Was Hitler a Socialist?

The word “Socialist” entered the party’s name in 1920, against Hitler’s wish according to Konrad Heiden’s history of the movement. The party began as the German Workers’ Party (DAP), founded in Munich on 5 January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a railway locksmith, and Karl Harrer, a journalist. The Deutsches Historisches Museum describes it as one of countless far-right splinter groups in Munich’s antisemitic, ethnic-nationalist (völkisch) circles, with 20 to 40 members at first.

On 24 February 1920 about 2,000 people came to the party’s first mass meeting, in the Hofbräuhaus. There the party presented a 25-point program and announced a new name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

Heiden’s history appeared in English in 1934. Heiden dates the new name from April 1920. He writes that the word “Socialist” was “under dispute, but was eventually adopted, against the wish of Hitler”, who “would have preferred to call it the ‘Social Revolutionary Party’”.

In Heiden’s account the new name was meant as “a new and more attractive name” against two rivals, the German Social Party and the German Socialist Party. It came from the National Socialists of the former Austria-Hungary, whose party had taken the name “German National Socialist Party of Austria” in May 1918.

Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf describes an earlier plan. In 1919, before he joined the DAP, he and a few like-minded comrades from an army course discussed founding a party. That party’s name would “from the very beginning have to offer the possibility of approaching the broad masses”, and they “arrived at the name of ‘Social Revolutionary Party’”.

Britannica’s entry on the Nazi Party calls the party’s socialist orientation “basically a demagogic gambit designed to attract support from the working class”. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) says the party sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism.

Hitler kept the word but defined it against Marxism and in favour of private property. He set out that definition in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck. The Guardian, which reprinted it in 2007, calls it an edited interview that took place in 1923 and was republished in Liberty magazine in July 1932. The published text describes events of 1932, so its wording is the later, edited version.

Viereck asked why Hitler called himself a National Socialist, “since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism”.

The same answer ends with the state and race: “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.” Heiden quotes a speech of 27 January 1923 that says the same about property. “Marxism propounds three horrific theories,” Hitler told a party congress: “denial of the value of personality”, “denial of the right to private property” and the “destruction of all human culture”.

In Mein Kampf Hitler writes of “the Jewish doctrine of Marxism”, which “denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race”. The book was published in two volumes, in July 1925 and December 1926. Germà Bel is an economist at the University of Barcelona who has studied Nazi economic policy. He notes that the book makes no specific comment on nationalization.

Hitler stressed his anti-Marxism to industrialists too. On 26 January 1932 he spoke to around 650 members of the Industry Club in Düsseldorf, an interest group of leading industrialists. The German History in Documents and Images collection (GHDI) says that at such meetings he tried to seem respectable, largely refrained from antisemitic attacks and stressed his anti-Marxism. In the speech he named Germany’s primary need as “the restoration of a sound national German body politic armed to strike”.

The speeches did not win business over at once. GHDI adds that he often made a positive impression, but many in the business community remained distrustful of the party. Only a few major industrialists, it says, such as Emil Kirdorf and Fritz Thyssen, openly supported Hitler and his party before 30 January 1933. Following the historian Henry Ashby Turner’s work, Bel writes, it is generally accepted that Hitler won wide support among industrialists only from about mid-1932. That was when, Bel adds, his coming to power was seen as unavoidable.

His recorded private talk is more mixed. Hitler’s Table Talk, published after his death, purports to record his words from 1941 to 1944. Routledge’s description of Mikael Nilsson’s 2021 study of these texts calls them “dubious sources”.

On 24 March 1942 the Table Talk has him say “I absolutely insist on protecting private property”. It also has him say that “in the ordinary way” a family factory will be better run by a family member “than it would be by a State functionary”. The condition is that “the family remains healthy”. In the same entry it has him say that “joint-stock companies should pass in their entirety under the control of the State.”

Several of the program’s socialist-sounding demands were set aside, some of them before Hitler took power. Heiden counted points 10 to 14 and 17 as “the Socialistic portions of the programme”, which “were in part publicly ignored and privately renounced”. The table gives economic demands in the American prosecutors’ translation, for the Nuremberg trial, of the party’s own edition.

Two of these points were dropped or explained away before 1933. At a Munich meeting in August 1920, Heiden reports, Hitler declared that “industrial capital, being productive, would be left untouched, and that his enmity was only directed against the Jewish international loan capital”. Heiden adds: “This meant that Point 13 was sacrificed.”

On 13 April 1928 Hitler explained point 17. The party, he declared, “stands on the platform of private ownership”. So the point’s “gratuitous expropriation” concerned “only the creation of legal opportunities to expropriate if necessary”. The land in question was land “which has been illegally acquired or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare”. It was “directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies”.

Point 16 fared no better in 1933. Heiden writes that the Reich government gave the department stores “credits from Government money to the total of many millions of Marks”. He adds that “no one seems to have thought of dispossessing the erstwhile owners by taking over the shares at a greater or less compensation”.

Point 13 went into reverse: in the mid-1930s the regime sold state holdings in banks and industry, as the section on property shows. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that what came to define the party “was not its 25-point program, but rather complete loyalty to its Führer”.

Many of the program’s other demands were nationalist, racial and authoritarian. Point 4 said that a member of the race “can only be one who is of German blood”, so that “no Jew can be a member of the race”. Point 23 demanded that publications “counter to the general good” be forbidden, and point 25 “a strong central power in the Reich”. Point 24 ended with the principle “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz”: public interest before self-interest.

Two of the party’s more left-leaning members, the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser, were driven out or killed. Full Fact, the British fact-checking charity, describes the brothers as following a strand of Nazism that wanted to remove from power the elites Hitler courted.

Otto Strasser left the party in 1930, before he could be expelled, under the slogan “The socialists leave the NSDAP”, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie. In September 1931 he founded the Black Front, which Britannica calls anti-capitalist. Stripped of his citizenship in 1934, he went into exile in Prague. Heiden remarks that the Strasser group “discovered in 1930 that Hitler had abandoned Socialism”. That fact, he writes, shows “how little trouble these sincere Socialists gave themselves to learn the opinions of the Leader”.

Gregor Strasser was murdered on 30 June 1934, in the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives. In the winter of 1932, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) notes, he had sought an electoral agreement with Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. The agreement, USHMM adds, would have barred Hitler from power.

The purge’s main target was the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party’s storm troopers. The SA’s leaders wanted to “finish” the Nazi revolution, remove the traditional elites from power and replace the professional army with a “People’s Army”. Among the others killed, the Schutzstaffel (SS), the party’s elite guard, “mostly targeted right-wing nationalists”. Scholars have identified 90 victims by name, USHMM writes, and the total was probably around 100.

The purge sealed Hitler’s alliance with the army leadership. In return, USHMM writes, military leaders supported him in August 1934, when he combined the offices of president and chancellor.

The regime kept most industry in private hands and sold state holdings in several sectors, but it told private firms what to do. In the Depression the last Weimar governments had taken over firms in several sectors, and most of the big banks had come under state control.

The economist Germà Bel’s study of Nazi privatization was published in the Economic History Review in 2010. It shows the Nazi regime selling state holdings in the mid-1930s, most of them taken over in the Depression. The holdings were in steel, mining, banking, shipyards, shipping lines and railways.

No other Western capitalist country systematically reprivatized firms in the 1930s, Bel writes. The German word Reprivatisierung entered English then, as “reprivatization”.

The League of Nations reported that the “reprivatisation” of the big Berlin banks “was completed by the end of 1937”, as Bel quotes it. In 1936 the regime also sold its block of steel-trust shares, about 100 million Reichsmarks, to the trust itself, United Steelworks.

Bel concludes that ideology does not explain the sales. Political motives were important, among them better relations with big industrialists, and money for a budget strained by public spending and rearmament also played an important role. He judges that “neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler was ideologically devoted to private ownership”. He also judges that privatization was applied “within a framework of increasing state control of the whole economy through regulation and political interference”. When they judged it necessary the Nazis nationalized, as with the aircraft makers Arado and Junkers.

Hitler’s memorandum of August 1936, which became the basis of the Four Year Plan, set out the arrangement. “It is for the Ministry of Economics simply to set the national economic tasks, and it is for private industry to carry them out,” he wrote. If private industry believed it could not, “the National Socialist State will succeed in carrying out this task on its own.” The economy was to be “ready for war” within four years.

The German History in Documents and Images collection describes the plan under Hermann Göring. The plan aimed to centralize the mobilization of labor, restrict imports, impose wage and price controls, and allocate raw materials. Göring, the collection adds, also systematized the expropriation of Jews.

Rearmament was paid for partly with “mefo” bills. Hjalmar Schacht was president of the Reichsbank from 1933 and economics minister from 1934 to 1937. A Reichsbank director testified in 1945 that Schacht proposed the bills. Secrecy in rearmament’s first years, he said, was one of their main advantages.

Within six months of taking power the regime had banned the socialist parties and seized the free trade unions. The first people it targeted for arrest were political opponents, “primarily communists, trade unionists and social democrats”, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a British charity. In much of Germany, Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) men were deputized as auxiliary police in the campaign for the March 1933 election. They used their powers “to attack, arrest, and kill communists”, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) writes.

Leaders of the banned parties and unions were arrested or fled into exile, the Trust says. In July 1933, the Encyclopaedia Judaica records, 26,789 people across Germany were held in “protective custody”.

Once the state set pay, real weekly wages recovered slowly, passing their 1928 level only in 1937. The table gives the index from Volker Berghahn’s history of modern Germany, as GHDI reproduces it.

The case for calling Hitler a socialist rests on a broader meaning of the word. Britannica defines socialism as a doctrine that “calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources”. In control, the regime went far. The Four Year Plan aimed to impose wage and price controls, and Hitler’s memorandum left private industry to carry out tasks the state set.

The program put the public interest before self-interest. The Strength through Joy organization ran a savings scheme for a “people’s car”, the German History in Documents and Images collection (GHDI) notes. The Reich Autobahn, it adds, was one of the regime’s largest job-creation programs.

Rainer Zitelmann argues the case in detail in his study of Hitler’s ideas, first published in German in 1987. As Stephen Davies summarized in a 2022 review for Econlib, Zitelmann shows Hitler rejecting free markets and capitalism, and argues that his goal was “a synthesis between socialism and nationalism”.

In the socialism Hitler argued for, Davies writes, there was “extensive state ownership of key sectors or individual firms”. In that socialism most productive assets remained private, but their use was “directly controlled and directed by the collective political process”. Davies concludes that Hitler “aimed at a socialist order of a kind”.

The dominant view, Davies notes, holds that there was “no real coherent economic policy or vision”. It also holds that the regime “did not mark a clear break with capitalism, even in aspiration, never mind practice”. Zitelmann’s economic argument is, he writes, the book’s most controversial part.

That case rests mainly on control rather than ownership, and the control served rearmament and the regime’s racial aims. Bel finds the regime selling state holdings while it tightened regulation, with neither the party nor Hitler “ideologically devoted to private ownership”. The program’s nationalizing points were dropped or reversed, and the free trade unions and the socialist parties were destroyed within six months. The car scheme’s 330,000 savers, GHDI notes, never received their cars, because the factory turned to military vehicles.

Most historians reject the label, Full Fact reported in 2019: “the consensus among historians is that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were not socialists in any meaningful sense”. Full Fact quotes Richard Evans, “it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism”, and Ian Kershaw, “Hitler was never a socialist.”

Britannica’s answer to whether the Nazis were socialists is “No, not in any meaningful way, and certainly not after 1934.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the Nazi Party “the radical far-right movement and political party led by Adolf Hitler”.

No. Hitler kept the word socialism but defined it as national and racial and as keeping private property. He had set aside two of the program’s nationalizing points before 1933. Within six months of taking power his regime destroyed the socialist parties and the free trade unions. It sold the state’s holdings in three big banks and the steel trust. What it did instead was direct private firms toward rearmament.

The minority view, argued in detail by Rainer Zitelmann from Hitler’s speeches and writings, is that Hitler aimed at a socialism of another kind, with private property under political direction. The consensus Full Fact reports among historians rejects the label.

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The verdict above as one image, with its figures: the state-held shares in the three big Berlin banks that the regime sold to private buyers, in millions of Reichsmarks. Commerzbank’s were 57, Deutsche Bank’s 50 and Dresdner Bank’s 141. The image is 1,200 by 630 pixels, the size social networks use for link previews, and anyone may download it and post it.

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