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  1. The NSDAP were not socialists and it makes no sense to label them as such. Early in its history, the NSDAP did in fact have a "left" wing, but Hitler was not among it. Hitler never cared about the social policies proposed by other early members, rather he was more consistent in his interest in the rearmament of the Wehrmacht, and the Aryanization of German society. The NSDAP's comparatively left-wing branch was minimized first at the 1926 Bamberg Conference, while the remaining were either executed in 1934 or convinced to agree with the party’s agenda.
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  3. It makes zero sense to call the NSDAP Socialist, as it contradicts with the rest of early 20th century German political history. There was already a Socialist party at the time, the SPD, and to a lesser extent the KPD, along with a long history of what Socialism meant in Germany.
  4. There were several different responses to what could be considered the ‘social question’ in German politics at the time. The SPD's idea was to be the party that would facilitate the transition between Capitalism and Socialism. The NSDAP on the other hand sourced itself more from contemporary conservative criticisms of at the time. These ideas often prioritized racial or cultural solidarity would trump petty socioeconomic concerns if the right state structure appeared.
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  6. The German higher education system, which had a long standing culture of conservatism, produced a number of intellectuals arguing for close cooperation between the state and the economy. Many of the early NSDAP's ‘left-wing’ branch, such as Hess or Göbbels, formulated their ideas and plans for the economy in German universities, not from the SPD or other left-wing parties. There was a school of thought prevalent in German universities, and in some German professions to view free market Capitalism as something forigen that was fundamentally opposed to the German ideal. On the same note, Hitler and his supporters’ attacks on consumerism, department stores, and Capitalism in general had more to do with cultural conservatives' critiques of what was considered the ‘American’ styles of business that was beginning to affect businesses in Germany as early as the 1920s. There really weren’t that many supporters of free markets and laissez faire Capitalism among the Weimar far right; most tended to be clustered around the smaller bourgeois parties of the center-right. Most German industrialists and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei favored protectionism and cartels, while they also claimed to be the party of the small businessman.
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  13. Moreover, one of the things that is typical among discussions of Nazism being left-wing by simpletons such as yourself is to examine the NSDAP's party platform in isolate and zero in on its commitment to social legislation without looking at the broader picture. The problem with this type of analysis is that the German welfare state predated Hitler by decades. A large part of Germany's social safety net such as national health insurance, pensions, and other social insurance schemes originated with Otto von Bismarck. A Prussian, and the first Chancellor of a united Germany, who implemented these reforms, which were among the first of their kind, in part to take political capital away from the Socialists, but also because of the Junkers' traditions of noblesse oblige. Bismarck's policies of social welfare proved to be quite long-lasting and all the major parties had to contend with them. Hitler's pushing of these programs was not an invention of his, but an adaptation to existing institutions. The few programs that the Nazis actually started on their own, such as the Volksprodukte - consumer goods produced by state subsidies - failed completely, as people like Robert Ley underestimated the complexity of setting up production and distribution lines. The replacement of all German unions by a single NSDAP one- the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF)- was much more about political power than fundamentally restructuring German labor relations. Some of Hitler's rhetoric was tactical in nature (ie "vote for us and you will get true socialism"), but there was also an element of trying to restructure socioeconomic relations along racial lines.
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  15. That was one of the fundamental things that distinguished the NSDAP from the Socialists. German socialist tradition was always international, and officially condemned racism.You’ll be hard pressed to find an example of the word ‘Socialist’ being used in the Third Reich without being paired with the word “National'' or "German socialism."(eg National Socialist Welfare, National Socialist Automobile Club, etc.)
  16. This was not some arbitrary naming scheme as National Socialist ideologies constantly asserted that the Reich's solution to the social question was an unprecedented event in German history. And for all this rhetoric, the Third Reich did not really put that much effort in transforming the existing social welfare system. There were some false starts to centralize social insurance payments and rationalize the system, but this was too complex of a problem for the Nazi state to tackle. Outside of Aryanizing the system and pushing a racialized natalism, German social insurance under Hitler was not that much different from that of the 1920s or 1910s.
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  21. For reading material, Avraham Barkai's Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy is one of the major books on the origins and development of the NSDAP's approach to the economy. Barkai asserts that the hazy economic program grew out of "Nationalist Etatism" from the antiliberal right of the Kaiserreich. Jonathan Wiesen's Creating the Nazi Marketplace is one of the better recent introductions to the issue of consumption in the Third Reich. Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism details the complex evolution of a particular set of ideas that embraced technocratic solutions and reactionary politics. Although it is something of an older
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  23. Citations:
  24. 'The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia
  25. Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70'
  26. by Hermann Beck.
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  28. 'Origins of the German Welfare State: Social Policy in Germany to 1945' by Micheal Stolleis
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  30. 'Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy' by Avraham Barkai
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  32. 'Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich' by S. Jonathan Wiesen
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  34. 'The Politics Of Cultural Despair; A Study In The Rise Of The Germanic Ideology' by Fritz Stern
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