelmann explains, this belief led Hitler to start out by rejecting electoral politics altogether, for he “feared that by taking part in the parliamentary system the party would compromise itself and lose its character as a revolutionary movement.” At one point in 1921, Hitler “demonstratively resigned from the NSDAP. In his statement of resignation he argued, among other things, that the NSDAP had been founded as a revolutionary movement and must therefore reject any parliamentary tactics.” He changed his mind after the failed putsch of 1923.

Even Hitler’s personal racial doctrine derived from his theory of revolutionary change. For this reader, the most astonishing discovery in the book is that Germans thought of themselves as discrete races, each with its own talents, and that Hitler reflected this thinking in his own statements and policies. In an irony for the ages, Hitler forbade “race based” hiring and advancement in Germany.

This is why none of his personnel selections were ever affected by the absurd racial mysticism of Heinrich Himmler, which Hitler disowned. The reader has likely wondered why so many high-ranking Nazis were not blond, blue-eyed members of the stereotypical Aryan ‘master race’ that Hitler supposedly favored. Turns out that this seeming-discrepancy existed because the ‘race’ Hitler wanted to master Europe was the ‘German race’, and he actually extolled the “diversity” of that supposed race rather than a rare, idealized phenotype. Hitler’s racism was an inherently collectivist racism, a socialist racism.

Hitler even opposed the idea of heritability as destiny, at least for Germans. “National Socialism has always held the opinion that any given position is only the product of upbringing, habit, heredity and can therefore also be redirected again”, Hitler declared in 1940. “Because the child which grows up in our nation is not born with any prejudices of status or class origin, it is taught them. Only in the course of his life are these differences artificially forced upon it.” It is Rousseau’s ‘blank slate’ restated.

Dr. Zitelmann dispels the mystery about some of Hitler’s decision-making in this book. He vacillated on domestic issues, for example, because the meanings of titles such as ‘judge’, ‘president of police’, and ‘Reichs Chancellor’ were simply supposed to change with the new regime. Instead, public servants continued to do their jobs as before, obedient to new direction from above, without changing how they regarded their own positions. Reichsminister of Armaments Albert Speer had a much more realistic view of what German business could accept and deliver than Hitler did, and inevitably became a buffer between leader and led. In numerous speeches and statements, Hitler threatened German capitalists with nationalization if they put their own profit lines ahead of the demands of the state. He was unable to impose full control of his economic titans, however, to his great annoyance.

Hitler only gave public vent to his resentments at the end. In the most famous scene from Downfall, the 2004 film starring the late Swedish actor Bruno Ganz, Hitler lost control in his bunker office. As Zitelmann relates, the dictator was fed up with generals who failed to obey his dictates. His regard for the Soviet state had been equal parts fear and admiration. Now Hitler was sorry he had not purged his generals, like Stalin had. There was self-pity and pathos, to be sure, but also great regret that he had not been able to forge a new German elite to replace the old one.

Zitelmann also offers a new coherence to Hitler’s vision of Liebensraum. The frontier he wanted was an economic zone for the industrial powerhouse that he intended Germany to become. Rather than an agrarian bias for a return to the land, as many interpreters have cast it, Hitler was concerned that agriculture was out of balance with industry in Germany as the population urbanized. He wanted a market for German products as well as the raw materials in Ukraine to feed the new German factories that would make the products. This was all based on Hitler’s erroneous assumption of ‘shrinking markets’ in a global trade system, a flaw that he shared with other socialist economists of the time.

Lebensraum has too often been framed as a reactionary program. The more unsettling aspect of these mistaken arguments that Hitler hated modernity, or industrialization, is that he did in fact dislike the ecological damage that they wrought. For Hitler was not only a socialist, he was an environmentalist, as well as a progressive city planner with big ideas about intermodal linkage and dense, car-free urban centers. At a certain point, it becomes obvious why the average contemporary socialist wants to pretend he has nothing to do with Adolf Hitler or National Socialism. They are too much of a kind for comfort.

Hitler is the gnostic demiurge of a modern religion that has shaped the world and desperately needs to disassociate itself from him. They protest too much

Education was the key. He wanted Germans to educate themselves. In 1936, Hitler said the single most important project for the future was “to educate the German people to become true National Socialists, to a living inner confession and to a genuine conduct in this sense”. In 1937, he attacked the bourgeois belief that a thriving business climate could cure all social ills. Instead, National Socialism would do that — through education.

Of course, by “education” Hitler meant re-education, and then an indoctrination of the rising generation, with pervasive anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Jews explained the entire world, to Hitler. They were the hidden hand behind everything, the centralized conspiracy of compound interest. This is still a popular fairy tale. In a piece last Friday at Tablet Magazine, David Reaboi explained how this kind of “education” works in the present context, namely as Tucker Carlson politely interviewing Nick Fuentes.

By hosting Fuentes, Carlson offered his audience two flavors of antisemitism: explicit and denied. Fuentes names the Jew; Carlson insists he has nothing against Jews at all. But the coordinates are identical, and preferring one or the other is simply a matter of taste. They coexist comfortably because both point to the same destination. Antisemitism is not dangerous because it’s mean or offensive to the feelings or sensibilities of Jews; it is dangerous because it creates and circulates lethal fictions. It produces a weaponized alternate reality, one that leads inexorably to Jews being harmed or killed.

In a word, Hitler’s apologists today offer a Weltanschauung, a world-view in which the Jew hides under every bed, manipulating every event. It has an explanatory power for many because like all conspiracy theories worthy of the name, this Weltanschauung points towards power.

A long history of anti-Semitic laws and occasional pogroms in Europe forced urban Jewish communities to specialize in law, finance, medicine, academia, and then emerging lines of business, such as Hollywood. Most of the Jews in eastern Europe were poor and rural in 1939, but even with official and unofficial discrimination everywhere, Jews were already prominent in modernity. The ‘modern world’ — the world we live in at the time we live in it — seems to run on Jews because they had a prominent place in creating it. Anyone who wants to tear down the world-as-it-is, to replace the world-as-it-is with their intended utopia, will eventually want to remove the Jews to advance their pet project.

One reason it works on too many people is that our western education systems have entirely failed to educate us about the real Hitler. While most students of World War II are aware of the Volkswagen story, for example, few ever learn that the stonewalling resistance of German automakers radicalized Hitler against stockholder capitalism. His distinction between industrial capital (good) and investment capital (bad) only makes sense as socialism. No one in the academy even bothered to examine Hitler’s actual economic thinking until 1973, though. By then, he had long been pigeonhold as ‘right wing’ for the convenience of left wing socialists.

It is absolutely a myth that reactionary and right wing politics never trend towards socialism. Socialists have been located all over the left-right horseshoe since the 18th century. The only thing they all share in common is their use of the coercive power of the state to solve every problem of distribution. To be sure, if you lived in Sweden circa 2015, ‘socialism’ was pretty benign. ‘Socialism’ is not always benign, however, indeed it too often borne of revenge. There is no partisan coordinate, left, right, or independent, that locates the potential for its abuse.

A full essay would be needed to answer the question why some socialist states seem to work while others don’t. My short version is that a high-trust society is more capable of socialism than a low-trust society. Note that sudden social dislocations, such as mass immigration by refugees from a distant war zone, can alter the level of social trust, as in the Swedish example. Birth rates suggest that no socialist society is truly sustainable, indeed modernity itself may not be sustainable as a matter of population. For our purposes, what matters is that socialism has historically been very hard to get right, so arguments over the ‘right’ way to do socialism quite miss the point.

It is too easy to become confused about the intentions of any major figure who is trying to contain opposing tensions. Adolf Hitler was both rebellious and authoritarian — the combination of character traits that had stuck him at the rank of corporal during the First World War. While “in certain circumstances they seriously impeded his ability to take decisions, on the other hand this very contradiction was also virtually the precondition for his astonishing success with the masses”, Zitelmann writes. His socialism was also a study in tensions: the world was a competitive landscape, and the German state could not possibly oversee everyone at all times, so businessmen still had to be free to do business. At the same time, Germany needed every last resource brought to bear no matter the cost to business, and profits were unimportant to the state. Failure to square the circle led to his downfall.

The intention was autarky. Liebensraum was the extractive frontier from which the German center was to sustain its energetic growth phase, after the war, under conditions that Britain and the United States could not blockade. His greatest autobahn plans were to serve as the transportation backbone for this new hinterland. The intention was that diverse Germans would live in a class-free society of equal opportunity, united by a Weltanschauung and led by a new elite. Hitler subordinated business to the state and restricted the capitalists even as their profits increased. At the end, his failure to replace the old system with a wholly new system, a revolutionary-evolved socialist state, was his greatest regret. Contrarily, Hitler considered the destruction of European Jewry to be his greatest achievement, intended it to be his crowning glory.

It is ironic, then, that Tucker and Fuentes ignore or deny the Holocaust while claiming that Hitler had ‘a good idea’ of some kind, that is, some sort of economic restructuring that is more world-view than specifics, that deserves emulation today. Fuentes is evidently socialist, an admirer of Stalin just like Hitler was. Tucker’s motives are more obscure, but likely derive from his resentment of the coastal elite (read: Jews) that scorned him. Neither of them is describing the real Hitler, what he said or thought or did. Rather, they promote a Weltanschauung about Hitler, a world-view in which he has been wronged by history, thus rejecting the world order since 1945 for a new world order of Jew-free socialist racism.

Based on the number of prominent groypers who showed up at the Zohran Mamdani victory party, the new mayor of New York City gets it. This is supposed to be the politics of our future, but it is actually anemoia, nostalgia for a past that never existed. The average 21st century socialist refuses to examine their precious myth of right-wing Hitler and see the fellow socialist, or else embraces him like Fuentes. Hitler’s name is a weapon the left uses to bludgeon the right and invoke him as a demonic force that animates their political opponents.

In fact what is happening, right now, is a Zeitgeist, a moment in time where Hitler has come back into fashion again as a topic of discussion, thanks to everyone on all sides babbling his name as if to raise the dead. We should discuss the real Hitler and talk about what he really said and did. We should stop trying to raise him from the dead.