Was Hitler Actually a Socialist?

The German Workers’ Party (DAP) was founded in January 1919 by Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer in Munich as a small völkisch-nationalist group. On February 24, 1920, at a meeting in the Hofbräuhaus attended by roughly 2,000 people, the party publicly unveiled its 25-point program and was renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

The name was a calculated branding exercise. “National” and “German” appealed to the right. “Socialist” and “Workers’” appealed to the left. Contemporary historian Konrad Heiden (writing in 1934, before the full extent of Nazi atrocities) described the rename as an attempt to adopt a “new and more attractive name” to compete with rival völkisch-nationalist groups that already used “Social” and “Socialist” language.

Critically, Heiden reports that “Socialist” was adopted against the wish of Hitler, who preferred the label “Social Revolutionary.” This is corroborated by Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, where he describes considering “Social Revolutionary Party” as the mass-appeal name. The rename happened through the executive committee, partly influenced by Rudolf Jung, a Sudeten German “National Socialist” who had been using the term in Austria-Hungary.

The party’s formal name change is variously dated to February 24, 1920 (the Hofbräuhaus meeting) or April 1920 in some accounts. The precise date is disputed, but what is not disputed is the motive: the name was chosen for mass appeal, not to encode an economic doctrine.

Hitler used the word “socialism” constantly, but he, repeatedly, and publicly rejected everything the word normally means.

In a 1923 interview with journalist George Sylvester Viereck (later reprinted in Liberty magazine, July 9, 1932), Hitler was asked why he called himself a “National Socialist” when his program was “the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism.” His response:

This is the single most important primary source for the “was Hitler socialist?” question. In his own words: his “socialism” does not repudiate private property, rejects internationalism, rejects class struggle, and defines itself in opposition to Marxism. Whatever this is, it is not socialism as the word has been used by any socialist movement in history.

In Mein Kampf (1925–1926), Hitler calls Marxism “the Jewish doctrine” that destroys personality, nationality, and race. He attacks Social Democrats as tools of “Jewish capital and internationalism.” National Socialism is presented as anti-Marxist völkisch nationalism. There is no endorsement of class struggle, worker ownership, or nationalization beyond rhetoric.

On January 27, 1932, Hitler addressed about 650 industrialists at the Industry Club in Düsseldorf. He told them Germany needed “a sound national German body politic armed to strike”, not class struggle or proletarian ownership. He praised individual effort and industry, framed politics as the precondition for economic recovery, and made no nationalization threats.

When speaking to the people who owned Germany’s factories, Hitler did not sound like a socialist. He sounded like a man who needed their money and cooperation, and he got both.

In private wartime conversations recorded by aides: “I am absolutely opposed to any levelling of property. That is a Marxist invention.” He described the economy as requiring planning “from above” but rejected Soviet-style state ownership. The private Hitler matched the public one: nationalist, authoritarian, anti-Marxist.

The 1920 NSDAP platform contains several points that sound socialist on their face:

The same platform also demands racial citizenship, anti-Jewish exclusion, authoritarian centralization, press control, and subordination of all interests to the nation. Its core is ethnonationalist and anti-liberal, not class-socialist.

Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher (The German Dictatorship, 1969) described the program as “little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: ‘unalterable,’ yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation.”

The abandonment began before 1933. Heiden reports that as early as August 1920, Hitler publicly reassured audiences that “industrial capital, being productive, would be left untouched,” limiting hostility to “Jewish international loan capital.” Heiden’s assessment: “This meant that Point 13 was sacrificed.”

The Nazi party did contain people who took the “socialist” part seriously. Gregor and Otto Strasser represented the party’s more anti-capitalist wing. They wanted deeper social and economic transformation than Hitler tolerated: stronger hostility to big business, more radical anti-bourgeois posture, worker nationalization.

Otto Strasser left the party in July 1930 after discovering, as Heiden put it, “that Hitler had abandoned Socialism.” He formed the anti-Hitler Black Front in exile.

Gregor Strasser was murdered on June 30, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. The purge killed about 200 people, including SA leader Ernst Röhm and other figures associated with demands for a “second revolution” (nationalizations, SA power over the army).

The meaning was unambiguous: the faction most plausibly associated with the party’s “socialist” rhetoric was physically eliminated. The army, conservatives, and business elites were reassured that Hitler’s regime would not permit any independent anti-capitalist current to threaten property or hierarchy.

A regime that murders its own socialist wing to reassure industrialists is not a socialist regime. It is a regime that used socialist language to gain power, then destroyed the people who believed it.

The strongest empirical evidence against “Nazis were socialist” comes from economist Germà Bel, whose peer-reviewed research (Economic History Review, 2010) demonstrates that the English word “privatization” (Reprivatisierung) entered academic use in the 1930s specifically to describe what Nazi Germany was doing: selling state-owned assets to private buyers.

While most Western democracies were nationalizing industries during the Great Depression, Nazi Germany moved in the opposite direction. The regime sold or transferred state-held stakes in major firms across sectors including steel, mining, banking, shipyards, shipping lines, and railways.

Bel documents concrete transactions: Commerzbank shares totaling 57 million Reichsmarks were reprivatized in 1936–37. Deutsche Bank shares worth 50 million RM were sold back to private holders in 1935–37. Dresdner Bank reprivatization totaled 141 million RM, including a single 120 million RM sale in September 1937. After these operations, the state retained no ownership in the three major commercial banks.

The regime also sold state holdings in United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke), shipping companies, and local utilities. This was among the earliest large-scale privatization waves in modern economic history.

Krupp, Thyssen, and IG Farben maintained private ownership and profited enormously from rearmament contracts and the destruction of unions and democratic oversight. Corporate profits rose sharply between 1933 and 1938. Wages, meanwhile, were controlled by the state and often kept stagnant. Workers lost all bargaining power.

Hjalmar Schacht, Economics Minister from 1934 to 1937, was a conservative banker who stabilized the economy and financed rearmament through creative financial instruments (Mefo bills). The Four Year Plan (1936) under Göring was a war-mobilization and autarky program, not socialist planning in the sense of abolishing private property or establishing worker control.

The pattern is clear: private ownership preserved, privatization expanding, corporate profits booming, labor crushed. This is compatible with authoritarian state capitalism or fascist corporatism. It is not socialism in any definition used by economists or historians.

If the Nazis were socialist, they had a strange way of showing it: they destroyed every socialist institution in Germany within months of taking power.

Socialists and communists were the primary early victims of the Nazi regime. About half of early concentration camp inmates were political prisoners from the left. The regime systematically imprisoned, tortured, and murdered socialists.

This is the single most devastating piece of evidence against the claim. A socialist regime does not build concentration camps and fill them with socialists.

The state intervened massively in the economy: the Four Year Plan imposed wage and price controls, compulsory labor service, and autarky planning. Programs like Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organized mass leisure, the Volkswagen project promised a “people’s car,” and the Autobahn was a public works program.

The party’s motto was “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz” (Common good before individual good). Private property was formally preserved but increasingly subordinated to state direction. If you define “socialism” loosely as “the state directing the economy for collective goals,” Nazi Germany can look superficially socialist.

The strongest steelman is Rainer Zitelmann’s argument: that Hitler was anti-capitalist in private, envisioned an increasingly planned economy, and preserved private ownership only in legal form while making entrepreneurs functionally servants of the state.

Hitler rejected Marxism, class struggle, and the abolition of private property, in his own words, repeatedly, in public and in private. The 1923 interview is especially damaging: he defines his “socialism” as something that “does not repudiate private property.”

The regime privatized state assets (the word was coined to describe the policy). It preserved private ownership for “Aryans.” Corporate profits boomed. Workers lost all bargaining power. The socialist wing of the party was murdered. Socialists were the first concentration camp prisoners. The KPD and SPD were banned within months.

If a movement privatizes state assets, suppresses labor, collaborates with industrial capital, and murders its “socialist” wing, historians do not classify it as socialist. And they don’t. The scholarly consensus, Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Robert Paxton, Stanley Payne, Henry Ashby Turner, Joachim Fest: classifies Nazism as fascist, ultranationalist, racist, and anti-Marxist.

The scholarly consensus is near-unanimous. Ian Kershaw treats Nazism as radical fascism centered on a “power cartel” of party, state, army, and big business. Richard J. Evans emphasizes its anti-left, racist, and anti-democratic nature. Robert Paxton and Stanley Payne classify it within the fascism tradition, opposed to socialism. Henry Ashby Turner documented the industrial relationships in German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Joachim Fest rejects the socialist classification.

Zitelmann’s minority position (that Hitler was more anti-capitalist than standard accounts allow) is noted by scholars but does not overturn the consensus. Even Zitelmann acknowledges Hitler preserved private ownership; the debate is about the degree of state direction, not whether the regime was “socialist” in the standard meaning.