The origin of the wrong idea that the nazis were lefties

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Most Nazis were originally socialists.

No they were not. Nazism developed out of the Völkisch movement and to the extent that senior Nazis were previously political at all it was generally in that direction (even if sometimes only very vaguely). You'll find one or two exceptions here or there, but then that's how politics is. Stop repeating garbage pseudo-history, thnx.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

These grotesque dishonesties come up often enough that...

Urgh, not this sh!t again. I can't be bothered to write anything new, so I'll just use a search function to find some old posts on the subject:

Given what happend to actual Socialists under the Nazi regime (here's a random example), I do find the interwebs-tendency to scream that Hitler-Was-A-Socialist to be in astonishingly bad taste.

Oh for God's sake. No.

This issue seems to be raised on the forum a couple of times every year and I'm now tired of bothering to refute it in any detail, so I'll just note a couple of points:

1. No credible historian of the twentieth century believes that the Nazi regime in general or Hitler in particular were 'left-wing' in any respect. This includes some rather right-wing economic historians who specialise in aspects of Nazi economic policy, so this is not an example of a notoriously lefty profession closing ranks.

2. Nazi economic policy was geared entirely towards rearmament (which was achieved via an extraordinarily complicated form of fraud) and not towards any remotely left-wing (however defined) objective. Contrary to what is frequently asserted, the standard of living for the working class in Germany actually declined during the pre-war Nazi period as wages were kept under tight control by means of... well... authoritarian rule.

3. German industrialists (most of them) did remarkably well out of the Nazi regime and this was intentional (more so, in some ways, than in contemporary economies). The examples of Krupp and IG Farben are well known, but they were merely extreme examples of a more general pattern. The close relationship between capital and the regime was good for both of them; as profits soared, so did corporate contributions to the Nazi Party (why, yes. This was a rather corrupt regime).

4. A Trade Union controlled by the government is not a Trade Union.

Fundamentally, you can only argue that 'Hitler was economically left wing' if you define 'economically left wing' as 'prepared to intervene in the economy in order to make it grow'. Which is absurd.

Nazi underlying ideology = virulent nationalism/militarism, an especially nasty take on popular racial theories, anti-semitism (part of the former but enough of an issue, obviously, to deserve a mention on its own) and anti-socialism, combined with weird fetishes regarding leaders, action, and so on. Everything else was window dressing or a cynical attempt to win support (both electorally and in terms of powerful individuals and interest groups). If you think Hitler or any other leading Nazi gave a sh!t about whatever drivel the party adopted as its platform in its early years, then you should probably avoid further comment on the issue. Because there is just a little bit of a consensus over this.

Arguing that state intervention in the economy = Socialism isn't very clever. It means that you have to (for example) count all mainstream political parties and institutions in Europe between about 1945 (1940 or so in the case of Britain) and about 1973 or so as Socialist. Even more absurdly, it means that you have to count all European states before the rise of laissez faire as Socialist. And I think that would be a step into lunacy too far even for you.

Now, the sad thing about the internets is that these arguments are so common that you can just...

And it's worth noting how pro-business the Nazi regime was in reality. Somewhere, deep within my pile of box files, I've a little chart comparing donations to the NSDAP from IG Farben (a company critical to the implementation of the Final Solution, as it happens) with IG Farben's profits. I will eventually find it and post it here - makes for interesting reading.

Because the Nazis = Socialist canard isn't worth wasting much time dismissing. No one (no one honest anyway) with a basic knowledge of early 20th century German history takes it seriously.

(for the record, IG Farben was a German chemical giant, the largest company in Europe (some of the time), a major financial donor to the Nazi regime (and as the companies profits went up, so did donations), a major user of slave labour and the manufacturer of Zyklon B. It was broken up (more or less) by the Allies at the end of the War. Krupp is another well-known example of a big company doing well out of the Nazis).

I mean, there's more but I can't be bothered to dig it up right now.

But I repeat my comment about bad taste.

Conclusion: fyck off and read a few books on the subject.

I would like to stress particularly this point: fyck off and read a few books on the subject. Because, honestly, you people are staggeringly ignorant.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I note that there has been no response to this very specific refutation:

Most Nazis were originally socialists.

No they were not. Nazism developed out of the Völkisch movement and to the extent that senior Nazis were previously political at all it was generally in that direction (even if sometimes only very vaguely). You'll find one or two exceptions here or there, but then that's how politics is. Stop repeating garbage pseudo-history, thnx.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Leftist economic garbage nonetheless

No. No, no; this is untrue. Nazi economic policy was categorically not left-wing. It was a very strange thing - the entire purpose was to facilitate the fastest rearmament possible, while also not alienating their conservative junior coalition partners or creating an international crisis before it was time for one - and at its core was fraud, curiously enough. Hjalmar Schacht, a banker and a former liberal who had drifted a mile to the right during the early 1920s, came up with a complex scam (there's a very readable summary here; not perfect but it gives a good general overview) that enabled them to do just that. Also critical to it was extensive co-operation with certain giant private industrial interests (I will mention again the names IG Farben and Krupp) who got from the Nazi regime pretty much everything they had ever wanted out of a government including, critically, the total annihilation of the labour movement. While the regime was naturally keen to see economic growth (what government isn't?), its policies were not redistributive and working class living standards are generally accepted to having fallen during the 1933-39 period, with the crushing of the trade unions being a major factor. And so on and so forth; the general pattern is quite clear.

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What has this got to do with the price of rice?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Per Joseph Bederansky and quoted: "Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and an economic revolution when the party gained power in 1933. Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program."

Even were one to accept this reading (I would not and neither would most historians; there's no doubt that the radical wing of the SA did expect some sort of social transformation but it was not one that had any connection whatsoever with the established socialist tradition in Germany) it does not actually help your case one bit, as implicit is the fact that this did not happen and was never going to. The Nazi platform was a tottering tower of bullsh!t designed purely to hoover up votes from across the political and social divides; it did not matter one bit to any of the figures who mattered in the regime.

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Ah yes, as in France under the rule of that well known socialist Louis XIV.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Um... Himmler was a follower of Röhm, and Goebbels was an advocate of Strasserism. Alfred Rosenberg, the Heydrich brothers, and many others were considered to have ties to the Strasser brothers.

This and its implicit argument I can't even begin to engage with though. Were you sniffing glue before you wrote it?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How you can maintain National Socialism as an ideology of the right (or at least, the economic right) baffles me to no end.

The fact that pretty much everyone at the time considered it to be so might give an inkling, perhaps? Why were the DNVP (i.e. the old school Prussian national-conservatives) and the right-wing of the Zentrum so utterly relaxed at going into government in the Nazis? The same people who had gone to extreme lengths only months earlier to remove the SPD-led Prussian state government because 'yuck, dirty reds'?

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Just like noted socialist Louis XIV!

Have to say that I'm amused at the idea that the Nazis oversee a 'precipitous expansion of central government' - you have to be pretty ignorant of German history to believe that. Not that the expansion of the state is an inherently left-wing thing, of course.

Again, all of this is in such monstrously poor taste. The entire German labour movement and socialist tradition was outlawed and brutally persecuted by the Nazi state. Arguing that their (literal and not metaphorical) murderers, jailers and torturers were on the same side as them in order to score cheap political points is grotesque.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is an argument from ad populum. Just because everyone at the time thought a particular way, doesn't mean that that's what they objectively were or believed.

No, it's an argument based on a logical interpretation of historical facts made by someone (me) with a long term 'serious' interest in German history. If you think the fact that everyone in Germany in the 1930s understood that the Nazis stood on the extreme Right of the political spectrum is irrelevant and that you know better, then I think perhaps History is not for you.

'Left' and 'Right', incidentally, are purely descriptive terms and do not have an 'objective' existence. In the context of Germany in the 1920s and 30s 'Left' meant essentially meant Socialist, while 'Right' meant nationalist and antisocialist. No great mystery, then, in trying to work out the position on the political spectrum of a party that openly believed that the Socialist movement were traitors to the Nation.

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All of the Nazis conservative allies were eventually marginalised. All this proves is that the Nazis were not conservatives (did anyone here argue otherwise?). The critical thing here is that the DNVP and the conservatives in the Zentrum assumed that the Nazis had the same goals as them because they clearly had the same short-term priorities. Whereas their attitude towards the SPD was one of bitter hostility. Again, I draw attention to the fact that mere months before going into government with the Nazis, Papen conspired to illegally remove the SPD-led government in the state of Prussia because that was how deeply and viscerally hostile to the Left he and his allies were.

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I'm doing no such thing. Try again.

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Embarrassing.

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Yeah, you might want to stop right now. You're making an absolute fool out of yourself and it's kind of awful to witness.

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The suspicion occurs that you don't actually know what any of those terms mean.

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Is this supposed to be a relevant example? Because the Nazis certainly did not prevent sector from functioning effectively or foster trade unionism (they in fact did the exact opposite of both things, as I have already demonstrated in this thread), so I don't see how it can be.

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I note that you are not addressing the point that I made. I would like you to do so.

As for Mein Kampf; it is the ugly and incoherent ramblings of an insane man and contains very little worth analysing. Though it also contains absolutely nothing that could make anyone with any knowledge of German history conclude that its author was anything other than a member of the extreme Right.

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That is not my logic at all.

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The point at which one decides that building roads is an inherently left wing policy is the point at which one loses all contact with the real world.

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Ah, now this is a rare experience! People aren't normally patronising to me; they tend to know better. We are indeed, as you so rightly point out, discussing Nazis. I happen to believe, and I'm sorry if this is a little bit snowflakey for your liking, that when one discusses the Nazi state one ought to adopt a respectful position regarding the people that that state murdered, tortured and imprisoned. Arguing that a group of people who the Nazis defined themselves against, who they viscerally hated, and who they viciously persecuted from the very instant that they gained political power, were essentially the same as the Nazis in order to make a cheap political point is, I submit, not very respectful. It is in extremely poor taste and you should feel bad about it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The arrogance is in this thread is ing astounding. Instead of legitimate debate, just a bunch of junk comments. I probably should have known better considering the A-grade accuracy of most of the predictions on here for HRC last year.

I'd like to continue, but if it's just going to be a flood of junk then ing forget it.

Bye!