Myth 6) The Nazis were socialists
Spend enough time on social media and you’ll see Godwin’s Law is alive and well. Nowhere is this more the case than with historical topics: debate one for long enough and sooner or later Hitler will surface from the dead and rear his ugly head. When you take Hitler and the Nazis as your starting point, however, and mix in politically charged—and relevant—ideas of socialism, nationalism, and fascism, you’re bound to cause some controversy.
Not debate though. I don’t want to wax lyrical about the battlefields of political debates today—this is, after all a history page. But it does seem that we’re losing the ability to intricately weave an argument, to try to mine under (or, better, undermine) those on the other side with reason, persuasion, and logic. It seems instead that we’ve reverted back to the World War I tactics of trying to incessantly bombard those on the other side into submission. The big difference is that today’s shells are Facebook comments fired blindly into the ether.
Nevertheless, here it goes: Despite being called National Socialists, the Nazis were not socialists. Nazi ideology completely rejected socialism—just as it did capitalism and liberalism for that matter—for the nationalistic ideology of Volksgemeinschaft. Translating as the “people’s community”, the term has a utopian ring to it as a community of social equality. But this is fundamentally misleading; for equality was promised only to the racially superior Aryans.
Okay, so there’s a gulf between ideology and practice, and at some point or other during the party’s life, it incorporated aspects of everything. Capitalist cartels were formed which enriched certain businesses while socialist elements cropped up too: the state taking the fiscal driving seat in nationalizing certain industries, profit sharing, and providing old age-related benefits, for example. But these elements were not cored to Nazi ideology; rather they were a means to a eugenically driven end.
Hitler used socialism as a vehicle through which to drive up support amongst the workers, and at times this involved implementing socialist policies. But once the Nazis had secured power, Hitler did away with many of these ideas—along with many of those who had come up with them—in favour of his own distinctly racial brand of fascist ideology. Hitler hated socialism, and this hatred was inexorably tied up with his innate hatred of one group in particular, the Jews. It’s no surprise, then, that socialists were among the first to be transported to the concentration camps.