International No, the Nazis were not 'liberal' or 'left wing', and in 2021 this shouldn't have to be repeated.

[Senzo Tanaka]

Probably the best somewhat simple classifcation I'v seen....

https://www.politicalcompass.org/

I think things like the political compass are part of the problem actually. You might can get an overall average but you really need to weigh each idea on its own merit. For instance, Hitler was into the arts and an artist. The arts is seen as very liberal and shunned by modern right wingers. Does that make Hitler "far left" at least when it comes to arts? Maybe....

I like this test better - https://8values.github.io/

Rather than boxing someone into left or right or everything, it weighs your ideas into different categories and if they are socialist, communist, liberal, conservative, authoritarian, etc. I think it's far more realistic and gives some pretty interesting results.

According to the site, I'm an economic socialist, a peaceful diplomat, a civil liberal and a societal progressive.

 

[Deleted member 110072]

I think things like the political compass are part of the problem actually. You might can get an overall average but you really need to weigh each idea on its own merit. For instance, Hitler was into the arts and an artist. The arts is seen as very liberal and shunned by modern right wingers. Does that make Hitler "far left" at least when it comes to arts? Maybe....

I like this test better - https://8values.github.io/

Rather than boxing someone into left or right or everything, it weighs your ideas into different categories and if they are socialist, communist, liberal, conservative, authoritarian, etc. I think it's far more realistic and gives some pretty interesting results.

According to the site, I'm an economic socialist, a peaceful diplomat, a civil liberal and a societal progressive.

Well I did say somewhat simplifed but perhaps more telling than the typical left/right axis alone that people tend to use.

I wouldn't say "the arts" is automatically liberal, they can and have been used to push authoritarian/conservative political viewpoints across history, Hitler embraced certain arts that suited his narrative and repressed others which didnt.

 

[AWilder]

National Socialists were indeed leftist on economic policy, though.

"national socialists" do you mean Nazis? because most of their economic policy is indeed NOT leftist. You're going to need to share some knowledge on these leftist economic policies. Privatization of major banks, steelworks, and manufacturing is not leftist. Shifting military spending from 10-75% of national income is not leftist. Social Darwinism is not leftist. A few policies that may overlap with leftist economics is foreign trade to increase influence. But, that's not really unique to left or right. Hitler's own words "The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all" not very leftist....

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

"national socialists" do you mean Nazis? because most of their economic policy is indeed NOT leftist. You're going to need to share some knowledge on these leftist economic policies. Privatization of major banks, steelworks, and manufacturing is not leftist. Shifting military spending from 10-75% of national income is not leftist. Social Darwinism is not leftist. A few policies that may overlap with leftist economics is foreign trade to increase influence. But, that's not really unique to left or right. Hitler's own words "The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all" not very leftist....

What else could I mean other Nazis?
And yes, ample social programs, social protection, free education and basic healthcare, but mostly : a planned economy.
Doesn't get much more leftist than that.

 

[AWilder]

What else could I mean other Nazis?
And yes, ample social programs, social protection, free education and basic healthcare, but mostly : a planned economy.
Doesn't get much more leftist than that.

a planned economy is not a uniquely leftist trait...

 

[Holic]

Ah yes the people who were executing religious conservative fundamentalists were totally republicans that whole time.

Or are we now claiming the Jewish people of the 1930's were paragons of progressivism and secular values?

Tick tock, choose a button...

 

[Fronk]

a planned economy is not a uniquely leftist trait...

 

[AWilder]

great argument

 

[Fronk]

great argument

If you place "planned economy" and "market economy" on a political scale which would fall right and which would fall left?

 

[AWilder]

If you place "planned economy" and "market economy" on a political scale which would fall right and which would fall left?

actually i take it back, a planned economy is leftist. However, calling Nazi economic policy planned is misleading. Yes, the main driving principle of Nazi economics is to prepare for war, but the financial instruments to do so were market economy based and far from the policies of the USSR or China, the most obvious examples of planned economies.

 

[Hollywood Jack]

thats cause you have limited understanding of left vs right where fat left is communism and far right is fascism

the reality is political spectrum looks like this:

if you read both definitions it's obvious nazis are more left wing. it doesn't mean they dont have elements of right wing, however the movement itself is more left wing

If you had a higher IQ, you'd realize that was just a poorly put together and inaccurate graphic that lacks any validity whatsoever. The person who made that graphic is not an intellectual or academic, they made many syntax errors and other mistakes and there is no sound logic behind it.

 

[Oceanmachine]

But Hitler liked dogs so obviously he was a leftist.

Also vegeitarian and against weapons testing on animals

 

[Mila is My World]

Been busy this afternoon so I couldn't respond to you all.

Regarding the supposed Strasser quote, its humorous in this day and age that ya'll think celebrities should be cancelled for liking right-wing tweets... but Adolf Hitler being in the leadership of the early Nazi party with Strasser, who said that supposed quote attributed to Hitler, makes Hitler completely not guilty by association, and he never refuted he was his fellow Nazi leader's claims of what socialism is... even after Hitler killed them for not supporting him as the ultimate leader of the party.

Humorous indeed the standards you have for some, yet you reach so hard to the point of your shoulders being dislocated to not have Hitler be associated with the world 'Socialism.' Are there any other Nazis you could name that wasn't socialists, or just their leader?

Oh sure, Hitler lead socialists but wasn't actually one himself. That's believable.

This is why you all can't be trusted with history. Zero critical thinking.

Anyway, beyond that supposed Strasser quote, have there been any actual quotes by Hitler in his speeches or book that he directly claims to be socialist without any credible claims of mistranslation?

Yes, there are.

"Any idea may be a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself, when really it is only the means to an end. For me and for all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND."
-Mein Kampf 182
https://mk.christogenea.org/references/page-125

“If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites – and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose.” “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?
- Public speech in Munich in August 1920.
https://fee.org/articles/anti-racists-should-think-twice-about-allying-with-socialism/

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions" (Toland, 1976, p. 306).
The Biography of Adolf Hitler by John Toland.
https://archive.org/details/adolfhitler00tola/page/n11/mode/2up

So, go ahead, come up with whatever excuses you can come up with to dodge not only one, but three, quotes of Hitler publicly claiming to be 'socialist.'

Here's one - 'Nazism wasn't real socialism.'

Let's use some historical context, genius. You should be a fan of this as a well learned sherdog historian:

One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances. This is compounded by the fact that although many within the NSDAP construed themselves as self-made intellectuals, the movement as a whole eschewed formal intellectualism. The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent and coming up with clear definitions and parameters is often akin to nailing jelly on the wall. This is doubly true of the "socialist" component of the political movement. Although it is true Hitler did not choose the name of the party, it is also evident he did not seek to rebrand the movement either, and the phrase "National Socialist" or its abbreviation NS became ubiquitous in the Third Reich's official discourse and neither Hitler nor the NSDAP disassociated themselves from the word. For the NSDAP, they had their own definition of "socialism," one that was inextricably linked to their construction of a racially-based Volksgemeinshaft and mediated by the party-controlled state.

In his "Why We Are Antisemites" speech delivered in 1920 and later much publicized after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hitler was already differentiating his own brand of socialism from its Marxist-influenced contemporaries:

Thus we can see the two great differences between races: Aryanism means ethical perception of work and that which we today so often hear – socialism, community spirit, common good before own good. Jewry means egoistic attitude to work and thereby mammonism and materialism, the opposite of socialism. ... Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.

Beneath the appalling antisemitism, Hitler was already outlining what he envisioned as his own new definition of socialism: one in which socialism is a sober racial community in which class differences between Aryans have been erased without any recourse to class warfare. This ideal remained a powerful animating force within the NSDAP, even after the purging of its left-wing components like the Strasser brothers and Ernst Rohm. Erich Koch, who would eventually become the Gauleiter of East Prussia, maintained in an a 1931 article "Sind wir Faschisten?" that the key difference between Mussolini's Fascist party and the NSDAP was that the former was capitalistic, while the later was socialist.

Yet the definition of "socialism" within a National Socialist context was still quite contentious. Hans Reupke, a member of the SA with connections with German industry, wrote in his 1931 book Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft that the NSDAP would have to disavow any socialist attacks on private property and the needs of the Volk were dependent upon preserving private property. Yet Reupke did not argue for keeping the capitalist status quo, but instead positioned both the NSDAP and National Socialism as a fundamentally transformative catalyst for a new economic order. In the place of Weimar and the Kaiserreich's divisive labor relations, the National Socialist shopfloor would be governed by a coordination of both manager and laborer by the party in which everyone experienced the "Freude des Schaffens" (Joy of Creation). Not everyone within the party was enthusiastic about Reupke's book. Goebbels in his diary considered it a "downright betrayal of socialism," and the NSDAP's left-wing felt that by abandoning nationalization, they were eliminating the NSDAP's revolutionary potential.

For his part, Hitler tended to keep apart from these debates on the true nature of the NSDAP's socialism and its wider economic policy. This made a good deal of electoral sense as one of the NSDAP's key strategies was to promise a hazy utopia under their leadership while clearly defining how Germany's racial enemies were in diametric opposition to such a utopia. The promise of "real socialism" to the German worker was one of the key electoral planks in the NSDAP's rise to power and the SPD was rather alarmed that this promise had curried some of the worker's votes.

Although Reupke found himself locked out of political power, a number of his ideas percolated into the Third Reich's approach to labor relations and its own contradictory relationship with capitalism. In light of the Depression, the NSDAP took as its own and expanded the concept of a national labor force, and added considerable regimentation and ideological components to it. The Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) was not only a state-sponsored jobs program, but one in which honest work for the Volk would inculcate a healthy National Socialist perspective among German youth. The Deutsches Arbeitsfront (DAF) headed by Robert Ley incorporated a number of Reupke's ideas on National Socialist labor relations with the DAF positioning itself as the replacement for worker-led unions and as an honest broker between manager and worker. Although the DAF's record in this regard was decidedly mixed and the DAF leadership was incredibly corrupt, it did managed to ensconce itself as a power bloc within the polycratic Reich and Ley was something of a true believer in National Socialism. The DAF implemented various state-funded improvement programs such as state-subsidized housing, factory recreational facilities, and small-business loans for managers that belonged to the DAF. As was normal in the Third Reich, state support was often quite fickle and had to deal with a whole layer of NSDAP corruption to reach the German worker. Industrial concerns closely related to the ideology of the state tended to benefit greatly from DAF and state-support. For example, the Third Reich's leadership saw a healthy German aviation industry as both a propaganda coup and important for rearmament, so concerns like Messerschmitt and Dornier had lavish state support for worker facilities. Other industrial concerns were less fortunate and although entities like the DAF positioned themselves as neutral arbiters between labor and management, they almost invariably sided with management in labor disputes. For example, some of the hard labor of RAD duty when building the Westwall was reserved for shopfloor malcontents and other "troublemakers" as a war to punish and dissuade labor activism.

One of the most publicly heralded initiatives of the DAF was the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) which promised a state-subsidized leisure and enjoyment for the German worker. Whether through vacations, automobiles, or other material goods, the state promised Germans that it, not the free-market, would allow them to enjoy the "good life" of modern consumerism. The Third Reich put an intense effort in publicizing how it was going to provide German consumers modern luxury goods at state-subsidized rates. In addition to cars, there were other Volksprodukte that the Third Reich trumpeted would herald the advent of the good life for Germany. There were publicity campaigns for people's refrigerators, cameras, televisions. Of these products, only the Volksempfänger, or People's Radio, made its way into German homes in any appreciable numbers.

The success of Volksempfänger actually illustrates why so many of Volksprodukte fell flat and revealed the larger contradictions of the NSDAP's definition of socialism. Many of these products potentially cut into German military production and were detrimental to rearmament, so they consequently received less state resources. On the other hand, the state did see radio as an essential component of coordinating the German public and controlling information. Moreover, setting up production lines for radio was a much easier task than new, complicated machinery like automobiles or refrigerators. When setting up its various "People's" initiatives, the leaders of the Third Reich vastly underestimated the costs needed to meet its lofty goals of providing material prosperity to all Germans. The state promised German consumers that these goods would be of high quality and their possession by Germans of all socioeconomic background would erase class distinctions and create a true Volksgemeinschaft.

In terms of commodities delivered, the Volksprodukte initiatives were a manifest failure and helped feed an undercurrent of cynicism within the German public as German war fortunes waned. However, there is some evidence that the promises of material prosperity and the idea of the good life without sacrifice did buy the regime some degree of credibility among the German public. KdF initiatives like state-subsidized travel were some of the more popular programs the Third Reich initiated. Although the state security apparatus did report persistent grumblings about the failure of KdF and the state to deliver on its promises and the NSDAP's "Golden Pheasants" flaunting their wealth, they also report a high degree of interest in these various initiatives when they were launched. Although it is tempting to conclude that Volksprodukte campaign was a patent attempt by the NSDAP to buy off the German people with "free stuff" (and there is more than a little truth to this charge), such a conclusion tends to minimize the intensive effort that the state poured into the program.

The failure of the Volksprodukte was emblematic of the wider failures of the NSDAP's definition of socialism. Hitler popularized a hazy vision of a racially-based utopia in which capitalism was preserved, but had none of its various vices. These poorly-defined visions of community and economic relations often fell flat when confronted with reality and the Third Reich's implementation of its own form of socialism was mired by rushed and poor planning, unrealistic expectations, and endemic corruption.

Sources

Mommsen, Hans. The Third Reich between Vision and Reality New Perspectives on German History, 1918-1945. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Patel, Kiran Klaus. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2005.

Ross, Corey, Pamela E. Swett, and Fabrice d' Almeida. Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Steber, Martina, and Bernhard Gotto. Visions of Community in Nazi Germany Social Engineering and Private Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Wildt, Michael. Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.


Be sure to read the footnotes, professor.

 

[Fronk]

actually i take it back, a planned economy is leftist. However, calling Nazi economic policy planned is misleading. Yes, the main driving principle of Nazi economics is to prepare for war, but the financial instruments to do so were market economy based and far from the policies of the USSR or China, the most obvious examples of planned economies.

It's a silly discussion to begin with. Sure, Nazi Germany was collectivist, and just like fascist Italy, expanded the welfare state. They might share some traits with socialist economic thought in that aspect but it doesn't make Nazi Germany any less an enemy of the political left. Mussolini was a disillusioned syndicalist who lost faith in class-consciousness as a sufficient political force so he rejected it. Hitlers entire movement was sprung out of fighting communists and socialists. The thing is, both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy rejected many aspects of old conservative Europe too; like clasical liberalism, religion in many ways and conservative monarchism that defined the old right-wing guard. So it's not really black and white. Which is why a term like the "third position" is often used instead.

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

24 pages and nobody will read my comment but
Yes, they were a right wing movement
It's pushed by Crowder but also Souza, that midget I forgot the name, Prager and a few others. Olavo de Carvalho, who is buddies with Bannon also pushes this.
Having said that, many nazi foot soldiers were once communists.
And academically there is some influence from Marxism in early Fascist thought.
Using a crude dialectics Fascism saw itself as synthesis to the contradiction of communism
Capitalism generates inequality
Communism tries to be the solution but generates worse problems
Fascism solves sub or unemployment (capitalism problem) and extreme poverty with the State regulating employment and unions while avoiding your country falling into the hands of communists who were mostly bank robbers and rabble rousers.

 

[AWilder]

This made a good deal of electoral sense as one of the NSDAP's key strategies was to promise a hazy utopia under their leadership while clearly defining how Germany's racial enemies were in diametric opposition to such a utopia.

this sounds familiar...

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

It's a silly discussion to begin with. Sure, Nazi Germany was collectivist, and just like fascist Italy, expanded the welfare state. They might share some traits with socialist economic thought in that aspect but it doesn't make Nazi Germany any less an enemy of the political left. Mussolini was a disillusioned syndicalist who lost faith in class-consciousness as a sufficient political force so he rejected it. Hitlers entire movement was sprung out of fighting communists and socialists. The thing is, both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy rejected many aspects of old conservative Europe too; like clasical liberalism, religion in many ways and conservative monarchism that defined the old right-wing guard. So it's not really black and white. Which is why a term like the "third position" is often used instead.

Good post. There is that book, I think it's Hitler table talk. I'm on my phone and I'm not researching.
Hitler criticizes Franco a lot and says he is not a national socialist. Franco was surrounded by the clergy, monarchists and all the old stuff. Hitler said that was ridiculous.
He also hated the church and hated paganism too and feared becoming a SS saint one day! Look at these modern nazi pagans, ridiculous.

 

[Corona]

Liberals were Nazis but trump is also literally Hitler. Idk what to believe anymore

 

[Limbo Pete]

He's an idiot and a sexual deviant.

 

[Jack V Savage]

People like you and the attention deprived @Jack V Savage look at anything left of Communism as right wing.

I'm not a communist or a right-winger. Why are you making up obvious lies instead of addressing real arguments?

LOL @Jack V Savage is playing hide and go seek with the blood stained history of the Democrats. The reality is that the Dems are the party of slavery, KKK and eugenics both in the North and South. And he claims it's a game for the Republicans....you know the party of emancipation and all.......to rightfully point it out.

That's next level delusion.

Huh? I said that Democrats used to be a right-wing party (extremely far-right, in fact). That's common knowledge here in America. I get that you've never been and haven't read about our history. That's fine. You don't have to get embarrassed and lash out childishly (that just makes you look worse). Just say, "whoops, didn't know that" and correct it.