Even while Hitler was still pondering whether he should join the German Workers' Party, he received a membership card in the mail. He'd been recruited! He was given party number 555. Needless to say, it wasn't long before he was running the show. It turned out that this antisocial, autodidactic misanthrope was the consummate party man. He had all the gifts a cultish revolutionary party needed: oratory, propaganda, an eye for intrigue, and an unerring instinct for populist demagoguery. When he joined the party, its treasury was a cigar box with less than twenty marks in it. At the height of his success the party controlled most of Europe and was poised to rule the world.
In 1920 the Nazi Party issued its "unalterable" and "eternal" party platform, co-written by Hitler and Anton Drexler and dedicated to the overarching principle that the "common good must come before self-interest." Aside from the familiar appeals to Germany for the Germans and denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, the most striking thing about the platform was its concerted appeal to socialistic and populist economics, including providing a livelihood for citizens; abolition of income from interest; the total confiscation of war profits; the nationalization of trusts; shared profits with labor; expanded old-age pensions; "communalization of department stores" the execution of "usurers" regardless of race; and the outlawing of child labor. (The full platform can be found in the Appendix.)
So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending — a.k.a. "interest slavery" — the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing.
What the Nazis pursued was a form of anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or "people's community." The aim was to transcend class differences, but only within the confines of the community. "We have endeavored," Hitler explained, "to depart from the external, the superficial, endeavored to forget social origin, class, profession, fortune, education, capital and everything that separates men, in order to reach that which binds them together."13 Again and again, Nazi propaganda, law, and literature insisted that none of the "conservative" or "bourgeois" categories should hold any German back from fulfilling his potential in the new Reich. In a perversely ironic way, the Nazi pitch was often crafted in the same spirit as liberal sentiments like "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" and "the content of their character." This sounds silly in the American context because to us race has always been the more insurmountable barrier than class. But in Germany class was always the crucial dividing line, and Nazi anti-Semitism provided one of many unifying concepts that all "true" Germans, rich and poor, could rally around. The tectonic divide between the National Socialists and the communists wasn't over economics at all — though there were doctrinal differences — but over the question of nationalism. Marx's most offending conviction to Hitler was the idea that the "workingmen have no country."
The Nazis may not have called themselves left-wingers, but that's almost irrelevant. For one thing, the left today — and yesterday — constantly ridicules ideological labels, insisting that words like "liberal" and "left" don't really mean anything. How many times have we heard some prominent leftist insist that he is really a "progressive" or that she "doesn't believe in labels"? For another, the "social space" the Nazis were fighting to control was on the left. Not only the conventional analysis typified by Shirer but most Marxist analysis concedes that the Nazis aimed first to "destroy the left" before they went after the traditionalist right. The reason for this was that the Nazis could more easily defeat opponents on the left because they appealed to the same social base, used the same language, and thought in the same categories. A similar phenomenon was on display during the 1960s, when the New Left in the United States — and throughout Europe — attacked the liberal center while largely ignoring the traditionalist right. In American universities, for example, conservative faculty were often left alone, while liberal academics were hounded relentlessly.
The Nazis' ultimate aim was to transcend both left and right, to advance a "Third Way" that broke with both categories. But in the real world the Nazis seized control of the country by dividing, conquering, and then replacing the left.
This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the "internationalism" of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we've learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn't inherently right-wing — unless we're prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking "Mother Russia" and dubbing World War II the "great patriotic war." By 1943 he had even replaced the old Communist anthem ("The Internationale") with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.
But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists — that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.
The Nazi ideologist — and Hitler rival — Gregor Strasser put it quite succinctly: "We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today's capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!"14
Hitler is just as straightforward in Mein Kampf. He dedicates an entire chapter to the Nazis' deliberate exploitation of socialist and communist imagery, rhetoric, and ideas and how this marketing confused both liberals and communists. The most basic example is the Nazi use of the color red, which was firmly associated with Bolshevism and socialism. "We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation...so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings...so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people." The Nazi flag — a black swastika inside a white disk in a sea of red — was explicitly aimed at attracting communists. "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man."15