Not long after I started following eugyppius' Substack, I predicted that AfD would someday become the majority party of the entire Federal Republic, not just one state. Their policies are not fascist, right-wing, or even very conservative, they are practical, sensible, and non-ideological, while the rest of the German political establishment has become both authoritarian and insane.
Sorta. The Wahlprogramm of the Afd is not fascist, but often unpragmatic, unrealistic and self-contradictory.
Amusingly, the policies that make the mainstream angry (and thus get the most press attention) are the comparatively sensible ones, while they don't talk nearly enough about the other part, like the retirement plans, where the AfD is also firmly in the territory of making wildly unrealistic promises.
If you speak German, live coverage of the Saxon-Anhalt election starts at 17:00 Central European Time or 11:00 AM Eastern time on the news website www.auf1.tv. They offer a "conservative" view in their news reporting. Results should start coming in about an hour after that.
Good luck to AfD and the rest of the German people. From my vantage point in the USA it looks like they are running out of time and chances to save their country.
I believe the school population is now 42 percent immigrant stock. So yes, the clock is ticking. Massive levels of deportation needed to restore the nation and avoid third world status.
The other parties' fear is that should AfD succeed to governance of even one state, the scare-mongering would lose all credibility as people saw the world not coming to an end. That could be a tipping point for the whole country.
In theory, this would also apply in the United States. Yet as we’ve seen, a country that is doing just fine can be perceived as collapsing if social media says it is.
Just as with anything individuals can do; statists hate anything which counters their propaganda of needing government to wipe their noses because government is holding their hands and they can't take care of themselves.
"You could be forgiven for wondering whether the Amadeu Antonio Foundation is running some kind of deep-cover pro-AfD campaign."
"emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation."
I already said I like AFD, you dont have to sell me on it
>>The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits.
Oh no!
>>European Union flags disappear from public buildings.
OH NO!
>>The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology.
AARRGGHH!!!
>>The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.
Fighting crime instead of letting women be raped, that's anti-socialist!
>>Perhaps most hilariously, the pro-migration umbrella organisation LAMSA threatened that as many as 80% of all migrants living in Sachsen-Anhalt would consider leaving the state should the AfD come to power there.
Absolutely horrendous! Mass immigration is needed as all Whites in every country have always opposed mass immigration. Which shows they are racist Whites who must be destroyed.
>>And last but not least, the economist Reint Gropp has warned that an AfD government could cause the economy of Sachsen-Anhalt to enter an indefinite recession.
They say the same about EVERY nationalist party in Europe. They said the same about the nationalist FPÖ entering the government in Austria in 2000. And of course the Jewish State immediately withdrew its embassy from Austria and called around to EU regimes demanding Austria be boycotted.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, back when he was focused on mass immigration and ending wars, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, their "economic expert," said that Trump winning would cause the stock market to crash. And "it may never recover." (Of course Jew Krugman hasn't said the same about actual racial supremacist parties, named Jewish Power and Orthodox Judaism and praising a Jewish mass murderer who massacred people in a mosque, entering government in Israel. One rule for Whites, another rule for the rest of us.)
?? Unlike any other refugees anywhere Ukrainian men are being sent back as cannon fodder to die for the corrupt tribal Zelinski regime in Kiev. One suspects if they weren’t white and Christian some human right organization might say something .?
EU27 plus UK forces are being asked to fight in Ukraine while young Ukraine males sit on their expensive backsides in other countries doing almost nothing, funded by tax cash. I think that's profoundly wrong.
Even the EU27 Kommission has done the maths on this.
It's why Zelenskyyieeeev is going to get a single finger salute from the whole world.
NATO militaries in Ukraine would be quite an escalation if it weren't an obvious total fantasy. Have you no sense of what is plausible and what is not?
Not by European either if we go back no further or farther than the 1980s.
The "right-wing" in any EU-nation today is usually to the left of where the left was in the 1980s, on social issues. Kind of analogous to how some USAmericans call themselves "90s Democrats" when the wokeoids decry them as "fascists".
I read it as if it were inserted -- and if you had asked me immediately after reading that sentence, I would have sworn that it was. That's why I'd make a terrible editor.
As a conservative American that started following in the covid era, I can't thank Eugyppius enough for my education of German politics. He has given me hope that Europe is not a lost cause.
What a joke! AfD are the exact opposite of the Nazis with regard to who they believe is the master race and in the Nazi era would have been classified as far left and rounded up and sent to re-education camps along with the communists and those whom AfD think are the master race.
Hitler stated repeatedly in speeches and his two books, "I am a socialist." His economic policies were indistinguishable from those of the Soviet Union under Stalin. By 1938, the NSDAP had seized control of every business and corporation in Germany. Far from abolishing trade unions, the NSDAP created the German Labor Front, which was in its time th largest union organization anywhere in the world. As for supposed conservative leanings, the NSDAP loathed and hated the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. It made no attempt to restore him to Germany in the 1930s.
So, I agree with you; the AfD is the exact opposite of the NSDAP.
Wrong. "In Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), published in 1925–1926, Hitler outlined the antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy."
"The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organisation, which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism. The Nazi Party's precursor, the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party (DAP), was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party in order to appeal to left-wing workers, a renaming that Hitler initially objected to. The National Socialist Program, or "25 Points", was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent ..."
"Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ ⓘNA(H)T-siz-əm), formally named NationalSocialism (NS; German: Nationalsozialismus, German: [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs] ⓘ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as HitlerFascism (German: Hitlerfaschismus) and Hitlerism (German: Hitlerismus)."
"Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and the use of eugenics."
"Nazism sought to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those whom they deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races (Untermenschen)."
A minority of people think that Hitler was a socialist. To Hitler "socialism" did not mean what you think it means.
Also, you may be confusing Hitler with Abraham Lincoln. Socialists were active participants in Lincoln's political world and the Union war effort. Karl Marx, who corresponded with Lincoln, was an admirer of the US Republican Party and Marx was a columnist for the New York Tribune for over a decade. Lincoln was an avid reader of the Tribune.
The GOP today remains fiercely philosemitic, which historically has been a hallmark of left wing socialist parties.
The renaming of the German Workers' Party (DAP) to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) was partially driven by a desire to use both left- and right-wing terminology, with "Socialist" and "Workers'" appealing to the left, and "National" and "German" appealing to the right.
George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Hitler in 1923 for the American Monthly:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party program is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?" "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution […] We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
"The majority of scholars identify Nazism, in both theory and practice, as a form of far-right politics. Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate, and purge society of supposed inferior elements. When on trial in February 1924 for his leading role in theBeer Hall Putsch Hitler stated "I have resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism", a statement which he later applied to those opposed to the Nazi Party in 1926, claiming that "[t]hey tried to paralyze the one party that would have been able to give opposition to this Red pest." At times,Adolf Hitlerand other proponents declared that Nazism was a “party of the right” or “the most right-wing party”, but also sometimes denied that Nazism was left or right, and instead portrayed it as syncretic, combining elements from across the political spectrum.
In a 1921 speech, Hitler stated:
There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction—to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power—that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. Here, too, there can be no compromise – there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew."
"During World War Two, Hitler stated that he believed the Western Allies and Soviets were ideologically aligned. In a February 1943 letter to Mussolini, Hitler declared that the current war risked the fate of Western Civilization just as “Islam and the Mongol Conquests” had. “Bolshevism and plutocracy pursue the same goal”, and that “they are directed by the same force. Bismarck once made the statement that liberalism is the continuation of social democracy. The Jewish plutocracy, outwardly disguised as Anglo-Saxon, is likewise the champion of Bolshevism. It is therefore impossible to separate the two phenomena from one another, but rather they must be regarded as one unity.”
Hitler had quoted the same statement fromOtto von Bismarck
in an earlier pre-war speech.
Bismarck had been the chief force behind the Anti-Socialist Laws
of 1878.
The claim that the German Nazis were “socialist” or “left-wing” because the word socialist appears in Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) is a name-based fallacy that collapses under historical, ideological, and empirical scrutiny.
Below is a clear, evidence-based rebuttal.
1. Names are propaganda, not ideology
Political movements often mislabel themselves for strategic appeal.
The Nazis deliberately used “socialist” and “workers” to attract working-class voters away from Marxist parties, which were genuinely left-wing and far more popular among German workers in the early 1930s.
Once in power, the Nazis destroyed actual socialist and communist organizations.
Historical parallels:
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor a republic.
The Patriot Act undermines civil liberties.
“People’s” or “Workers’” in a party name has often been used by explicitly anti-left regimes.
A word in a title is not dispositive; policy, doctrine, and practice are.
2. The Nazis violently eradicated the Left
If the Nazis were left-wing, their first actions make no sense.
Immediately after taking power (1933):
The Communist Party (KPD) was banned
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was banned
Trade unions were dissolved and replaced with a state-controlled labor front
Thousands of leftists were imprisoned or murdered (Dachau’s first inmates were communists and social democrats)
This was not an intra-left dispute; it was extermination.
3. Nazi “socialism” rejected core socialist principles
Socialism—across its major traditions—centers on:
Class analysis
Internationalism
Worker control or ownership of the means of production
Opposition to inherited hierarchy
Nazism rejected all of these.
Nazi ideology instead emphasized:
Racial hierarchy, not class struggle
Ultranationalism, not international solidarity
Private property, provided owners served the state
Authoritarianism, not worker empowerment
Hitler explicitly rejected Marxism as “Jewish” and viewed class politics as corrosive to national unity.
4. The Nazi economy was not socialist
The Nazis did not abolish capitalism.
Major industries (Krupp, IG Farben, Siemens, Thyssen) remained privately owned
Industrialists profited enormously under Nazi rule
The regime privatized several state-owned enterprises (railways, steel, banks)—a fact noted by historians such as Götz Aly and Adam Tooze
What existed was state-directed capitalism, not socialism:
Private ownership + state goals + repression of labor
This is closer to corporatism or fascism, not the left
5. The “left wing of the Nazi Party” was purged
Early on, some figures (e.g., Gregor Strasser) promoted a pseudo-anti-capitalist rhetoric.
What happened to them?
They were murdered or sidelined, especially during the Night of the Long Knives (1934)
Hitler explicitly chose industrial elites and the military over any anti-capitalist faction
This decisively settled the question of what kind of regime Nazism was.
6. Every serious historian classifies Nazism as far-right
This is not controversial in academic history.
Nazism is universally classified as:
Far-right
Fascist
Ultranationalist
Racialist
Anti-liberal and anti-Marxist
This consensus spans:
Liberal historians
Conservative historians
Marxist historians
The “Nazis were left-wing” claim appears almost exclusively in modern polemics, not scholarship.
Bottom line
Nazism was not socialist in any meaningful sense.
It was a far-right, fascist, racial-nationalist ideology that:
Destroyed the Left
Preserved private capital
Rejected class politics
Replaced socialism with racial myth and authoritarian rule
The presence of the word “socialist” in the party’s name tells us about Nazi propaganda, not Nazi ideology.
"His economic policies were indistinguishable from those of the Soviet Union under Stalin." I disagree, so later I will post a brief discussion of fascist economic policy, citing evidence.
Fascism has nothing to do with National Socialism. They are fundamentally different. Mussolini's fascism had no antiSemitic racism. But they are both indeed political philosophies of the far Left.
But it proves something the vast world of commentariat can't quite grasp. Sometimes a majority of people choose rightly, and sometimes they choose wrongly. Sometimes democracy results in a healthy outcome and sometimes it results in a terrible horrible no good rotten cookie day.
I look at NY, and at where I live now--both places where the people voted their will and I thank God daily I don't live in that place no more.
Anyway wishing you guys good fortune. Wherever we can stamp out the worst of crazy is a small victory for hope.
Not long after I started following eugyppius' Substack, I predicted that AfD would someday become the majority party of the entire Federal Republic, not just one state. Their policies are not fascist, right-wing, or even very conservative, they are practical, sensible, and non-ideological, while the rest of the German political establishment has become both authoritarian and insane.
If you look at the definition of fascism, it’s the ADF opponents who resemble that.
Would you agree that of all the parties in Germany AfD has the strongest position in favor of free speech?
Sorta. The Wahlprogramm of the Afd is not fascist, but often unpragmatic, unrealistic and self-contradictory.
Amusingly, the policies that make the mainstream angry (and thus get the most press attention) are the comparatively sensible ones, while they don't talk nearly enough about the other part, like the retirement plans, where the AfD is also firmly in the territory of making wildly unrealistic promises.
I live in the US, and actually have a calendar reminder set to check the news about the election, especially eugyppius.
If you speak German, live coverage of the Saxon-Anhalt election starts at 17:00 Central European Time or 11:00 AM Eastern time on the news website www.auf1.tv. They offer a "conservative" view in their news reporting. Results should start coming in about an hour after that.
Appreciate it, but all I got is high school French, so I'm depending on eugy :)
Good luck to AfD and the rest of the German people. From my vantage point in the USA it looks like they are running out of time and chances to save their country.
I believe the school population is now 42 percent immigrant stock. So yes, the clock is ticking. Massive levels of deportation needed to restore the nation and avoid third world status.
The real number is probably much higher, since people with immigrant grandparents aren't counted.
Yes, that would include more Turks of course. Astonishing betrayal.
"European Union flags disappear from public buildings."
Oh, the horror!
Are these people for real?
The other parties' fear is that should AfD succeed to governance of even one state, the scare-mongering would lose all credibility as people saw the world not coming to an end. That could be a tipping point for the whole country.
In theory, this would also apply in the United States. Yet as we’ve seen, a country that is doing just fine can be perceived as collapsing if social media says it is.
Just as with anything individuals can do; statists hate anything which counters their propaganda of needing government to wipe their noses because government is holding their hands and they can't take care of themselves.
I like a party with slogans like "cash [vs electronic payment] is lived freedom"
👍
"You could be forgiven for wondering whether the Amadeu Antonio Foundation is running some kind of deep-cover pro-AfD campaign."
"emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation."
I already said I like AFD, you dont have to sell me on it
lol
>>The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits.
Oh no!
>>European Union flags disappear from public buildings.
OH NO!
>>The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology.
AARRGGHH!!!
>>The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.
Fighting crime instead of letting women be raped, that's anti-socialist!
>>Perhaps most hilariously, the pro-migration umbrella organisation LAMSA threatened that as many as 80% of all migrants living in Sachsen-Anhalt would consider leaving the state should the AfD come to power there.
Absolutely horrendous! Mass immigration is needed as all Whites in every country have always opposed mass immigration. Which shows they are racist Whites who must be destroyed.
>>And last but not least, the economist Reint Gropp has warned that an AfD government could cause the economy of Sachsen-Anhalt to enter an indefinite recession.
They say the same about EVERY nationalist party in Europe. They said the same about the nationalist FPÖ entering the government in Austria in 2000. And of course the Jewish State immediately withdrew its embassy from Austria and called around to EU regimes demanding Austria be boycotted.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, back when he was focused on mass immigration and ending wars, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, their "economic expert," said that Trump winning would cause the stock market to crash. And "it may never recover." (Of course Jew Krugman hasn't said the same about actual racial supremacist parties, named Jewish Power and Orthodox Judaism and praising a Jewish mass murderer who massacred people in a mosque, entering government in Israel. One rule for Whites, another rule for the rest of us.)
?? Unlike any other refugees anywhere Ukrainian men are being sent back as cannon fodder to die for the corrupt tribal Zelinski regime in Kiev. One suspects if they weren’t white and Christian some human right organization might say something .?
Ukraine needs warm bodies to fight, and isn't sending them back preferable to letting them lounge in cafes on welfare?
No. I don’t want any more white christans to die for the corrupt zelinski clan.
Um. No.
EU27 plus UK forces are being asked to fight in Ukraine while young Ukraine males sit on their expensive backsides in other countries doing almost nothing, funded by tax cash. I think that's profoundly wrong.
Even the EU27 Kommission has done the maths on this.
It's why Zelenskyyieeeev is going to get a single finger salute from the whole world.
Snort, snort, snort.
NATO militaries in Ukraine would be quite an escalation if it weren't an obvious total fantasy. Have you no sense of what is plausible and what is not?
Look closely for preparations underway for exactly this turn of events.
Apparently, not.
All this hyperventilating over a party that's mostly made up of normie conservatives is so unserious.
That's the funniest part for me, the AfD isn't honestly even all *that* conservative! Certainly not by American standards.
Not by European either if we go back no further or farther than the 1980s.
The "right-wing" in any EU-nation today is usually to the left of where the left was in the 1980s, on social issues. Kind of analogous to how some USAmericans call themselves "90s Democrats" when the wokeoids decry them as "fascists".
'You could be forgiven for whether the Amadeu Antonio Foundation is running some kind of deep-cover…'
Wondering if "wondering" needs to be inserted in this sentence.
yes thank you
I read it as if it were inserted -- and if you had asked me immediately after reading that sentence, I would have sworn that it was. That's why I'd make a terrible editor.
Having once been a copy editor is a curse 😬
As a conservative American that started following in the covid era, I can't thank Eugyppius enough for my education of German politics. He has given me hope that Europe is not a lost cause.
AfD is pretty much anyone with a brain, foreign or domestic, who doesn't want the final collapse to happen.
I'm on the sidelines on that question.
What a joke! AfD are the exact opposite of the Nazis with regard to who they believe is the master race and in the Nazi era would have been classified as far left and rounded up and sent to re-education camps along with the communists and those whom AfD think are the master race.
Hitler stated repeatedly in speeches and his two books, "I am a socialist." His economic policies were indistinguishable from those of the Soviet Union under Stalin. By 1938, the NSDAP had seized control of every business and corporation in Germany. Far from abolishing trade unions, the NSDAP created the German Labor Front, which was in its time th largest union organization anywhere in the world. As for supposed conservative leanings, the NSDAP loathed and hated the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. It made no attempt to restore him to Germany in the 1930s.
So, I agree with you; the AfD is the exact opposite of the NSDAP.
Wrong. "In Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), published in 1925–1926, Hitler outlined the antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy."
"The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organisation, which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism. The Nazi Party's precursor, the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party (DAP), was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party in order to appeal to left-wing workers, a renaming that Hitler initially objected to. The National Socialist Program, or "25 Points", was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent ..."
"Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ ⓘNA(H)T-siz-əm), formally named NationalSocialism (NS; German: Nationalsozialismus, German: [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs] ⓘ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as HitlerFascism (German: Hitlerfaschismus) and Hitlerism (German: Hitlerismus)."
"Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and the use of eugenics."
"Nazism sought to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those whom they deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races (Untermenschen)."
Read “Travelers In the 3rd Reich”. Most visitors at the time couldn’t discern much difference between the USSR and Hitler’s Germany.
The only difference is that the fascists allow corporations and private property, as long as everyone knows their place.
“All for the state”.
Sort of like where Carney is taking us here in canada.
So you claim that Hitler was lying when he stated and wrote repeatedly, "I am a socialist".
And implemented socialist policies.
A minority of people think that Hitler was a socialist. To Hitler "socialism" did not mean what you think it means.
Also, you may be confusing Hitler with Abraham Lincoln. Socialists were active participants in Lincoln's political world and the Union war effort. Karl Marx, who corresponded with Lincoln, was an admirer of the US Republican Party and Marx was a columnist for the New York Tribune for over a decade. Lincoln was an avid reader of the Tribune.
The GOP today remains fiercely philosemitic, which historically has been a hallmark of left wing socialist parties.
The renaming of the German Workers' Party (DAP) to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) was partially driven by a desire to use both left- and right-wing terminology, with "Socialist" and "Workers'" appealing to the left, and "National" and "German" appealing to the right.
George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Hitler in 1923 for the American Monthly:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party program is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?" "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution […] We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
"The majority of scholars identify Nazism, in both theory and practice, as a form of far-right politics. Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate, and purge society of supposed inferior elements. When on trial in February 1924 for his leading role in theBeer Hall Putsch Hitler stated "I have resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism", a statement which he later applied to those opposed to the Nazi Party in 1926, claiming that "[t]hey tried to paralyze the one party that would have been able to give opposition to this Red pest." At times,Adolf Hitlerand other proponents declared that Nazism was a “party of the right” or “the most right-wing party”, but also sometimes denied that Nazism was left or right, and instead portrayed it as syncretic, combining elements from across the political spectrum.
In a 1921 speech, Hitler stated:
There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction—to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power—that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. Here, too, there can be no compromise – there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew."
"During World War Two, Hitler stated that he believed the Western Allies and Soviets were ideologically aligned. In a February 1943 letter to Mussolini, Hitler declared that the current war risked the fate of Western Civilization just as “Islam and the Mongol Conquests” had. “Bolshevism and plutocracy pursue the same goal”, and that “they are directed by the same force. Bismarck once made the statement that liberalism is the continuation of social democracy. The Jewish plutocracy, outwardly disguised as Anglo-Saxon, is likewise the champion of Bolshevism. It is therefore impossible to separate the two phenomena from one another, but rather they must be regarded as one unity.”
Hitler had quoted the same statement fromOtto von Bismarck
in an earlier pre-war speech.
Bismarck had been the chief force behind the Anti-Socialist Laws
of 1878.
The claim that the German Nazis were “socialist” or “left-wing” because the word socialist appears in Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) is a name-based fallacy that collapses under historical, ideological, and empirical scrutiny.
Below is a clear, evidence-based rebuttal.
1. Names are propaganda, not ideology
Political movements often mislabel themselves for strategic appeal.
The Nazis deliberately used “socialist” and “workers” to attract working-class voters away from Marxist parties, which were genuinely left-wing and far more popular among German workers in the early 1930s.
Once in power, the Nazis destroyed actual socialist and communist organizations.
Historical parallels:
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor a republic.
The Patriot Act undermines civil liberties.
“People’s” or “Workers’” in a party name has often been used by explicitly anti-left regimes.
A word in a title is not dispositive; policy, doctrine, and practice are.
2. The Nazis violently eradicated the Left
If the Nazis were left-wing, their first actions make no sense.
Immediately after taking power (1933):
The Communist Party (KPD) was banned
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was banned
Trade unions were dissolved and replaced with a state-controlled labor front
Thousands of leftists were imprisoned or murdered (Dachau’s first inmates were communists and social democrats)
This was not an intra-left dispute; it was extermination.
3. Nazi “socialism” rejected core socialist principles
Socialism—across its major traditions—centers on:
Class analysis
Internationalism
Worker control or ownership of the means of production
Opposition to inherited hierarchy
Nazism rejected all of these.
Nazi ideology instead emphasized:
Racial hierarchy, not class struggle
Ultranationalism, not international solidarity
Private property, provided owners served the state
Authoritarianism, not worker empowerment
Hitler explicitly rejected Marxism as “Jewish” and viewed class politics as corrosive to national unity.
4. The Nazi economy was not socialist
The Nazis did not abolish capitalism.
Major industries (Krupp, IG Farben, Siemens, Thyssen) remained privately owned
Industrialists profited enormously under Nazi rule
The regime privatized several state-owned enterprises (railways, steel, banks)—a fact noted by historians such as Götz Aly and Adam Tooze
What existed was state-directed capitalism, not socialism:
Private ownership + state goals + repression of labor
This is closer to corporatism or fascism, not the left
5. The “left wing of the Nazi Party” was purged
Early on, some figures (e.g., Gregor Strasser) promoted a pseudo-anti-capitalist rhetoric.
What happened to them?
They were murdered or sidelined, especially during the Night of the Long Knives (1934)
Hitler explicitly chose industrial elites and the military over any anti-capitalist faction
This decisively settled the question of what kind of regime Nazism was.
6. Every serious historian classifies Nazism as far-right
This is not controversial in academic history.
Nazism is universally classified as:
Far-right
Fascist
Ultranationalist
Racialist
Anti-liberal and anti-Marxist
This consensus spans:
Liberal historians
Conservative historians
Marxist historians
The “Nazis were left-wing” claim appears almost exclusively in modern polemics, not scholarship.
Bottom line
Nazism was not socialist in any meaningful sense.
It was a far-right, fascist, racial-nationalist ideology that:
Destroyed the Left
Preserved private capital
Rejected class politics
Replaced socialism with racial myth and authoritarian rule
The presence of the word “socialist” in the party’s name tells us about Nazi propaganda, not Nazi ideology.
"His economic policies were indistinguishable from those of the Soviet Union under Stalin." I disagree, so later I will post a brief discussion of fascist economic policy, citing evidence.
Fascism has nothing to do with National Socialism. They are fundamentally different. Mussolini's fascism had no antiSemitic racism. But they are both indeed political philosophies of the far Left.
You collapse a multidimensional thing to a single economic parameter and imagine yourself insightful.
If the AfD are elected, I will seriously consider moving there, if they will have me. Rostock is nice. Be assured I am financially self supporting.
My Lord this is so grimly hilarious.
But it proves something the vast world of commentariat can't quite grasp. Sometimes a majority of people choose rightly, and sometimes they choose wrongly. Sometimes democracy results in a healthy outcome and sometimes it results in a terrible horrible no good rotten cookie day.
I look at NY, and at where I live now--both places where the people voted their will and I thank God daily I don't live in that place no more.
Anyway wishing you guys good fortune. Wherever we can stamp out the worst of crazy is a small victory for hope.
This is delicious. The scaredy cats are sh*****g themselves, aren’t they?
Great report, and notes exactly the contradiction in tone and message that struck me: "Don't threaten me with a good time."
I am very much hoping for an AfD victory carrying them over the 40% threshold.....my Schadenfreude levels will be high re; the CDU et al...