Introduction
Two prominent right-wing commentators—one, the traditionalist conservative Peter Hitchens of The Mail on Sunday;1 the other, TIK History, a libertarian with a vast YouTube following—have recently drawn attention by arguing that Nazi Germany was a Leftist regime,2 and that Hitler was a ‘racist Leftist.’ In this post, I refute their views. I do so not on the grounds that Leftism is noble and ought to be defended.3 Rather, I am motivated by my belief that history is a serious field of knowledge, that politically motivated history is poison, and that such politicization should be exposed and discredited.
The post contains three parts. First, I describe historical facts which cast doubt on Hitchens’ and TIK’s preferred narratives: namely, that German conservatives and industrialists brought Hitler to power, and that they did so under the assumption that Hitler would snuff out Germany’s Leftist movements. (These facts are conveniently omitted from TIK’s and Hitchens’s analyses.) Second, I discredit TIK’s argument that Nazi Germany pursued socialistic economic policies, showing that, on the contrary, the regime’s policies crushed labor rights, increased working hours, and unleashed record profits for capitalists. Third, I dispute Peter Hitchens’ contention that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact reflected deep ideological affinity between the Nazis and Communism.4
This essay concludes with an aside on the intellectual history of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). This history explains why—despite the decidedly anti-socialist nature of the Nazi regime—the Nazis were called (and called themselves) “National Socialists.” In short, the term was an anachronism by the time Hitler came to power in 1933. The party had indeed been “National Socialists” in the sense of being right-wing anti-capitalists when it was founded in 1919,5 but Hitler slowly marginalized and eventually liquidated these elements after becoming Führer of the party.
But before jumping into the meat of this essay—that is to say, the aforementioned Parts I-III—a semantical throat-clearing is in order. I invite those of you who do not care for such things to skip ahead to Part I.
A Semantical Preamble: Defining Socialism, Or, TIK’s Definitional Trick
While labelling Hitler a ‘racist leftist’, Peter Hitchens fails to offer a definition of leftism; thus, this section on definitions does not apply to his arguments. Conversely, TIK—who calls Hitler and Nazi Germany’s policies “socialist”6—does provide a definition of socialism, namely: “the Public (State) ownership or control of the means of production” (italics mine). While TIK insists that he is only restating the traditional definition of theoretical socialism, he is subtly modifying it. The traditional theoretical definition of socialism grew out of the work of the French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, particularly in his treatise L'Industrie (1817) and various articles in the Leftist political magazine L'Organisateur (1819-1820); “socialism” in this traditional, Saint-Simonist sense referred solely to state (or public) ownership of the means of production, not to TIK’s more ambiguous: “control . . . of the means of production” (emphasis mine).
If we apply the traditional, Saint-Simonist definition of socialism—not TIK’s modified version—we quickly recognize that Nazi Germany could not have been socialist, because it made no effort at nationalizing industry. On the contrary, Nazi Germany engaged in privatization of state-owned (or partially owned) enterprises, ranging from United Steel to the Commerz-Bank. This privatization project enriched entrepreneurs, facilitated private ownership of capital, and completely defied traditional socialist principles.
Nevertheless, recall TIK's definition of socialism: any regime that exercises "control" over the means of production is socialist. As an authoritarian dictatorship, Nazi Germany certainly exercised “control” over all German persons and institutions, including capitalists and their businesses. Thus, TIK’s definition of socialism allows him to call Nazi Germany socialist.
But this is circular and misleading. For TIK’s tendentious definition7 implies that all historical dictatorships, from Pinochet’s Chile to Putin’s Russia, were socialist. After all, all (successful) dictators exercise “control” over all social institutions, including over businesses. Indeed, depending on the definition of “control,” all modern Western states could be considered socialist, insofar as they tax and regulate businesses. TIK is perfectly entitled to believe such a thing. But he should more clearly spell out the aggressively ideological assumptions behind his language, rather than misrepresenting his definitions as having been inferred from mainstream historiography.
As an alternative to TIK’s bent definition, I propose that for purposes of this conversation—and evaluating whether Nazi Germany pursued Leftist or socialist economic policies—a commonsensical definition of socialism and (economic) Leftism. My definition of a socialist or Leftist regime would be a state that attempts to expand the power and wealth of the working class, while curtailing the wealth and power of the corporate and business classes. In the context of this debate, I consider my commonsensical definition of socialism to be superior to the traditional theoretical one from Saint-Simon. After all, this debate is taking place not with academic historians, but with regular people, who rely on colloquial understandings of terms. In any case, even if the traditional, Saint-Simonist definition of socialism were adopted, TIK’s views would be discredited at the outset, since Nazi Germany made no effort to nationalize the means of production.
So, in view of my proposed definition of socialism—or, alternatively, in view of the traditional theoretical view that comes out of Saint-Simon, public or government ownership of the means of production—let us systematically examine whether Nazi Germany was a socialist regime.
Part I: Hitler's Path to Power: Anti-Leftism and Collaboration with Conservatives
In arguing that Hitler was a Leftist, both Hitchens and TIK revealingly omit any detailed discussion of how he came to power. This expedient omission is certainly necessary to make their arguments work. For the history of Hitler’s Machtergreifung establishes that it was German conservatives who brought Hitler to power, and did so under the (correct) assumption that he would crush the German Left. This contradicts the idea, which Hitchens (quoting Denis de Rougemont) promotes, that German conservatives were Hitler’s most incorrigible opponents.
Electorally speaking, Hitler’s core political base came not from the working class—which was mostly Leftist in the Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s—but from petty bourgeois voters who were sympathetic to Hitler’s anti-Communism. Moreover, Hitler was never democratically elected to the position of Reichskanzler; his best showing in a free election came in July 1932, when he won a 37% plurality of the vote. Instead, Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg, the Prussian Field Marshal who led the German Army in the Great War, and conservative-nationalist par excellence.
Hindenburg saw Hitler (“that Bohemian corporal”) as a political vulgarian and social inferior. He would have vastly preferred to appoint his friend and political collaborator Franz von Papen, who came from a proper aristocratic background, as German Chancellor. Nevertheless, Hindenburg was politically astute enough to realize the Nazis were the only non-Leftist political movement with considerable popular support in 1933 Germany. Hindenburg was therefore eager to make common cause with Hitler as a means of suppressing the Communists and Social Democrats.8
The same held true of the German industrialists who financed Hitler’s rise to power, from Fritz Thyssen (beginning in 1923) to IG Farben (beginning in 1927 and 1928), to the much larger coterie of industrialists who increasingly began to support the NSDAP following the onset of the Great Depression in late 1929. Many such industrialists found Hitler—the beer-hall demagogue—distasteful and an affront to bourgeois values. Most had not supported Hitler in the 1920s, and most continued to prefer traditional national-conservative alternatives to the NSDAP, provided that they were politically viable. Nevertheless, the business class appreciated Hitler as an enemy of the Left. Hence, when Hitler’s NSDAP stood as the only politically viable anti-Leftist movement, overwhelming funds from German industrialists poured into the NSDAP coffers.
A major breakthrough came in a 27 January 1932 meeting in Düsseldorf—organized by Hitler’s earliest industrialist supporter, Fritz Thyssen—in which the Führer spoke to hundreds of captains of industry. In this speech, Hitler declared his unswerving support for private property, and his commitment to imposing greater regimentation on German labour. Indeed, he argued that the Führer principle of dictatorial leadership should be applied to factories, vis a vis managers (“Führer”) and their workers (“Gefolgschaft,” or followers). Most importantly, Hitler promised to liquidate the political Left upon his ascension to power. As we will see below, these were not idle slogans, but became the foundation of Nazi labor law. German industrialists reacted to this speech and others like it by showering the NSDAP with funding in 1932, contributing to its successful election campaigns that year.
When the conservative-nationalist leader Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933, the latter immediately made good on the promises he made to industrialists to deal with the German Left. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was banned only four weeks after Hitler came to power, on 28 February 1933, with the 27 February “Reichstag Fire” incident as the pretext. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)—whose elected officials bravely bloc-voted against the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933—were also banned by 22 June 1933. All parties except the NSDAP would be banned weeks later.9
It cannot be credibly maintained, as early Marxist historians of the Third Reich did, that Hitler was a mere tool of the industrialists. Nor can Hitler himself be classed as a German conservative in the tradition of a Bismarck or Hindenburg. Indeed, Hitler and the regime he built defied traditional German nationalist-conservative values in numerous ways: from the unlimited cravings for Eastern Lebensraum;10 to the plans of enslaving and exterminating Jews and entire Eastern-European ethnic groups; to the contempt for Christianity; to the unprecedented interventions in religious and family life.11 Nevertheless, it was conservative and industrial elements who put Hitler into power, above all Fritz Thyssen and Paul von Hindenburg. They did so to destroy the German Left. And the Führer honored his commitments in this regard.
Part II: Nazi anti-Labor Policies and Their Fruits
The role of German industry and national conservatives in bringing Hitler to power—and the latter’s brutal destruction of the German Left—cast doubt on the idea that Hitler was a Leftist. However, this history alone does not fully discredit Hitchens’s and TIK’s claims. It seems plausible that Hitler was a ‘racist Leftist,’ as Peter Hitchens said, who persecuted the cosmopolitan KPD and SPD in spite of (not because of) their economic policies. Thus, in evaluating the claim that the Hitler was a Leftist, we must ask: what kind of economic policies did he implement as Führer and Reichskanzler? Were these policies “socialist” and aimed at uplifting the working class, as TIK claims?
Hardly. The Nazis banned trade unions shortly after coming to power, and arrested their leaders on sham pretexts on 2 May 1933.12 TIK notes that the trade unions were replaced by the German Labor Front (DAF), led by Robert Ley. But he fails to note that the DAF did not even pretend to exclusively represent worker interests, as the other unions did; rather, it officially represented the interests of workers and capitalists, as well as those of the Nazi state. Indeed, to the extent that Nazi Germany intervened in labor-employer relations, it was almost always to promote Nazi ideology—for example by coercing employers into hiring Brownshirts,13 or to build athletic facilities on their premises to promote racial hygiene—or to bolster the power of employers to the detriment of the worker.
A strikingly anti-labor DAF policy that TIK glosses over was the creation of the “workbooks” in February 1935, effectively dossiers on worker histories which workers needed to secure employment. The DAF actually granted employers the right to keep the workbooks. This gave employers massive bargaining power over their workers and effectively indentured their laborers to them, since they could not seek alternative employment without their workbooks. The DAF’s preference to placate employers was scarcely surprising, given the extraordinary greed of Robert Ley, the man who led the organization. By making DAF membership effectively mandatory for workers, Ley could gorge on the colossal payments of dues from tens of millions of Germans, purchasing numerous villas and supporting a string of mistresses.
The Nazi ‘Führer Principle’ was applied to labor-employer relations in the extraordinary Gesetz zur Ordnung der nationalen Arbeit (or Law to Regulate National Labor) of 1934. This law codified an extreme subordination of workers—denigrated as “Gefolgschaft” or followers—to the “Führer,” i.e. the owner and absolute Leader of the firm. While employers could technically not violate the protections of national labor legislation (passed before Nazi Germany, but not repealed by the Nazis), the Law to Regulate National Labor otherwise gave them total authority to determine working hours, salaries, and termination procedures. Moreover, the Nazis introduced various legal loopholes which allowed employers to violate labor law in practice, for example by extending the work day well beyond the statutorily-determined eight hours.
The consequences of these interventions—which consistently served to diminish the power of workers, while enhancing the power of capitalists—were predictably grim for workers. Despite a broad economic recovery in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the hourly real wage14 of the average worker actually decreased in the pre-war Nazi period.15 Moreover, working hours significantly increased. Conversely, corporate profits in Nazi Germany soared. Compared to the predecessor Weimar Republic, the percentage of national income that went to corporate profits in Nazi Germany was higher, and the percentage going to employee salaries lower. These data can be seen in the following chart, from Maxine Y. Sweezy’s The Structure of the Nazi Economy (highlights mine)16:
Taxes on businesses and the wealthy in Nazi Germany were low before the outbreak of war. But even in the 1940s, the Nazis refused ask the business sector and the wealthy to bear a tax burden commensurate with the outbreak of world war: indeed, tax rates were not only less than those of the United States, but well below the rates imposed by Winston Churchill's Tory Government! The top individual wartime tax rate in Germany was 67%, compared to over 90% in Britain. While the wartime corporate tax rate reached 55% in both countries, Churchill's Britain imposed a considerably higher tax on corporate profits. The Nazis also declined to impose a luxury tax, while Great Britain did.17 This tax disparity is all the more striking given that Nazi Germany spent more than twice as much on military expenditures during the war than did Great Britain.
Rather than increasing the tax burden on the wealthy, Hitler preferred to enrich the public sector and pay for his war by enslaving millions of ‘racially inferior’ conquered peoples—mostly Jews and Slavs—to work on government projects, as well as looting Occupied Europe, especially Poland and other portions of the East. It should be noted that TIK terms genocidal Nazi policies against Jews, Poles, and others as “socialism,” because such policies entailed expropriation of property; he also accuses those who rejects his theories of Holocaust denial. These arguments demand much response, none of it substantive.
German pre-war economic policy was implemented primarily by the German banker Hjalmar Schacht and Luftwaffe Commander in Chief (as well as committed Nazi and Hitler confidante) Hermann Göring.18 Both men were adamant capitalists with extensive industrial contacts and nothing but contempt for socialism. Schacht and Göring advanced Hitler’s core political goal of rearmament through the private sector, via collaboration with industrialists.
To be sure, Nazi Germany did not practice a laissez faire economic system. In addition to its policy of rearmament, the government made massive investments in public works and construction projects, which helped solve the problem of massive unemployment with which Hitler was confronted in 1933.19 As TIK and Hitchens say, the Nazi government implemented some controls on the economy, notably including price controls. A few Nazi policies could be characterized as pro-worker innovations. The DAF’s Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) initiative offered workers opportunities for cruises and other touristic ventures around Europe, and its Beauty of Work (Schönheit der Arbeit) program improved aesthetic and hygienic standards at workplaces, while also installing social and recreational facilities at many factories.
While the Nazis did cut and partially privatize Weimar and Imperial-German public welfare and pensions programs, they did not attempt to abolish them. Thus a “welfare state” for Germans persisted in the Nazi years.
That being said, all post-Depression Western governments have intervened in the economy to some extent, and adopted at least some policies to help workers. Regarding price controls and public welfare programs, Winston Churchill’s government implemented them in Great Britain. This prompts the question whether TIK would also deem Churchill a Leftist and socialist.
It is of course TIK’s prerogative to adopt any definition of a term that he wishes. Perhaps, as an “austrolibertarian” influenced by “anarcho-capitalist” Muray Rothbard, he considers Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and indeed all post-Great Depression Western leaders to have been socialists. But it is irresponsible for him to assign fringe meanings to terms like “socialism” or “socialist”20 without clarifying that this is what he is doing. This gives the false impression to his many viewers that Nazi economic policy was especially Left-wing compared to other Western nation. In fact—on unionization, labor rights, the rights of entrepreneurs and capitalists, and privatization—it was comparatively quite right-wing. For laborers, Nazi Germany ultimately meant longer work hours, lower (hourly) real wages, and total subordination to their employers or Führers.
Part III: What about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?
Peter Hitchens argues that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and Nazi-Soviet collaboration in the conquest of Poland, prove that Hitler was a Leftist with an affinity for the Soviet Union. On its face, the idea that two parties to a military alliance would have an ideological affinity seems plausible. However, an examination of the history of Nazi-Soviet relations, as well as Hitler’s views on the Soviet Union and his racism against the Soviet people, shows that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was an amoral sham borne of pragmatism, not ideological rapport.
Anti-Soviet sentiment was as essential to Nazi propaganda as was antisemitism. As early as Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler denounced the Soviet Union as a Jewish regime and a Jewish plot for global domination. He characterized the nation as led by “blood-stained criminals” who have “ruled with such a savage tyranny as was never known before.” Hitler demeaned the Russian people as racially inferior, and—both in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch (1928)—advocated for their violent conquest and subjugation. Thus, Hitler not only despised the Soviet Union but advocated its conquest for German Lebensraum, and the extermination or enslavement of its inhabitants. Such attitudes are, needless to say, incompatible with Hitchens’s claim of a genuine affinity between the Soviets and the Nazis.
These anti-Soviet and anti-Communist attitudes were reinforced when the Nazis came to power. As noted above, the Communist Party of Germany was promptly banned, and its leaders exiled or confined to concentration camps. Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda constantly inveighed against the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the Nazi educational system pumped German youth with anti-Bolshevist sentiment. Hitler denounced the Soviets in the harshest terms in his speeches, and the Nazis concluded an anti-Communist military alliance with Japan and Italy on 25 November 1936. The Nazis supported Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), while the Soviets supported the Republicans.
Stalin and other Soviet leaders recognized the horrific implications of Nazi anti-Communism and Hitler’s call for conquering Russian Lebensraum in Mein Kampf. Hence the Soviets had considered Germany its greatest security threat since Hitler came to power in 1933, and attempted to re-orient their foreign policy towards an alliance with France and Britain against Nazi Germany. Stalin was even willing to relinquish his desire to reconquer the lands of the former Russian Empire,21 in order to solidify his ties with Britain and France and pursue a policy of “collective security” against Germany. Between 1933 and 1938, Stalin had prominently condemned Nazi Germany and called for a united front against Hitler on numerous occasions, notably at the Seventh World Congress in July-August of 1935. However, the British and French were never fully committed to a military alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and indeed were inclined to regard it as an equivalent or even (in the case of men like Pierre Laval, who served as French Foreign Minister and Prime Minister in the 1930s22) lesser evil to Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of the 1938 Munich Agreement—to which the Soviet Union was staunchly and vocally opposed—it became plain to Stalin that Britain and France were committed to appeasement rather than collective security.
Consequently, the Soviet Union abruptly reversed its anti-Nazi position, and began to negotiate directly with Nazi Germany in August 1939.23 These negotiations were fruitful because both sides had an interest in postponing a war with the other. With the Soviets fearing an invasion from both Japan and Germany, and Germany—planning to invade Poland in mere weeks—fearing a two-front war with the West and the USSR, expediency brought the two totalitarian regimes together. Out of their negotiations would emerge the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (henceforth, “the Pact”). The Pact promised non-aggression between Germany and the USSR, and also (secretly) provided for the division of sovereign Eastern-European nations into Soviet and Nazi-controlled regions. Stalin may have been denied his preferred policy of collective security with Britain and France, but he would happily exploit the Pact to invade Eastern Poland and various other sovereign Eastern-European countries, to reconquer the former territories of the Russian Empire.
The shock with which statesmen and journalists around the world regarded the announcement of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact on 23 August 193924 underscores how counterintuitive, and contrary to recent history, such a treaty was. The underlying absurdity of the Pact, in view of the extensive record of violent hostility between the Soviets and the Nazis, was humorously conveyed in the following cartoon by David Low in the Evening Standard of 20 September, 1939:
Stalin himself recognized the inanity of the situation, telling Ribbentrop during the Pact’s signing ceremony,
For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit on each other's heads, and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. And now, all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe that all is forgotten and forgiven?
Shortly after the Pact was finalized, Hitler told confidantes that he still regarded war between Germany and the Soviet Union was still “inevitable.” Doubtless, Stalin felt the same way. Yet the foreign-policy exigencies of the moment, as well as the desire of both dictators to conquer more territory, led to the Pact.
Of course, subsequent to the Pact, the Nazis and Soviets collaborated on the conquest of Poland and various other sovereign nations in Eastern Europe. Hitchens has sent tweets depicting the 22 September 1939 Nazi-Soviet victory parade in Brest-Litovsk, in which Wehrmacht and Red Army leaders paid tribute to each other, with the implication being that these were real gestures of friendship and ideological sympathy. Hitchens could have cited many other gestures of friendship and affinity—not merely the Brest-Litovsk parade—made between the Soviets and Germans during the 22 months of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But such gestures were two-faced diplomatic niceties, not the expressions of ideological affinity Hitchens makes them out to be.
The Nazis were ruthlessly dishonest in foreign relations. Mere months after Hitler solemnly pledged to the British and French in the Munich Agreement that the Sudetenland was his final territorial claim, he invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Thus, Hitler was happy to conclude treaties he intended to violate shortly thereafter. Regarding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one must remember that Hitler had previously concluded a non-aggression treaty with another nation he intended to invade and subjugate: the non-aggression pact with Poland on 26 January 1934. During the five-year period of German-Polish collaboration, Hitler made ostentatious displays of respect for the Poles, personally attending the funeral of the Polish First Marshall Jozef Pilsudski in 1935. Moreover, he collaborated with Poland in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Yet none of these friendly gestures towards or collaborations with Poland prevented Hitler from fulfilling the vision of Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch by launching a war of aggression against Poland in September 1939 and enslaving and murdering many millions of its ‘racially inferior’ Jewish and Christian civilians. Germany’s participation in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Hitler’s public cordiality to the USSR during the 22 months the treaty was in effect should be seen in the same cynical light as his prior collaborations with Polish leaders. All these treaties indicate is Hitler’s duplicity and opportunism.
Not even one year after the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—in July 1940—Hitler and his generals were planning an invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Otto). In June 1941, Germany not only executed this planned invasion, but launched a Vernichtungskrieg (War of Annihilation) against its people. The Nazis exterminated virtually all Soviet Jews they could get their hands on, and also enslaved or deliberately starved to death many millions of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian gentiles, whom the Germans regarded as subhumans (Untermenschen). Hitchens certainly does not deny the Nazi Holocaust—a baseless charge made against him by some liberal critics. But in arguing that Hitler had real affinity for the USSR, he consistently overlooks Nazi genocide against non-Jewish Soviet civilians.
It is evident from the history described above that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was an expedient for the Nazis, and did not represent affinity from Hitler for Communism, the USSR, or Russia. From at least the time he wrote Mein Kampf (1924), and probably earlier, Hitler despised the USSR and was bent on the annihilation of the Soviet regime and its people. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a cynical ploy by both the Nazis and the Soviets. Eleven months into the Pact, Hitler and his generals were already planning an unprovoked invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitchens’s suggestion that Hitler had an affinity for the Soviet Union exposes his total lack of knowledge of Hitler’s anti-Soviet and anti-Russian ideology, and his ignorance of the history of Nazi-Soviet relations.
An Aside on Intellectual History, Or, ‘So Why Were the Nazis called “National Socialists”’?
I have demonstrated that Hitler came to power through the interventions of German conservatives and industrialists; that when in power he crushed the unions, privatized industry, and enacted pro-capitalist, anti-worker law; and that his commitment to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was cynical and fleeting. My evidence demonstrates that, contrary to TIK, Nazi Germany was not socialist, nor was it a left-wing regime. But one question continues to linger. Why did the Nazis call themselves socialists, or more specifically the National Socialist German Workers Party?
The answer is simple. When the term “National Socialist German Workers Party” (NSDAP) was coined in 192025—thirteen years before Hitler came to power—the Nazis were socialists! That is to say, they were anti-capitalists who favored nationalization of industry and a radical expansion of public welfare programs.
For example, consider the 25 points of the Nazi Party, presented by Hitler in the Hofbräuhaus Beerhall in Munich on the evening of February 24, 1920. Among the 25 points are not only calls for the removal of Jews and the glorification of the German Aryans, but demands to nationalize trusts, practice profit-sharing in large industries, and expand old-age insurance. When he came to power, Hitler would adopt the precise opposite economic policies: privatizing state industry, passing laws which radically increased the power and profits of capitalists, and abolishing old-age insurance except for the physically disabled.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that the 25 points were some kind of fraud or industrialist conspiracy to beguile the German working classes into voting for the Nazis. On the contrary, it is plain that most members of the NSDAP in 1920 were anti-capitalists who believed in the principles behind the 25 points. The party’s prominent anti-capitalists in 1920 included NSDAP chairman Anton Drexler, Brownshirt roughneck Ernst Röhm, and the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser. By 1934, Drexler had long since left the NSDAP and lost influence in German politics, Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser had been murdered on Hitler’s order, and Otto Strasser had been forced into exile.
The fascinating intellectual history behind the transformation of the NSDAP from a genuine “Third Positionist”26 party that advocated nationalism and anti-capitalism, into a governing party that usually worked for the interests of capitalists and against those of workers, deserves an essay of its own. Here, I do not have space or occasion to do justice to this history. It will however suffice to say that the Nazis were called National Socialists simply because that term was descriptively accurate when it was coined in 1920. After becoming party leader in 1921, Hitler would gradually strip the party of its anti-capitalist commitments and marginalize its anti-capitalist leaders and intellectuals. As with other historical political parties—such as the “Communist” Party of China—“National Socialism” eventually became an anachronism.
Bibliography
Secondary Sources
Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Fisher, 2005)
Germà Bel, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany,” University of Barcelona (13 November 2004), available online at http://www.ub.edu/graap/nazi.pdf
Hans-Joachim Braun, The German Economy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 1990)
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis (Norton & Company, 2001).
Hans Klemann and Sergei Kudryashov, Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939-1945 (Berg, 2012)
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume II: Waiting for Hitler (Penguin Press, 2017)
Timothy Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge University, 2015)
Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’ (Berg Publishers, 1993)
Mabel Newcomer, War and Postwar Development in the German Tax System, National Tax Journal: 1 (1948), pp. 1-11.
Business and Industry in Nazi Germany, Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener, eds. (Berghahn Books, 2004)
Jacques R. Pauwels, Big Business and Hitler (James Lorimer & Co, 2017)
Gunther Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007); note that this book was originally published in 1939
Dan P. Silverman, Hitler’s Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933-1936 (Harvard, 1998).
Maxine Y. Sweezy, The Structure of the Nazi Economy (Harvard, 1941)
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Allen Lane, 2006)
Andrei P. Tsygankov, Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin: Honor in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Primary Sources
Gesetz zur Ordnung der nationalen Arbeit, 20 January 1934, available online at Gesetz - Details (ns-quellen.at)
P.S.: A Note on Sourcing, and This Substack
The content of this Substack will be in line with my general goals as a content creator. I will examine and analyze narratives about history that have some salience in contemporary politics, or are making headlines as news items. My writing style here will be quasi-academic, or more specifically a cross between academic-style writing and colloquial pieces of the sort one would tend to find on social media. Accordingly, I will not cite each individual claim I make—an important convention in academia that nevertheless tends to clutter writing. Instead, I will only cite claims sporadically, while providing a general bibliography containing all works I referenced. I will of course be open to challenge and conversation about the accuracy of any claim I make, and I invite anyone who questions any of my assertions in this or future articles to ask about its basis or providence in the comments.
Regarding any factual errors or material omissions I make, I pledge never to edit these out (or edit the omited content in) without appending formal notice of this. Regarding the correction of typographical errors—misspelled words, etc—, or the addition of new content which does not amount to the correction of a factual error, I reserve the right to stealth-edit.
Speaking of which, I made one correction to this piece. Previously, I falsely stated that Hitler’s best performance in a free election was winning a 33% plurality of the vote. Actually, his best performance was a 37% plurality, in the July 1932 German federal election.
Hitchens’ 11 March 2023 piece on this theme drew much more attention, but he elaborated on these arguments in more detail in a 16 September 2019 piece for First Things. See https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/09/hitler-the-progressive.
In TIK’s case, he has made this argument for years, although he reiterated it in a video released a few weeks ago. See:
I am no Leftist; my twitter feed attests to my center-right political commitments and hostility to the contemporary “woke” Left.
In the course of the essay, I fail to address many other claims from Hitchens—that Nazi eugenics was Leftist, that building modern weaponry is Leftist—and TIK, because I am not impressed by these arguments and do not expect that a reasonably impartial reader would be.
The NSDAP was founded as the German Workers Party, and renamed to the NSDAP in 1920.
Hitchens does not expressly refer to Hitler as a socialist, instead calling him a “left-wing racist.”
Other definitional tricks by TIK are beneath substantive comment, such as his claim that publicly traded companies such as Amazon or Apple are socialist. TIK uses this definitional trick to argue that Nazi privatization measures were socialist, in the following clip:
Hindenburg actually was supported by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in his 1932 run for the president, however he had nothing but contempt for the SPD, endorsing the SA’s campaign of violence against them in 1933.
As I say, all political parties except the NSDAP were dissolved by the Nazis shortly after the ban on the SPD, but it was only the active Leftists—that is leaders in the KPD and SPD—who were subject to banishment into concentration camps, exile, or outright murder. Hence, all three SPD leaders in the November 1932 German Federal Election were forced into exile after Hitler’s rise to power, while the KPD leader Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned for eleven years in solitary confinement, before being transferred to a concentration camp in 1944 and murdered on Hitler’s orders. Conversely, former leaders of non-Nazi conservative-nationalist parties faced no social or legal consequences, and indeed rose to the highest echelons of Nazi-German politics and high society.
German nationalists in the tradition of Bismarck favored German imperialism in the east, but of a much more limited, and less brutal, character than we saw under Hitler.
Hitchens calls Nazi interventions into family life “Leftist.” But they are better classified as marks of totalitarianism, which can occur under either right-wing (Hitlerian) or left-wing (Stalinist) regimes. Such totalitarian practices are also compatible with ideologies—such as the jihadist-Salafi ideology of the Islamic State—that fall outside Western Left-Right classification schemes.
TIK notes that the trade unions were replaced by the German Labor Front (DAF), led by Robert Ley. It is certainly true that the DAF exercised power over businesses. But the changes they made usually related to the promotion of Nazi race ideology, not the improvement of working conditions or salaries.
Citing the Gunter Reimann’s 1939 book The Vampire Economy (republished by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 2007), TIK absurdly claims that episodes of Nazi authorities requiring factory owners to hire or overpay veteran Brownshirts are proof of a broader Nazi commitment to the working class, rather than the banal episodes of corruption and political patronage that they were.
“real wage” means inflation-adjusted wage.
The overall real salary of the average worker slightly increased, but only because he was forced to work longer hours by his employer!
(Harvard, 1941).
The statistics I cite here can be found in Mabel Newcomer, War and Postwar Development in the German Tax System, National Tax Journal: 1 (1948), pp. 1-11.
Göring was also Hitler’s closest political advisor and successor, though he fell out of favor after the poor performance of the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.
The Nazis also invested public money in ideologically motivated projects, such as loans to newlywed couples, subject to reductions in interest for couples who had more children.
In thinking about TIK’s fringe understanding of terms like “socialism,” it is instructive to consider the economists he cites as core intellectual influences. One of TIK’s inspirations is Ludwig von Mises, who denounced the Mont Pelerin society—a society composed of famous conservative and libertarian thinkers such as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek—as a “bunch of socialists.”
After Stalin gave up on the collective security concept and aligned with Hitler on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he would indeed reconquer the lands of the former Russian Empire, invading (eastern) Poland, the Baltic States, and Bessarabia.
After the German conquest of France, Laval would serve in many prominent roles in the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis and in the Holocaust.
As a precursor to opening negotiations with the Nazis, Stalin sacked his Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov on 3 May 1939, and purged other Jews from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It should be noted that the “secret protocols” of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which envisioned the division of specific regions in Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, were not publicly known until the Nuremberg trials of 1946-1947.
The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded in 1919 as the German Workers Party. It was renamed to the NSDAP in 1920.
Interestingly, the ‘leading’ Neo-Nazis in the contemporary United States—such as Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich of the National Justice Party, as well as Matthew Heimbach of the defunct Traditionalist Worker Party—frequently identify as “Third Positionists” and espouse the anti-capitalist positions of the early NSDAP, rather than the business-friendly policies implemented by Hitler after he became Reichskanzler