Comments by "On The Piss" (@On_The_Piss) on "TIKhistory"
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Pedro Duarte Really? That’s strange because every definition of socialism I’ve ever read specifically ordains that the means of production and industry are to be in the hands of the community at large. Was Nazi German industry in the hands of the community at large? Of course not, it was sold off and privately owned by a select group of capitalists throughout. That isn’t socialism, as much as you may want to believe otherwise.
“a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
“Socialism is a political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management of enterprises. It includes the political theories and movements associated with such systems.[10] Social ownership can be public, collective, cooperative or of equity. While no single definition encapsulates many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element.”
“Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state”
Seeing as Nazi germany did the exact opposite of all of these things, by PRIVATISING their industry, and selling it off to capitalists. Private property was not threatened in any way by the state, nor was the private ownership of industry... if that’s socialism then surely almost any modern country with private industry and government insight is also socialist? No, of course not. The argument makes no sense.
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“First of all, here's Hitler's understanding of socialism from his 22.07.1922 speech "Freistaat oder Sklaventum" (translation from Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich):
Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of the nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, “Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land - that man is a Socialist.
That is simply not how socialism is defined, therefore appealing to the mere use of the term is not an argument.
Early on there was an actual socialist wing in the NSDAP led by the Strasser brothers (e. g. Goebbels initially belonged to that wing).
In the winter of 1925/6 there was an internal debate in the party on the question of the compensation of the property expropriated from the former ruling royal houses. The Strasserite wing wanted the party to jump on the expropriation without compensation bandwagon. Hitler was strictly against this. At the Bamberg conference of 1926 Hitler's position as the absolute authority in the party was confirmed and the socialist wing lost on this issue, and, consequently, their overall influence was significantly reduced. They continued their activities for some time.
In Otto Strasser's Hitler and I (1940) he recounts a discussion with Hitler from 1930 (he published the transcript shortly after the talk and republished it in later books):
https://archive.org/details/HitlerAndIOttoStrasser
Adolf Hitler stiffened. ‘Do you deny that I am the creator of National-Socialism?’
‘ I have no choice but to do so. National-Socialism is an idea born of the times in which we live. It is in the hearts of millions of men, and it is incarnated in you. The simultaneity with which it arose in so many minds proves its historical necessity, and proves, too, that the age of capitalism is over.’
At this Hitler launched into a long tirade in which he tried to prove to me that capitalism did not exist, that the idea of Autarkie was nothing but madness, that the European Nordic race must organize world commerce on a barter basis, and finally that nationalization, or in Hitler and I socialization, as I understood it, was nothing but dilettantism, not to say Bolshevism.
Let us note that the socialization or nationalization of property was the thirteenth point of Hitler’s official programme.
‘Let us assume, Herr Hitler, that you came into power tomorrow. What would you do about Krupp’s? Would you leave it alone or not?’
‘Of course I should leave it alone,’ cried Hitler. ‘Do you think me crazy enough to want to ruin Germany’s great industry?’
‘If you wish to preserve the capitalist regime, Herr Hitler, you have no right to talk of socialism. For our supporters are socialists, and your programme demands the socialization of private enterprise.’
‘That word “socialism” is the trouble,’ said Hitler. He shrugged his shoulders, appeared to reflect for a moment, and then went on: ‘I have never said that all enterprises should be socialized. On the contrary, I have maintained that we might socialize enterprises prejudicial to the interests of the nation. Unless they were so guilty, I should consider it a crime to destroy essential elements in our economic life. Take Italian Fascism. Our National-Socialist State, like the Fascist State, will safeguard both employers’ and workers’ interests while reserving the right of arbitration in case of dispute.’
‘But under Fascism the problem of labour and capital remains unsolved. It has not even been tackled. It has merely been temporarily stifled. Capitalism has remained intact, just as you yourself propose to leave it intact.’
‘Herr Strasser,’ said Hitler, exasperated by my answers, ‘there is only one economic system, and that is responsibility and authority on the part of directors and executives. I ask Herr Amann to be responsible to me for the work of his subordinates and to exercise his authority over them. There Amann asks his office manager to be responsible for his typists and to exercise his authority over them; and so on to the lowest rung of the ladder. That is how it has been for thousands of years, and that is how it will always be.’
Shortly after this Otto Strasser left the party and published his manifesto "The socialists are leaving the NSDAP": https://www.ns-archiv.de/nsdap/sozialisten/sozialisten-verlassen-nsdap.php
Gregor remained in the party but continued losing influence at a catastrophic rate, until he and the remaining part of the socialist wing were purged during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. From time to time the leading Nazis did use the word "socialist" after that, which however by that time was empty of meaning, a zombie-word if you will.
So, in the end, the NSDAP under Hitler neither abolished the private ownership of the means of production, nor did it even plan to, which, by definition, made it a non-socialist party.
There's been one other argument, that since the Nazi regime was a dictatorship, all the private property was de facto abolished. Let's ignore for the moment that it still wouldn't make the party or the state socialist (since socialism doesn't imply only the abolition of the private means of production but also the workers' direct or indirect control over it, which would be impossible here), the thesis is not even correct, since in the Nazi Germany, with a few exceptions, the private property of the German citizens was respected, the private firms had a choice whether to work with the state and could dictate their conditions (the firm Topf und Söhne, the constructors of the crematoria and the gas chambers come to mind, whose sometimes heated correspondence with the SS is available). On this see Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner, "The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry", The Journal of Economic History, 2006, vol. 66, issue 02, 390-416, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/90cb/f391bd67a277087be05349347de3b582b1a3.pdf - (not my words, but makes the point better than I can).
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Weimar Republican Internet Specialist “To trace the evolution of the idea of "National Socialism," we have to differentiate between three different approaches: conservative theorists who first proposed systems of nationalistic socialism after World War One, radicals within the Nazi movement who took the class warfare promise of socialism seriously, and Hitler's attempts in the electoral campaigns of 1929-1933 to make his party palatable to the disaffected middle classes. And we must acknowledge that Nazism was Janus-faced, accommodating different interest groups and classes at different times.
These different view points can be understood by the narrative of 1918-1934: in this period, Hitler took a crude conservative brainchild of the post war, that of cramming together the ideas of nationalism and socialism, tweaked it to appeal to middle class voters, and then extirpated (or let whither) the truly socialistic element.
The idea behind Anton Drexler's "German Socialist Party" - the party a young Austrian corporal joined in 1919 - was neither unique nor original. In the days after the armistice that ended the Great War many a conservative theorist dreamed of a state that would both respect the national identity of the German community and provide its masses with an official alternative to Bolshevism. Their version of socialism did not have as its primary purpose the well-being of the worker but rather the harnessing of the worker's energies in the service of the German state/German volksgemeneischaft. "German" or nationalist socialism would concomitantly balance the working class's interest with that of the ruling class, especially the factory owner and entrepreneur.
The socialist revolution of 1918 encouraged some of these hopes, as when labor unions and industrial managers came together in November, 1918 to hammer out a compromise on wages, working hours and strikes. In the shadow of the Spartacist (Communist) movement, here was a corporatist modus operandi where business magnate and worker could come together for the stabilization of society against the menace of Bolshevism. At a time when Bolshevik revolution appeared all but inevitable, such a nationalistic socialism seemed to conservatives a practical way of staving off the worst. Walter Rathenau, the Jewish war planner and industrialist who served as foreign minister until his assassination in 1922, exemplified the accommodation of nationalism-industry-socialism that many on the right hoped for.
Meanwhile, in the intellectual hothouse of the post-war, conservative thinkers scrambled for an ideological system to replace the Kaiser's state. Authors Ernst Niekisch, Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler all proposed nationalistic socialisms that can be seen as theoretical forerunners of Nazism. Schematically: Niekisch proposed "National Bolshevism" as a dictatorship of the proletariat that would rise up to reject the internationalism of Moscow; Ernst Junger's "trench socialism" called upon the model community of soldiers as the basis of a new society by and for Germans; Oswald Spengler's 1919 Prussianism and Socialism rejected Marxist materialism in favor of a national community that would unify around traditional Prussian values. These writers offered spiritual utopias to oppose the materialist utopia of Marxism, and there is certainly a zeitgeisty insincerity about their use of the term: In 1918-1919, socialism was the future. These writers sensed that conservatism would have to to integrate "socialism" into its slogans if it wanted to survive in any form.
Many, in sum, had already thought of joining nationalism to socialism. Their goal was not to promote the egalitarian socialism of the Chartists, of Marx, or of the SPD, but to displace it. In this light Anton Drexler is little more than a political copycat. Without Hitler, his movement would have fizzled like so many others, including National Bolshevism. To give you an idea of how commonplace the idea of "German" or "National" socialism was, Hitler's party joined with Julius Streicher's in 1921. Streicher's Party? "German Socialist."
National Bolshevism, trench socialism, Prussian socialism, German socialism, National Socialism - these were mere crude slogans with no mass following, the fantasies of a few radical intellectuals, right up until the crisis days of the Republic starting in 1929, when Hitler hit upon a formula that could animate these conservative theories of the post war.
By 1929, faith in the Republic had been shattered by constant economic crisis, and the Communist movement, that perennial nightmare of the middle class, was gaining unprecedented strength. Hitler had by now perfected the pitch of National Socialism. In its spiritual nationalism it offered more excitement, more inspiration than the center and right wing parties ("Germany, Awake!"), while still accommodating the worker, who would be welcomed into a purified racial community free of class struggle. In all of this, the Jew stood in for the capitalist of Marxism as the nemesis of progress, so the propertied classes could rest easy. Though an eclectic ideology, Hitler's charisma brought its many strands together during the manic campaigns of 1929 - 1933.
But Nazism never truly won the allegiance of the working classes. Skilled workers and those involved in the labor movement cleaved to the SPD (Socialists) right until the end, while unskilled labor and the urban poor voted increasingly for the Communists right until 1933. Clearly the appeal of Nazism was not that it was truly "socialist" in the sense that we now understand that term, or even that anyone mistakenly believed it to be so, but rather that it offered the nervous middle of society a cure to the disease of socialism. Probably more by his political instincts than by any actual research or planning, Hitler had succeeded in extracting the political sap from the early theorists, leaving behind the intellectual pith. In doing so, he succeeded where they had failed in building a mass following.
Still, there were true believers in the socialism of National Socialism within the party. A number of its early activists supported an Ernst Niekisch-like revolutionary socialist vision before Hitler centralized party power in his own hands.
Hitler had always distanced himself publicly from this class warfare wing of his party. In retrospect, it is clear he was slowly rooting these elements out while trying to extract as much effort from them as possible. First, in 1926, he suppressed a revolt of the left-wing Nazis led by Otto Strasser, winning over the support of former Strasser-follower Joseph Goebbels in the process. Then, little more than a year after the 1933 seizure of power, he murdered the radical SA leader Ernst Rohm and dismantled the SA, whose fanatic members had been so instrumental in his rise to power.
After that, the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was little more than a label. Nevertheless, "National Socialism" remained consistent with those earlier reactionary theorists of the post-war like Junger or Spengler who had opposed the materialist international community of Marxism with a spiritual, exclusively German community. Similar ideas clothed the pure thuggery of 1933 in a garb of intellectual sophistication. Witness for instance philosopher Martin Heidegger's ecstatic pro-Nazi speeches as Rector of Freiburg University. There was a sense amongst these thinkers that Hitler and Nazism had found a solution to the crisis of industrial civilization. By 1934, and increasingly as the 30's wore on, such intellectuals tended to retire from public life, for Nazism was, at heart, anti-intellectual. With the war of ideas already won, Hitler turned his attention to fighting wars, and Nazism began to distill into the form it takes in our memories - practical, brutal, authoritarian, racist and militaristic, in the realm of ideas bizarre, inconsistent and Orwellian.” Counter argument provided by r/Askhistorians
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