We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

As a kid, I was always taught (in school, mind you) that Hitler was some kind of right-winger, a "facist" -- if he was an American, he'd be a Republican. I cannot recall anyone ever explaining why this should be so, but I also remember this not making any sense as far as my tiny mind could reason about it.

I mean, after all, he was from the National Socialist Party, right? How would that make him not a socialist? His religion was an occultic sect which was a lot closer to the New Age movement (which is full of socialists and greens) than something like Christianity. (And, in fact, quite a few clergy went to jail.) He exerted state control over industry. And his eugenics was based on Darwinism and the lastest "science" of the times, also embraced by people who are currently viewed as leftists, like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

I failed to understand how any of this made Hitler anything but a socialist.

John Jay Ray, author of Dissecting Leftism weighs in to the same effect, with his eye-opening paper "Hitler was a Socialist". If the question interests you, it's worth a read or bookmark. It contains countless examples of Hitler's policies which, if one is considering the question as one reads, demonstrate how close Hitler's own views and policies were to those embraced by contemporary leftists.

A few highlights...

General Outlook

Ed Feser:

He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.

Economic Redistribution

socialism - any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

Policy manifesto written by Adolph Hitler, 1925:

9. All citizens of the State shall be equal as regards rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.

Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.

13. We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into cartels.

14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.

15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

State Economic Control

Leonard Peikoff:

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of CONTROL. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

Adolph Hitler, 1931:

What matters is to emphasize the fundamental idea in my party's economic program clearly -- the idea of authority. I want the authority; I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the priniciple: benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual. But the state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners of property.

(How is this different than any other non-Marxist socialist government?)

John Ray:

He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial.

And:

And while Hitler did not nationalize all industry, there was extensive compulsory reorganization of it and tight party control over it. It might be noted that even in the post-war Communist bloc there was never total nationalization of industry. In fact, in Poland, most agriculture always remained in private hands.

And:

This policy is broadly similar to the once much acclaimed Swedish model of socialism in more recent times, so it is amusing that it has often been this policy which has underpinned the common claim that Hitler was Rightist. What is Leftist in Sweden was apparently Rightist in Hitler!

Environmentalism

Andrew Bolt, emphases mine:

Hitler also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.

The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913.

In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.

Gun Control

John Ray:

But surely Hitler was at least like US conservatives in being a "gun nut"? Far from it. Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany did have restrictions on private ownership of firearms but the Nazis introduced even further restrictions when they came to power. The Nazi Weapons Law (or Waffengesetz), which restricted the possession of militarily useful weapons and forbade trade in weapons without a government-issued license, was passed by the Reichstag ("State Assembly" -- i.e. the German Federal Parliament) on March 18, 1938.

Nationalism

Hitler's party was the National Socialist Party -- its aim was to be (unsuprisingly) both national and socialist.

Some claim is that since Hitler was a nationalist (patriot), he couldn't possibly be a socialist. This is amusing, given the recent effort in the US of many of our left-leaning citizens to earnestly assert the opposite: That leftism is not unpatriotic.

Ray:

With the Nazis you could be both a socialist and a full-blooded nationalist. Hitler was thus simply the most effective figure in showing that socialism and nationalism, far from being intrinsically opposed, could be very successfully integrated into an electorally appealing whole.

And:

Although many modern-day US Democrats often seem to be anti-American, the situation is rather different in Australia and Britain. Both the major Leftist parties there (the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party) are perfectly patriotic parties which express pride in their national traditions and achievements. Nobody seems to have convinced them that you cannot be both Leftist and nationalist.

Alliances

Ray, on support from German labor unions:

The fact that Hitler appealed to the German voter as basically a rather extreme social democrat is also shown by the fact that the German Social Democrats (orthodox democratic Leftists who controlled the unions as well as a large Reichstag deputation) at all times refused appeals from the German Communist party for co-operation against the Nazis.

On opposition from conservatives:

Both in Germany and Britain he despised them and they despised him. Far from being an ally of Hitler or in any way sympathetic to him, Hitler's most unrelenting foe was the arch-Conservative British politician, Winston Churchill and it was a British Conservative Prime Minister (Neville Chamberlain) who eventually declared war on Hitler's Germany. Hitler found a willing ally in the Communist Stalin as long as he wanted it but at no point could he wring even neutrality out of Churchill.

Update: Further Reading

Since I wrote this six months ago, I've discovered a number of good resources for similar information. There's Dr. John Ray's "Hitler was a Lefist" website, broken down into different areas, and also an interesting book review by Anthony Flew of George Waton's "The Lost Works of Socialism". In particular, Flew writes:

For those of us born before World War II, the most interesting section of the book is that dealing with the intellectual relations between the teachings of Adolf Hitler and those of Marx and his professed followers among Hitler’s contemporaries. In his autobiography, and in recorded conversations with intimates among his own followers, Hitler said such things as, “I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” that “the whole of National Socialism is based on Marx,” and that without racist commitments his own political movement “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.”

Hitler was not in these statements saying that he either was or ever had been a Marxist. From his first political activity, he had always been opposed to communism, but that was not because it was socialist, but because it was internationalist. Hitler, although born and raised in Austria, had always been a dedicated German nationalist.

Even those who are aware that Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party have doubted the sincerity of its socialist professions. This is in part because Hitler, upon coming to power, refrained for tactical reasons from launching an immediate and extensive program of state takeovers of private industries, and in part because these skeptics have not enjoyed the benefits of Watson’s re-readings of the lost literature of socialism.

His chapter on “Marx and the Holocaust” begins by telling us that Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, recalled in his memoirs that even at the height of the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941-45, his colleagues had respected the socialist example of an exterminatory program based on forced labor. Watson then proceeds to deploy further evidence of Soviet influence on the Nazis and to cite other relevant passages from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other socialist luminaries, all presenting candidates for or possible methods of genocide. The connection between socialism and genocide could hardly be made any clearer.

From all this, Watson concludes that “it is becoming ever more probable that it was not just the idea of genocide that the Nazis owed to Marx and the Marxists, but its detailed practice too, not excluding camps and gas chambers. The shadow of the socialist idea grows longer and longer.”

Also see John Ray's new website "Marx Words" where he posts the translated versions of some of Marx's and Engel's words, demonstrating the eerie similarity between the views of Socialism's founders and those of Adolph Hitler.

Also see another article of mine, "Myth: Hitler was a Leftist", where I decontruct a leftist's argument that Hitler had nothing to do with socialism. (His basic approach is to claim there has never been any such thing as socialism. Sure, but that's because it doesn't work, not because it wasn't tried.)