Was Hitler economically left wing?

[Liberté]

Leftwing, IMO.

They typical leftist counterargument to this is to claim that he abolished unions. Actually he didn't, he replaced the independent labour unions with a single nationalized labour union that all Germans workers were part of, the German Labour Front. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Labour_Front

Since independent labour unions were also abolished by the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, communist China etc., I don't think this disqualifies Hitler from being considered economically left wing. Nor does the militarist emphasis of his economic policies disqualify him seeing as the USSR and FDR's America pursued similar military buildups.

I'm simply going to quote what I said in another thread on the subject:

Let us see how historian William Shrier, a first-hand eyewitness to the establishment of the Third Reich, interpreted Hitler's 'laborism'. From page 233 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

In other words, according to Shrier, while the National Socialists may have used 'laborist' or unionist rhetoric, the application of that rhetoric in practice entailed, first, the centralization of labor unions and then the rendering subservient of them to the employers.

Hitler "replaced the independent labor unions" in order to subordinate the independent labor unions to the managerial class.

Even prior to WW II, there was massive intervention and control of the economy, and of the segments of the economy not involving the Jews.

This is not particularly 'left-wing'. Otto von Bismarck, the premiere conservative of the 19th century, created the first welfare state in modern history. And I'm quite left-wing economically and adamantly oppose government intervention in the economy, including welfare.

[Liberté]

Also, I'd like to note that Heinrich Brüning, the most "American conservative" chancellor of the Weimar Republic (as he was the least economically interventionist) used the government to break up some of the big Junker estates and distribute their holdings to the underclass. The association with a lack of State intervention in the economy with right-wing policies is quite recent.

[Liberté]

He was, certainly for his time, left of center economically.  In England, at the same time, you had laissez-faire Conservatives that were the majority of the party (though it lead to the party split).

Your mistake lies in accepting the narrow, myopic American definitions of 'right' and 'left' wholesale and trying to retroactively apply them to German history.

What was Bismarck's goal in establishing the welfare state in Germany? This libertarian site suggests it was the following:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Nobody who understands Bismarck as a politician considers him 'left-winged' in any respect. That he was more economically interventionist that the British Tories is a given; so was the French ancien regime, and nobody can accuse King Louis of being "to the left" of the Tories of the nineteenth century.

The same applies to both Bismarck and Hitler. German conservatism had always implicitly accepted government intervention in the economy because, once Prussia came to dominate the Landtag and then Germany, they foisted their economic model upon the rest of the country. And Prussia had always seen collusion between the Junkers and the civil government, as well as a powerful military economy.

This tradition of 'conservative Statism' proved useful in Germany in helping to undermine the SPD and the socialists by "buying off" the workers who were loyal to them. While the means used to achieve this might be (erroneously, in my opinion) identified as being 'on the Left' within dogmatic American discourse, the end sought by them was most certainly 'on the Right'.

Bismarck and Hitler were economic interventionists and authoritarians. That does not, however, make them 'left-winged' in the slightest.

EDIT: British laissez-faire economics was not always considered 'conservative' either, given that the main rhetorical reason for repealing the Corn Laws (to use one example) was to free the British working classes from the burden of wage deflation. It was 'to the Left' of the physiocrats and the mercantilist who had been the main economists of the late Middle Ages. 

[Liberté]

That, however, is how the question is phrased.

And the question is poorly phrased. Within the historical context in which they lived, both Adolf Hitler and Otto von Bismarck were understood clearly as men of the Right, albeit not the traditional German Right.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

His goal makes all the difference. That's like arguing Bill Clinton was on the Right when he signed welfare reform - despite the fact that his goal was to prevent a far more radical reduction of welfare benefits by the Republican Congress.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Because the material and political situation had changed. What was conservative in the German Confederation could no longer be conservative in the newly-minted German Empire.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Yet the Tories (really the Liberals) in England of the time - the free-traders altogether - were to Bismarck's "Left", socially speaking. They supported free-trade in the main because of the benefits it brought to the new industrial class, as evidenced by some of the rhetoric being thrown around during the repeal of Comstock.

The same holds in France, where the free-traders were engaged in a much more riotous battle against the tattered remains of the mercantilist and protectionist conservatives of the ancien regime.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I've read it before. That platform was the product of a number of Nazi minds - Feder being the most predominant - and was written when Hitler was still nominally only the NSDAP's propaganda minister.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What is 'right-wing' changes from era to era. The French monarchy enacted similar such laws to prevent the rising of the bourgeoisie.