Nazis and socialism: straight from the horses’ mouths
There’s a long-running argument, online and elsewhere, about how socialist the National Socialists (otherwise known as Nazis, whose full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [*see NOTE below]) were.
The Nazis certainly weren’t conventional socialists, if there can be said to be such a thing. But they were indeed some sort of socialist—as briefly described in this previous post.
Now we have this article at the Federalist, which tackles the question once again and answers that the Nazis were indeed socialists, and certainly on the left side of the political spectrum. Here are some excerpts:
From the moment they enter the political fray, young right-wingers are told, “You own the Nazis.” At best, the left concedes it owns communism. This comforts a little, because even if far higher in body count, communism supposedly rebukes the scourge of racism. But it’s all a lie…
… The right consists of free-market capitalists, who think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property rights, and are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies and government solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions, such as church, as needed checks on state power…
The left believes the opposite. They distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in strong property rights.
They believe it is the government’s responsibility to solve social problems. They call for public intervention to “equalize” disparities and render our social fabric more inclusive (as they define it). They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance, income inequality, minimum wage, access to health care, and righting past injustices. These people talk about “democracy”—the method of collective decisions.
By these definitions, the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.”…
As Hayek stated in 1933, the year the Nazis took power: “[I]t is more than probable that the real meaning of the German revolution is that the long dreaded expansion of communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognized because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden by the difference in phraseology and the privileged groups.”
Nazism and socialism competed with the Enlightenment-based individualism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and others who profoundly influenced the American founding and define the modern American right at its best…
Much much more at the link.
It is true, however, that Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis, both in Germany and elsewhere. But—as the Federalist article points out—this does not change the fact that both were primarily on the left. They were definitely different (as could be seen, for example, by the distinction between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR). But it was in part a turf war. Both were devoted to statism vs. individualism, and both believed in government control of business as well:
The Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It calls for “equality of rights for the German people”; the subjugation of the individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery”; “confiscation of war profits”; the nationalization of industry; profit-sharing in heavy industry; large-scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the “free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman Law; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich…
In “Mein Kampf,” he states that without his racial insights National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.” Nor did Hitler eschew this sentiment once reaching power. As late as 1941, with the war in bloom, he stated “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same” in a speech published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Nazi propaganda minister and resident intellectual Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis would install “real socialism” after Russia’s defeat in the East.
Very few people in this country are aware of these facts. The left’s propaganda machine has been teaching that Hitler was a man of the right for a long, long time, and for the most part that propaganda has been successful.
[ * NOTE: To get the exact name for the Nazi Party—I knew it was more than “National Socialists,” but I wasn’t 100% sure what it was—I went to Wiki, as evidenced by the link I offered in the text of my post. However, as though to demonstrate the point in the last paragraph of my piece, this is the way the Wiki entry begins [emphasis mine]:
National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism…is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.
Far-right groups? The article goes on to describe the socialist roots and socialist aims of Nazism, without seeing the irony there.
By the way, there is a Wiki talk page that discusses the Nazi right/left issue, although “discusses” is really not the right word. Here’s what it says under FAQs:
Why does this article say that the Nazis were right wing?
Because that is the consensus of reliable sources, in this case historians and political scientists.
But the word “socialist” is right in their name!
The word “socialism” has different meanings in different contexts. The phrase “national socialist” as used by the Nazis referred to a nationalistic view that the German people should prosper at the expense of others, or more specifically, that the interests of the German people were the paramount concern of the party. The meaning of “socialist” was not “communal ownership of property” as it is generally used to mean today, but “of or pertaining to a society” in the more general sense.
There’s much much more in which the Wiki folks firmly reject the “Nazis are leftist” arguments. I don’t have time to read all the links, but if any of you feels like tackling it, I encourage you to do so. My guess is that they reject all sources (including one contemporary to the Nazis, such as Hayek, or the writings of Goebbels—hey, what did Goebbels know about Nazism?), and pay attention to historians and social scientists many of whom are invested in leftism and have their own motives for disowning the Nazis.
Wiki does add this:
But what if I find a large number of very reliable sources all claiming that Nazism is left wing?
Then you will be more than welcome to show them to us, so that we can see that they are very reliable and that they assert that Nazism is a left wing ideology. If they are, then we will change the article.
Get it? They have to be very reliable, and anyone on the right is probably considered to be inherently unreliable. But I would suggest that anyone who wants to put in a little bit of work should research those Wiki links that point to previous discussions of the issue, and see how Wiki has handled it in the past, and try again to introduce this information.
One thing that is actually less relevant is what the Nazis called themselves. The “Socialist” in the name is far less important than what the Nazis did.]
Wikipedia is unreliable on any political topic.
The Communists and Nazis both attacked Socialists as rivals for the peoples’ loyalty. The Weimar government had Socialist policies during the 1923 period when Hitler was forming his policies.
The Kerensky government was also Socialist.
The Nazis and communists were both Socialist in origin and attacked the more moderate Socialists that were their rivals.
Yeah, I actually value Wikipedia quite a bit, but only when I use it for math and science topics, which is usually what I’m reading about are usually apolitical in nature, but for anything that is influenced by politics, it’s not very useful.
The thing that has stood out in more and more sharp relief to me is that it seems that if you pay attention to the leftists (i.e., the media) Hitler is the only historical bad guy who’s ever existed. I never see comparisons to Stalin or any of the many other (usually leftist) totalitarians who committed mass murder on the scale of thousands or millions. In fact, some of those people are actually admired by the Left.
Good old Adolph made a lot of press with the debut of the “People’s Car”, the one we came to know by its German name Volkswagen.
Two of the most egregious and most common idiocies of the left regarding AH are that he wasn’t really vegetarian (he certainly was) and that he was some kind of Christian (in truth, he despised Christianity for many reasons, not least because of its origins as a sect of Judaism and because of its appeals to compassion and forgiveness).
I’ve posted previously my personal views on this topic as a longtime online debater (going back to the BBS days in the early 1990s). Back in the day, when I was primarily debating with people in my local area, or at most with a US audience, there was general understanding of left vs. right being defined as statist vs individualist. This is how left vs right was typically defined in my time and place by people who liked to debate politics online. The United States has a different history than other countries, and a different political spectrum to better reflect its own experiences and ideals. By the US political spectrum, the furthest extreme of right is anarchy.
At some point – maybe the latter 00s – I started noticing that more and more I was debating people who thought that right=nationalist. Since the US right-of-center is much more likely to be patriotic than the left-of-center, this, IMO, is one of the wedges that was used in foisting a different political spectrum onto the United States, and that led to the “Hitler was a nationalist. Therefore ALL nationalists are like Hitler/Nazis” meme. To the best of my ability to figure, this seems to be something seeping in from UK/Euro politics, where left=internationalism/class-based ideologies vs right=nationalism/ethnicism/religion. It was advantageous to the US left to introduce this into US political debate, so they could attempt to neuter any comment from someone with any views that were not negative toward religion or one’s country by calling them “Nazis.”
In left-wing ideology, there can be only one. The wide acceptance of mortal gods is some kind of secular substitute for a traditional belief in God and individual standing.
Diversity or color judgments that deny individual dignity. Abortion rites or wicked solution that deny life deemed unworthy. And justification of redistributive change or single/monopoly practices because Jew… White privilege. Yeah, the Dazis are descended from the Nazis.
Say no to cruel and unusual punishment. Deprivation of life for causes other than self-defense and without due process. Disarming and denying a voice to the wholly innocent, the most vulnerable. Close the damned abortion chambers. Pro-Choice is two choices too late. #HateLovesAbortion
The United States has a different history than other countries, and a different political spectrum to better reflect its own experiences and ideals.
Yes. #PrinciplesMatter
In sheer numbers, the Maoists were worse than the Soviets were worse than the Nazis. The Dazis are keeping the numbers close to their pocketbook. Then there are the Hutu and Tutsi and recurring cycles of retributive change.
Wikipedia is unreliable on any political topic.
It’s a source for signal diversity, useful to removing noise, obfuscation, and corruption, so that we can optimally, but not absolutely, recover a close representation of the truth… is out there.
Apparently, the Nazis were the quintessential “progressives” of their era, engaging in redistributive change, providing single-payer healthcare, and assuring the trains ran on time. Unfortunately, they earned disfavor when they embraced diversity or color judgments including the concept of “Jew privilege”. And they lost it at the twilight fringe, when their privacy was breached with widely disseminated reporting of their abortion chambers and Planned Judaism or selective-Jew.
The meaning of “socialist” was not “communal ownership of property” as it is generally used to mean today, but “of or pertaining to a society” in the more general sense.
I am assured by every left-wing progressive today that “socialism” only means Scandahoovian-style welfare states, not the “communal ownership of property”.
Worth looking up the NSDAP platform, when they still pretended to have elections. The linked article summarizes:
“he Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It calls for “equality of rights for the German people”; the subjugation of the individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery”; “confiscation of war profits”; the nationalization of industry; profit-sharing in heavy industry; large-scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the “free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman Law; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich. It was also racist and anti-immigrant.”
Fascist, socialist, communist…. it is all much of a muchness, what?
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.'”
The question, in politics, is always which is to be master.
I had heard that the Wiki editors live in a left-leaning bubble (or hive-mind) but Neo’s quotes really make it clear.
This post is a two-fer with the one on Google’s leaked video.
(he PowerLine headline for their post says it all:
“IT’S OFFICIAL: GOOGLE IS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY FRONT”
* *
Mike K on September 13, 2018 at 1:11 pm at 1:11 pm said:
“Wikipedia is unreliable on any political topic.”
And now that every topic is political….
* * *
Frederick on September 13, 2018 at 2:16 pm at 2:16 pm said:
“Worth looking up the NSDAP platform, when they still pretended to have elections. The linked article summarizes:
…It was also racist and anti-immigrant.”
* * *
Well, there you go — only the Right is racist and anti-immigrant!
.. this year, anyway.
https://quillette.com/2018/09/10/the-counterproductive-suppression-of-heterodox-views-on-race/
“In a long essay for the Atlantic last year, the liberal journalist Peter Beinart described how this process has succeeded in stifling the free expression of anti-immigration positions on both the Left and the Right. A decade ago, Beinart reminded his readers, liberals “routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state.” But attitudes have shifted dramatically in the intervening years.
…
Similarly, a decade ago some liberals were open to the idea that, on average, black children born in female-headed households were at greater risk of adverse outcomes. Liberals participated in the Fragile Family Studies and some even supported President George W. Bush’s marriage promotion initiatives. In addition, progressive voices—including even that of Ta-Nehisi Coates (in his memoir The Beautiful Struggle)—could still point critically to the violent culture of a cohort of black youth, while others, including Cora Daniels in Ghettonation, could stress the irresponsible spending habits of many poor black mothers. Today, however, these more nuanced views are no longer acceptable. The exclusion of such views from the spectrum of acceptable opinion not only circumscribes criticisms of blacks by whites, but it also discourages thoughtful self-criticism by black writers and academics of their own communities.”
I think many poli-sci folks these days stick with Fascist = right because that is what they were taught. They were also taught that Fascism means pro business. Best I’ve been able to tell, the latter is because the Nazis and Mussolini were anti-labor union. Strikes were bad for public welfare. The progs therefore equate anti-strike with pro-business (crony capitalism?), and therefore Fascism is far right. QED. Also absurd. Then there’s Jonah Goldberg’s _Liberal Fascism_.
KyndyllG on September 13, 2018 at 1:40 pm at 1:40 pm said:
…there was general understanding of left vs. right being defined as statist vs individualist. …
At some point – maybe the latter 00s – I started noticing that more and more I was debating people who thought that right=nationalist. Since the US right-of-center is much more likely to be patriotic than the left-of-center, this, IMO, is one of the wedges that was used in foisting a different political spectrum onto the United States, and that led to the “Hitler was a nationalist. Therefore ALL nationalists are like Hitler/Nazis” meme.
* * *
The Left-Right division never really applied to the US at all, since both sides of the French division (revolutionaries and monarchists) were statists; they only disagreed on who got to run the show.
The Federalist author’s definitions are much more applicable to the US political spectrum; note that I do not say “parties” as we have seen that the Democrats and Republican elites are on the same side ideologically on a number of issues.
Which is another reason for the persistence of the deliberate confounding of Nazi with GOP statists.
“… The right consists of free-market capitalists, who think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property rights, and are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies and government solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions, such as church, as needed checks on state power…
The left believes the opposite. They distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in strong property rights.
They believe it is the government’s responsibility to solve social problems. “
From the Federalist, something I didn’t know but which may explain the origins of the Nazis=Right meme:
“Indeed, the Austrian-born Hayek wrote the book from his essay, “Nazi-Socialism,” which countered prevailing opinion at the London School of Economics, where he taught. British elites regarded Nazism as a virulent capitalist reaction against enlightened socialism—a view that persists today.”
So, the elites were as blinkered and stupid then as they are now. I can’t even imagine how they justified that bit of ideological legerdemain, but there are a few clues about how they accomplished it, because of the way that Hitler “managed” his capitalists rather than eliminating them, as the Communists did in Russia (where there was not as big an industrial or mercantile base anyway).
The Federalist post pretty much lays it out, so excerpting from it makes it clear how the sleight-of-hand worked.
“Yet the evidence the Nazis were leftists goes well beyond the views of this one scholar. Philosophically, Nazi doctrine fit well with the other strains of socialism ripping through Europe at the time. Hitler’s first “National Workers’ Party” meeting while he was still an Army corporal featured the speech “How and by What Means is Capitalism to be Eliminated?”
The Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect.
…
Critics argue the Nazis didn’t fulfill all their socialist goals after 1933. Some industrialists supported Hitler’s rise. Others, who saw no other choice, eventually acquiesced. They were early adopters of the Washington adage, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” …
We can find clues to Hitler’s practical stance on economic questions from the writings of his confidant, Otto Wagener. In texts only translated in the 1980s, Wagener explains that Hitler saw the Russian experiment as right in spirit and wrong in execution. Removing production from the industrial class had spewed unnecessary blood. Industrialists could be controlled and used without slowing the economy or impeding social progress. His task was to convert socialists without killing the entrepreneur and managerial classes.
…
Nazism was a “middle class” socialism that tolerated private enterprise as long as it paid homage and stayed in its lane.
This lack of overt hostility didn’t mean the Nazis welcomed the bourgeoisie or the industrialists.”
* * *
A useful book to read on this subject is “The Arms of Krupp: 1587–1968” about how one particular industrial company interacted with Hitler.
As for the other alleged connections of Nazis & the Right:
“Now, the Nazis were undoubtedly racists. But in context of socialist movements of their day, racism was the norm; there were no exceptions. … In America and England as well, the left’s ascendency during the first progressive movement was full of racists, including Woodrow Wilson, Sanger, and writers H.G. Wells and Jack London.
…
Related to the racist claim is that Nazis’ nationalism excludes them from the left. But arguably the most nationalist countries today are Cuba, China, North Korea, and Venezuela. All are militarized, and nobody considers them right-wing. Even Stalin ruled as a nationalist.”
* * *
Racism and nationalism are clearly not the primary factors that distinguish left-right political positions.
Before they became dictators, Lenin and Mussolini debated the right way to institute socialism. Mussolini rejected class warfare and created “corporatism” instead. The government would create corporations, aka, industrial boards, for each industry and the government and the companies would split the seats fifty-fifty. The businessman were left to run their companies but were governed under direction of the boards. The National Socialist German Workers Party followed Mussolini’s lead and instituted the same system when they took power ten years later.
This is exactly what our beloved Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed recently for the USA. Imagine the efficiency, imagine the fairness, imagine it’s responsiveness to the people, imagine the graft and corruption open to the politicians on the boards.
Wiki, says,
The Federalist author says,
The socialist leftist, be they “nationally” predicated, or trans-nationally oriented, see population collectives of some kind – “society” – as the locus of moral value and responsibility, and the only meaningful entity to which questions of moral ontology apply. The individual and his existence then, is seen as a kind of transient cell in the super-organism to which moral reasoning – if it is thought to be real at all – must properly relate.
The hypostatization of the collective – as the moral locus of value is nothing new in this regard, and constitutes the defining core of any “socialism”, be the population universal, or narrower; whether the ownership of the means of production and assignment to work is completely communal, or whether some allowance of private management and individual control is allowed. “Allowed”, meaning here, “tolerated by the leave of the collective” as a special case or privilege.
Which is why it makes perfect sense when we notice that both National and pan-national collectivists disavow the idea that any “rights” conceded by them to the individual person are anything more than socially granted permissions, revocable at will, without further consideration of whether the revocation it is right or wrong.
Socialists are always in a panic to distance themselves from the roots of the socialist ideas, and to instead attempt to indemnify at least part of the collectivist clique from the murderous history all of these swarm movements share.
Wikiquote:Joseph Goebbels.
PDF of NYT article:From the Vaults: New York Times, 1925.
Jonah Goldberg claimed that Stalin put a huge amount of propaganda effort into the notion that fascism = Nazis = Mussolini = right wing evil.
I didn’t know anything about corp. structure under the Nazis, but if they were nationalized and were required to profit share etc., that may have sowed the seeds of their demise. FDR picked William Knudsen as his genius manufacturer and capitalist architect of war production. Knudsen was installed in the Whitehouse, until some of FDR’s leftist pals had him kicked out. FDR then installed Knudsen in the Pentagon as a general even though he had no military experience.
The Nazi weapons may have been better in some regards, but ours were produced in massively greater quantity, in spite of the heavy use of slave labor from the concentration camps.
“Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis.” Communists were also among the most fervent anti-Communists, as judging by the number of Communists they killed.
A question, Neo: after a minute of editing, I was told, “You can no longer edit this comment.” All I was trying to do was to get rid of the blank blockquote at the beginning.
It is true, however, that Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis, both in Germany and elsewhere.
There is a glaring exception to this. From the signing of the German-Soviet Nonagression pact in August 1939 until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 22,1941, the Communist Party line was decidedly NOT anti-Nazi. Which helps explain why Dalton Trumbo wrote and published anti-war books like Johnny Got His Gun and The Remarkable Andrew during that time. After June 22 1941, Trumbo turned over to the FBI the names of those who asked about Johnny Got His Gun. The German Soviet Nonagression pact also explains why Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers released anti-war songs during that time, only to take them off the shelves after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
Decades after the fact, I found out that the father of a high school classmate had spent a decade after World War 2 as a CPUSA operative- not a mere member. He left the party after news of Krushchev’s 1956 speech about Stalin’s crimes. When asked about why he joined the party in the first place, he once replied that the Communist parties were stalwart anti-Nazis. Which conveniently erases the nearly two years of the German Soviet Nonagression pact.
LTEC
“Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis.”
Reply: Communists were also among the most fervent anti-Communists, as judging by the number of Communists they killed.
The Man Who Loved Dogs: A Novel. Originally in Spanish as El Hombre Que Amaba a los Perros.
Amazon review:
Neo, I posted a comment of Hitler quotes from Hitler’s Table Talk that got sent to the spam folder. How come?
Initially, when I was editing it, I was stopped from editing after only a minute or so of editing- not the standard 5. Later the comment disappeared entirely.
Gringo: “All your comments are belong to us.” — Does Google own WordPress??
A 1932 summary of Nazi principles, by Joseph Goebbels:
http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm
One more time, but abbreviated to get past the spam filter. There is a good source for Hitler’s opinions on Reds and Nazis: Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations
According to Adolf, Reds and Nazis are rather similar.
Both Reds and Nazis, Hitler tells us, are concerned with social inequality.
Consider Adolf’s opinion of Stalin.
Stalin’s Five Year Plan is very good, but OUR Four Year Plan is better. And no unemployment, either.
In the US:
Left is statist, right is individualist.
Left is internationalist and against nationalists, right is patriotic.
Left is anti-Christian, mildly anti-religion, right is pro-religious freedom but also pro-Christian.
Neither “Left”, nor “Right” are on the ballots.
If Hitler was in US politics, he would be a Democrat, one claiming America has always been great.
His policies, and tactics, are what Democrats are doing with respect to being against individuals who disagree.
The Democrats today are trying to treat Reps like the Nazis treated Jews – hate them, demonize them, lie about them, make their lives as uncomfortable as possible; even somewhat support crazies who shoot at Reps, certainly not condemn those committing small illegal acts in riots against conservative speakers.
Finally, there is one good commie / socialist / Nazi policy:
No unemployment.
Our society needs to find a way so that all those willing to work can find / are given jobs to do. With freedom to beg and not work, but not freedom to get gov’t benefits when unwilling to work.
Unwanted unemployment remains an unsolved problem in free market societies.
It’s interesting to note that the NSDAP’s party anthem, the (in)famous Host Wessel Lied even has a line referring to their ‘comrades shot by the red front and the reactionaries’ marching in spirit in the ranks of the SA.
[Komraden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen, marschieren in Geist, in unseren Reihen mit.
This presumes the “Right” is free market. That presumption is wrong, and hence the follow through is all wrong.
The distinction between left and right well predates that between capitalism and communism.
The real distinction between left and right is between whether people will behave well if the systems are good enough against those that believe laws and their enforcement will always be necessary. The Left is effectively Utopian, whereas the Right is not.
The Left has to oppose religion, because it is a competing Utopian belief system. The Right acts to support it, as it is another way of making people behave (not all religions though, the state church under their control is promoted — they don’t want independent power bases).
The Left wants to rewrite a new society of the future. The Right wants to return it to (an idealised) past.
The Left are openly international. The Right are proudly nationalist.
If the Nazis are on the Left, where do you place Franco’s Spain? Because if that’s on the Left, then you have a very conservative, very old-style Catholic on the Left.
Yet the doctrinal differences between Franco and Hitler aren’t huge.
Huge swathes of Europe between 1930 and the 1980s were more or less Fascist. Greece under the Colonels. Portugal with Salazar. Turkey. Hungary under Hrothy. Poland under Pilsudski. Latvia and Estonia pre-war.
People are so focussed on Hitler and Mussolini they think that’s all there was to Fascism. In fact all those other countries had a similar ethos. Strong man rulers, authoritarian, nationalist, conservative socially, and pro-peasants. Oh, and all profoundly anti-communist.
To anyone who lived in those countries the idea they were Left wing would be ridiculous.
Right and Left is about social attitudes, not economics.
Chester Draws:
If the Nazis are on the Left, where do you place Franco’s Spain? Because if that’s on the Left, then you have a very conservative, very old-style Catholic on the Left.
Yet the doctrinal differences between Franco and Hitler aren’t huge.
Actually, the doctrinal differences between Franco and Hitler were substantial. There was substantial disagreement regarding the monarchy and the church. Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations.
Leftist killing of priests and other Roman Catholic members was one of the causes of the Spanish Civil War. King Juan Carlos, also.
A further difference between Franco and Hitler would be on their actions toward people of the Jewish faith. The Truth About Franco And The Jews.
Franco and Hitler- not as similar as you would think. Hitler and Franco had substantial differences in their attitudes towards church and the monarchy, and also in their attitudes about and actions towards people of the Jewish faith.
Chester Draws:
There was a substantial difference between Hitler and the aforementioned Fascists: “conservative socially.” From the beginning Hitler had a goal of radical social change- extirpate the Jews from Germany. Not to mention his plans of world conquest- rather disruptive of the status quo, also. Hitler’s goals and actions were far from conservative, if by conservative one means maintaining the status quo.
Yes, some of those small-time Fascists may have been somewhat allied to Hitler at one time or another, but there were substantial differences between the small-time Fascists and Hitler’s program.
Gringo & Chester Draws:
The real problem here is that the terms left and right mean very different things in the United States than they do in Europe.
In European terms, both the individualist left (classical liberals, supporters of liberty) and the collectivist left (which includes communists, socialists and, yes, nationalist socialists such as the Italian Fascists and the NSDAP in Germany) are to the left of a right that is primarily monarchist, reactionary Protestant (e.g. Prussian Junker) or ultramontane Roman Catholic.
All of this is complicated by the Italian Fascist concordat with the Church and the fact that the French fascist movement was profoundly ultramontane Roman Catholic in hostility to the virulently anticlerical French republics going back to the Revolution.
Both the traditional European Right and the collectivist left are fundamentally hostile to capitalism – though for different reasons.