Transcription
The narrative that Hitler privatized industries, crushed trade unions, and was a capitalist shell, is this really the case? The process of collectivization of the German people started the moment the Nazis seized power and evolved over time, as described in Gunter Ryman's primary source document, "The Vampire Economy," and Adam Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction," as well as many others.
Nazi party officials and SA members walked into factories and businesses and took them over from within. It wasn't privatization, as the British Keynesian magazine known as "The Economist" claimed. It was, in 1936, to describe the policy of the German banks selling shares. Yeah, it had nothing to do with the selling of industries to private interests. Worse, all the political commentators in the 1940s described how the government's centralizing of the economy was privatization, which is clearly not the meaning of the word privatization we use today. And regardless, the actual Nazi policy wasn't privatized. I don't know where the media got the term from; they probably just made it up.
But the actual Nazi policy was called "Gleichschaltung," which means coordination or synchronization, as in synchronization of the economy and society into the state. And everything was to be merged together as one into the social state, the exact opposite of so-called privatization. Business and professional associations, sports clubs, choral societies, shooting clubs, patriotic associations, and most other forms of organized activity were taken under, or more frequently, hastened to place themselves under National Socialist control. In the first months of the Third Reich, there was no more social life. You couldn't even have a bowling club that was not coordinated, was how one inhabitant of Nordheim in Lower Saxony remembered it. There was a National Socialist Physicians League, a National Socialist Teachers League, a National Socialist War Victims Association, a National Socialist Women's Front, various youth organizations, a National Socialist Flying Club. Like, seriously, we'd be here all day if I was to list out all the various social clubs and social movements of the National Socialist regime. The only person in Germany who still has a private life is a person who's sleeping.
Between January 30th and July 14th, 1933, the Nazis had coordinated all social institutions, apart from the churches and the army, into a vast and still inchoate structure run by themselves. They had purged huge swathes of culture and the arts, the universities and the education system, and almost every other area of German society of everyone who was opposed to them. Private property rights, as enshrined by Articles 115 and 153 of the Weimar Constitution, were abolished in the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933. Many historians ignore this part of the Reichstag Fire Decree simply because they can't explain it or think it's irrelevant. My question to them is, why didn't the Jews and others sue the Nazis for stealing their property from them? Oh, that's right, because private property rights had been abolished. And where were they abolished? In the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933.
The Nazis viewed private property as conditional on its use, not as a fundamental right. If the property was not being used to further Nazi goals, it could be nationalized. So the industries and businesses were nationalized. The people who ran the industries were Nazis. Every member of the executive branches of IG Farben were members of the Nazi party, except the one who was a Swiss national and therefore exempt. And heavy social regulations were imposed on every industry, including regulations on the hiring and firing of workers, working hours, working habits, accidents, wages, vacation time, etc. If the leaders refused to cooperate, the factories that they supposedly owned were taken off them. Professor Junkers of the Junkers Airplane Factory was the first to be thrown out of his own business as a result, but wasn't the only one. Those industries that had their former owners removed, expropriated, were then sold to individuals in the Nazi party who then ran them on behalf of the Nazi party. In other words, they were nationalized.
This fact is pointed out by "Bells Against the Mainstream," a text that is often used by Marxists to prove that it was privatization. Except it doesn't; it accidentally proves the exact opposite. If only they had actually bothered to read it. Both governments, Nazi and Soviet, reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a large number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state, therefore, could direct the firm's activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises. The pre-existing tendency to form cartels was encouraged to eliminate competition that would destabilize prices. In practice, the Reichsbank and the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs had no intention of allowing the radical activists of the SA, the shop floor militants of the Nazi party, or Gauleiter commissioners to dictate the course of events. Under the slogan of the "strong state," the ministerial bureaucracy fashioned a new national structure of economic regulation. "We worked and governed with incredible élan. We really ruled." For the bureaucrats of the ministry, the contrast to the Weimar Republic was stark. Party chatter in the Reichstag was no longer heard. The language of the bureaucracy was rid of the paralyzing formula: "technically right, but politically impossible."
Manufacturers in Germany were panic-stricken when they heard of the experiences of some industrialists who were more or less expropriated by the state. These industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all booking entries of the company or individual businessmen for the preceding two, three, or more years until some error or false entry was found. The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties: a fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error. Obviously, the examination of the books was simply a pretext for partial expropriation of the private capitalist with a view to complete expropriation and seizure of the desired property later. The owner of the property was helpless, since under National Socialism, there is no longer an independent judiciary that protects the property rights of private citizens against the state. The authoritarian state has made it a principle that private property is no longer sacred.
Marxists claim that Hitler crushed the trade unions, which somehow proves that he wasn't a socialist, even though Lenin did the exact same thing. But it's a distortion of the truth. Everyone who worked in a factory, be they employers or employees, had to be a member of the DAF, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or German Labor Front. This was the nationalized trade union of the Third Reich that had a whopping 32 million members in 1938, making this one of the biggest trade unions in history. Any private union that refused to be nationalized into the DAF was crushed. But that isn't proof of Hitler's capitalism; it's proof that he socialized the unions, just like Lenin did. There were no private unions in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; they were all nationalized into the state. And yet, this nationalized union is simply dismissed by many Marxist historians as a shill for the capitalist elite. However, the Nazi party itself only had 8.5 million members at its peak. So for the German Labor Front to have 32 million members, 42% of the entire German population, it's a clear indication that this was an important part of the National Socialist movement and shouldn't just be ignored.
With private property rights abolished under the new National Socialist regulations enforced by the DAF, the concepts of employers and employees were done away with, being replaced with the terms "leaders" and "followers." And while some followers did complain about the new system, saying it was benefiting the leaders at the expense of the followers, their leaders also complained about the new system. "Yes, I am the leader in my factory, my workers are my followers, but I am no longer a manager. I cannot decide what is allowed or forbidden in my own factory." There have been cases where managers were removed by the party or labor trustees and replaced by commissars. However, by the same token, some leaders and followers also embraced the new order, as it reminded them of the previous war. As plant leader Ludwig Hermann from Herst-Breslau described himself as an officer and his followers as his soldiers, Hermann recognized the community spirit of the trenches of the First World War again in the "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft) of the Nazi regime, as did other industrialists and managers.
Profits, as point 14 of the Nazi 25 Points declared in 1920, was to be shared out among the community, which it was. As Götz Aly's book "Hitler's Beneficiaries" makes clear, most of the taxes were levied against the rich, the corporations, and foreigners like the Jews. They weren't levied against the poor, who had their food, rent, clothing, and recreational activities, plus others, subsidized by the state. Family and child tax credits, marriage loans, and home furnishing and child education allowances were among the measures with which the state tried to relieve the financial burden on parents and encourage Germans to have more children.
As a great example of regulation, in January 1938, the Nazis decided that if even one Jew worked for a business, then that business was defined as a Jewish firm. So by July of that year, the remaining Jews were removed from the businesses and, in some cases, taken straight to the camps. The businesses had to do this in order to apply for an official certificate that declared that they were a German firm. If they didn't get this certificate, they would be in violation of the Reich's race laws. In other words, the firms were being socialized. The German people, the social majority, were running the show. In addition to this, there were price controls, wage controls, rent controls, and centralized distribution of goods. Materials could only be bought with certificates, which had to be obtained from one of the various central planning boards, which distributed said materials. There were boards for coal, textiles, timber, batteries, paper, and steel, amongst many others. In no way was this a free market; this was a centrally planned economy.
Millions of questionnaires were sent out in order to get a true picture of demands, stocks, etc. Questionnaires and statistical reports of thousands of firms are collected and cataloged. A vast number of office workers labor over them in order to calculate normal requirements, the volume of demand, and other figures necessary for getting a picture of the market situation. They even had Reich's Commissars, like the Reich's Commissar for Prices, Josef Wagner, who tried and failed to set all prices in the Reich. He failed because socialism always fails, but the point is he tried. The commissar in charge of the supply of iron and steel sent many circulars to industrialists, blaming them for and warning them against the use of non-quota iron and steel, as well as against exceeding their quotas. The Reichs-Bahn, the German Railways, were officially nationalized in 1937, but as the author of "The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich" points out, this just rubber-stamped what had already happened earlier in 1933 and 1934. The Nazis removed the price system from the railways in favor of what they described as "social considerations." Numerous laws were passed that affected the railways and other businesses, as well as the state, too many to list here, but these resulted in numerous Jews and non-Jews being removed from the Reichs-Bahn in the first year after the Nazis came to power, being replaced by Nazi Party members or SA men, etc.
In 1941, the national firm Reichs-Bürger Hermann Göring was the largest economic enterprise in Europe. For the Soviet Union, Göring wanted all industry to be nationalized into the Reichswerke and was in the process of doing that in the 1941 to 1942 period. The only country in Axis Europe that Göring's National Corporation didn't have its grubby hands in was Romania, although they were trying to gain influence over it. German farmers had all their private debt collectivized, and a national bank was set up to oversee this process. Yeah, there was no more private debt for farmers, but even better, farms could no longer be repossessed or sold, effectively forcing farmers to be farmers, all of which are forms of farm collectivization. This was done through an inheritory system, and due to various reasons, it was limited to certain farms, so it wasn't done for every farm, but nonetheless, it shows that they were trying to move in that direction. And again, prices for agricultural produce were fixed, and subsidies were given to the farmers. Farmers were encouraged by state regulations to stop producing meat and eggs and to concentrate on grain production because the guys in charge decided that this would be a more productive use of the land, showing that the farmers were not in a free market. Of course, just like the Soviet Union, this led to a huge reduction in food production, with grain reserves dropping from 5.5 million tons in June 1939 to 1.2 million tons in 1943, despite the German Army stealing food from numerous other countries.
Even IG Farben's decision to build their Buna factory at Auschwitz was encouraged by the state, in addition to tax exemptions and the fact that some members of the IG Farben board were in Himmler's circle of friends, which is why he provided slave labor to the firm. The cooperation and coordination between the SS and the IG Farben firm has been described by one historian as a symbiotic relationship. IG Farben's eight-year-long entanglement with the Nazis had brought it to an extraordinary point where one of its leading executives was describing the merits of a new factory in unmistakably racial terms and openly extolling the virtues of its profitable collaboration with a murderous regime. The availability of slave labor had been a crucial factor in the company's decision to build a plant next to a concentration camp. Auschwitz inmates were already dying of hunger and exhaustion and disease and burns and beatings within a few months. As a consequence of the IG's actions, the first selections to the gas chambers would begin.
Speaking of slave laborers, it has been argued that take-home pay for the German workers shrank, that they couldn't change jobs, and weren't allowed to strike, thus proving that Hitler's regime wasn't socialist. William Shirer, in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," even claims that the German workers were like medieval peasants bound to the lord of the manor. I've gone over this in more depth in a video on Hitler supposedly crushing the trade unions, but essentially, no work of pay may have shrunk in nominal terms, but in actual real terms, it definitely went up, thanks to wage and price controls, rent controls, subsidies on food, rent, coal, insurance policies, and more besides. The labor book that the German workers had did prevent them from just swapping jobs, but it also stopped employers from hiring people they liked. Remember, a socialist economy is centrally planned, so the central planners dictate where you go and what you do. The fact that their workers were centrally planned is proof that the economy was rationally regulated, a central tenet of socialism. And since the social estate is meant to be working for the workers, you therefore can't have workers protesting against it, otherwise it proves it's not a worker state. Thus, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, and more socialists besides, all stopped workers from striking. So preventing the workers from striking after the revolution is actually an indication that you have socialism, since if they were allowed to strike, that would be private initiative, which is the antithesis of socialism.
Now, all the socialist policies the Third Reich implemented resulted in the economy being overburdened and unproductive. Debts were piling up, and Hitler was informed on the 1st of September 1938 that the state coffers would be empty within a month. In the end, the cost of implementing Hitler's limited socialism was too much for the Third Reich's economy to bear, and the only solution was to go to war in order to steal the resources of Europe and export their financial problems abroad. German soldiers plundered Europe, sending goods back home as the Reich exported their inflation to other countries. Countries like Belgium, France, Greece, Poland, and the former Soviet territories saw their local currencies hyperinflated, which sucked out the goods from their economies and put them in the hands of the Germans. Jews were targeted heavily for the same reason, and obviously had their possessions stolen off them, as well as their lives. Due to supply and demand, these extra goods flowing into the German economy suppressed prices at home, masking the massive quantitative easing inflation going on, in a very similar way that the United States of America is doing to the rest of the world today. What's that? Keynes took influence from the Nazi economists when he set up his own economic school of thought and then created the Bretton Woods system, which is very similar to how the Axis system exploited Europe. Oh, you don't say.
Marxists also believed the conspiracy theory that Hitler was a pawn of big business, who were the real puppet masters, and that the industrialists financially supported Hitler into power. Wikipedia, the greatest source in the universe, still says that Hitler and his party received lavish donations from wealthy benefactors at home and abroad. It then proceeds to list several industrialists and rich people who gave him donations that allowed him to purchase cars, a chauffeur, and even created the Berghof. But all of this is misleading because it's implying that the industrialists supported Hitler throughout his rise and into the Third Reich, which is a deliberate distortion. Prior to Hitler's seizure of power, the only major industrialist who was actually a committed supporter of Hitler was Fritz Thyssen, who then had his business nationalized and taken off him by the Nazis in 1939, and he spent the last year of the war in a concentration camp. Serves him right. There was also Hjalmar Schacht, who had been in charge of Germany's State Central Bank, the Reichsbank, up until 1930, who also gave his committed support for Hitler. But Schacht, who was reinstated into the Reichsbank in March 1933, was also thrown out by Hitler himself in 1939 and also put in a concentration camp. Serves him right as well.
Of course, there were more industrialists who gave some support to the Nazis, but as Turner points out in "German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler," most of this support went to individual Nazis rather than the party itself. Also, support for the party itself came late in the day, either at the eleventh hour or even after the Nazis had gained power. And the big businesses were simultaneously supporting other parties. In other words, they were hedging their bets. Because while the Nazis were looking like they were going to win, the Nazis weren't big business's first choice. None of these industrialists could be considered committed Nazis prior to 1933, and the rise of Nazism definitely wasn't some sort of grand conspiracy on the part of the big businessmen. As numerous historians have pointed out, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was a grassroots organization that financed itself from donations and selling tickets to Hitler's speeches. Here is Richard Evans confirming this: "The Nazi Party depended on such commitment, financed from the grassroots. Much of its power and dynamism came from the fact that it was not dependent on big business or bureaucratic institutions such as trade unions for its financial support, as the bourgeois parties and the Social Democrats, to varying degrees, were, still less on the secret subsidies of a foreign power along the lines of the Moscow-financed Communists." The notion that Germany's capitalists contributed significantly to Hitler's rise has become something of a truism. More often than not, that is the message conveyed by American textbooks for students of European history and by other instructional works with astonishing frequency. In short, evidence and purported evidence bearing on the subject of this book has been dealt with by historians in a fashion marked by a striking suspension of professional standards. As Turner points out, the myth persists that capitalists brought Hitler to power, despite the fact that the evidence quite simply doesn't support it. In other words, they made it up.
Regimes and ideologies then use this myth as propaganda to convince the masses that capitalism is inherently murderous and fascist by nature. Most publications that explain the rise of Nazism in terms of capitalism have no need to rely heavily on evidence, since most of what occurs in the economic sphere is assumed to remain concealed from the public and even from the historian. Much must be surmised from a few clues rather than demonstrated by a sustained marshaling of evidence, as in traditional historical scholarship. Even solid evidence has frequently been interpreted in such a manner as to distort it. Bias, in short, appears over and over again in treatments of the political role of big business, even by otherwise scrupulous historians. That bias should not come as a surprise. Professional historians generally have little or no personal contact with the world of business. Like so many intellectuals, they tend to view big business with a combination of condescension and mistrust. Relatively few of their number find it a congenial subject for research. As a consequence, most of what historians have written about the political role of German big business in the period dealt with in this book has been largely uninformed by knowledge about businessmen or their institutions, since almost all of those who have concerned themselves with the relationship between the business community and Nazism have, to one degree or another, stood left or at least left of center in their political sympathies. A great many have found it difficult to resist the temptation to implicate big business, which clearly belonged to the right, in the rise of Nazism.
Now, some people have denied the historical definition of socialism, even though none of these people can provide an alternative definition that isn't just a rephrasing of the historical definition. The historical definition of socialism is the social ownership of the means of production, hence the word socialism. The idea is that society will be centrally organized, that private property will be abolished and transferred to social control, and that socialized man will rationally regulate their interchange with nature. In other words, they will plan the economy rather than leave it to the free market. That is what socialism is. It is not when the workers do stuff; it's not when there are puppy dogs and rainbows; it's social ownership of the means of production. So, in order to prove that Hitler was a socialist, all we have to do is show that Hitler attempted to centrally organize the economy, attempted to abolish private property, attempted to transfer all property into social control, and attempted to regulate the economy, which is exactly what we've done.
On the other hand, Karl Marx's socialism was based on class. So he says that the associated producers, or the workers, are the socialized men. But socialism predates Marxism and has nothing to do with class. Marx added the class element to socialism to create Marxist socialism, or class socialism. Hitler said that Marxist socialism wasn't real socialism, which it isn't, and came up with his own version of socialism. Rather than class, his socialized men would be the Aryans. In other words, Hitler's socialism was a race socialism. This does make it different to Marx's socialism; however, it is still a variant of socialism because class and race are just add-ons to the idea of socialism, not socialism itself. "The sacrifice of the individual existence is necessary in order to assure the conservation of the race. The racial Weltanschauung is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. If the National Socialist movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present state and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason, it would not have the right to call itself a Weltanschauung. If the social program of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national bourgeois parties are." Yes, if they forget about the individual or the fact that they are racists rather than classists, then they would be just like the Marxist socialists. Hitler has literally just spelled that out.
And just to clarify, I'm not saying that Hitler was a Marxist. Hitler was not a Marxist. I'm saying that Hitler was a socialist, and there is a difference between Marxism and socialism, since socialism predates Marxism. Hitler's socialism was a socialism for the race, a racial socialism, whereas Marxist socialism was a socialism for the class, a class socialism. So when my critics say that Hitler wasn't a socialist because he wasn't a Marxist or he hated Marxists and Social Democrats, they're missing the point. He wasn't a Marxist or a Social Democrat; he was a National German Socialist. And I don't know how else to make that more clear. Most people can understand this, but for some reason, the socialist soy boy fascist in denial can't seem to grasp this simple point. So I'm going to use colors to convey this information to them. Red is Marxism, brown is National Socialism, and black is fascism. None of these are the same. And yes, there is a difference between National Socialism and fascism. I've covered that in its own video. I'm not saying that these are the same, but I am saying that they're all colors. "You just don't understand. Brown is not red." Bro, yes, I know brown is not red. What I'm saying is that red is a color, and brown is also a color. Now, may you're an anarco-fascist extremist libertarian? No, shut up. Red and brown are not the same, but they are both colors. And Marxism and National Socialism are not the same, but they are both socialisms. If socialists cannot understand this very simple idea, then it's no wonder that socialism doesn't work.
"I have not set myself on the road of politics in order to pave the way for an international socialism. I bring the German people a national socialism, the political theory of the national community, the feeling of unity of all who belong to the German nation and who are prepared and willing to feel themselves as being an inseparable but also co-responsible particle of the totality of the nation." A Marxist might also argue that socialism has to be international in nature, not national in nature. Well, three things: one, no, it doesn't. Two, they don't have a monopoly on what socialism is, so what they say is irrelevant. And three, internationalism is a form of nationalism. If you have one nation that conquers the world, it's one nation under God, a worldwide nation is a nation. So your internationalism is actually nationalism. The workers are the nation, and Marxists are nationalists who want to conquer all the nations, just like Hitler set out to do. So this whole nationalism versus internationalism thing is a lot of garbage.
Just like Karl Marx, Hitler believed that the Jews were the capitalists. But unlike Marx, Hitler said that the Jewish capitalists were the puppet masters behind Marxism, which he says was working for the benefit of the capitalist Jews. In other words, he thought Marxism was a Jewish plot that only put socialism in the name to trick the workers. Hitler's anti-Semitism was his anti-capitalism and his anti-Marxism. So by denying his socialism, you're denying his anti-Semitism and in turn denying the Holocaust. "The internationalization of our German economic system, that is to say, the transference of our productive forces to the control of Jewish international finance, can be completely carried out only in a state that has been politically Bolshevized. But the Marxist fighting forces, commanded by international and Jewish stock exchange capital, cannot finally smash the national resistance in Germany without friendly help from outside." Yes, Jewish stock exchange capital. For Hitler, the Jews, the capitalists, and the Marxists are all one and the same.
This has led myself and German historian Rainer Zitelmann to conclude, contrary to the accepted Marxist interpretation, that Hitler was not an opponent of Marxism and did not want to destroy it because he was inimical to labor, but because he was caught up in the insane idea that Marxism was an instrument of the Jews for the achievement of world domination, and above all because he rejected internationalism, pacifism, and the negation of the personality principle by Marxism. Hitler also believed in the socialist idea of the shrinking markets, which is a variant of the Marxist tendency of the rate of profit to fall fallacy. This not only proves that Hitler had red marks, but it also shows that he believed in the now-debunked labor theory of value, without which the shrinking markets problem couldn't happen. The idea is that there's a crisis of capitalism where the profits would fall over time, and unable to produce more wealth in the domestic market, the capitalists would need to take more wealth from somewhere else. In the socialist view, this explains why capitalists conquered foreign markets and created empires, imperialism. It was because profits in the domestic market were shrinking. What's worse, they were running out of international markets as well, and thus the poor would be ever more exploited, leading to the revolution.
Hitler's interpretation of this supposed problem was a bit different. He said, "The Western industrial nations and the agricultural nations." Currently, he said, "The industrial nations trade their industrial goods for food from the agricultural nations." However, he said that as the profits shrank in the industrial nations, the capitalists would seek new markets in the agricultural nations. They would industrialize them, which would stop them from needing industrial goods from the Western nations. Thus, trade would end between the two types of nations, and a hunger crisis would crush the Western industrial nations. He said that this crisis would be exploited by the Jews, who would usher in their Marxist revolution and take over the world. He says this is dangerous because he also believes that nations were created by Aryans. He says that if the Jews interbreed with the Aryans and spoil their blood, nations will collapse, and it would be the end of civilization. He therefore says, "For a fight it will have to be, since the first objective will not be to build up the idea of the People's State, but rather to wipe out the Jewish state which is now in existence." As so often happens in the course of history, the main difficulty is not to establish a new order of things, but to clear the ground for its establishment. He says he can't implement full socialism or full autarky without clearing the ground first and without taking the living space and resources of the East. He has to conquer the East first to destroy the Jewish state before he can bring in full socialism. This is important to grasp because Hitler could only implement a half-socialism until he had conquered the Soviet Union and got the land and resources he needed. Lebensraum. So Hitler was a socialist, even if he failed to implement full socialism in the Third Reich. He was attempting to implement full socialism but failed to do so. At worst, that makes him a failed socialist, not a capitalist.
Once he had conquered the land and resources of the East, he didn't want to industrialize or capitalize Russia; he wanted to keep it rural with German farmer-soldier overlords and Slavic peasant slaves, and maybe just have the odd highway running through it. This was to combat the shrinking markets problem. If Germany stays industrial and Russia stays agricultural, and if both economies were rationally regulated, then they could trade indefinitely and thus prevent the collapse of civilization, leading to a Thousand-Year Reich. But the fact that he didn't want to industrialize the East not only shows it wasn't fascist imperialism but also proves it wasn't so-called state capitalism either. What should at least be noted is that Hitler, as his refusal to industrialize Russia demonstrates clearly, rejected the practice of capital export, which was characteristic for the phase of monopoly capitalism. Hitler also wanted to collectivize the race and create a People's State or People's Community (Volksgemeinschaft). The idea was to abolish distinctions between classes, genders, and so on, and equalize all Germans in the community. Arguably, he didn't achieve this, but there was an attempt to solve the class and gender problem. In other words, he was woke before many of you antifa lot were a twinkle in Mussolini's eye. But in order to make his People's Commune, he would have to centrally plan the removal of the capitalist Jews from society.
"The nationalization of the masses can be successfully achieved only if, in the positive struggle to win the soul of the people, those who spread the international poison among them are exterminated." Socialists claim that because Hitler killed Ernst Röhm, this is somehow proof that Hitler wasn't a socialist. Except Hitler killed Ernst Röhm because Röhm was a threat to him, and arguably because Röhm was planning a second violent National Socialist revolution. Ernst Röhm vs. Hitler has nothing to do with a socialism versus capitalism argument; it was a consolidation of power and a clash of views. The conflict between Hitler and Röhm was not a conflict between reaction and revolution, but more between the representatives of different models of revolution. The historian H. Mao probably gave the clearest description by saying that the conflict was between a revolution of the old school (Röhm) and a representative of modern revolution (Hitler).
There are various other counterarguments: if we don't give all our money to the plutocrats, who's going to build the roads? To take things, North Korea is a democracy, and the Roman Empire is socialist, according to Take. There's also the argument that no historian agrees with me, or that I'm mentally ill, or that I'm letting my pro-free market ideology cloud my judgment. But none of these arguments hold water, and they're all deflections. For example, all you have to do is Google the question, "Who's going to build the roads? Mises," and you'll get a million answers because it's been explained a million times before. Robert Lately has recently published a book called "Hitler's True Believers," which strongly argues that historians, or academia, which is heavily funded by the state and thus biased, have completely ignored the socialism inherent within National Socialism. And my so-called free market ideology isn't clouding my judgment because I came to the conclusion that Hitler was a socialist when I was a socialist. I saw the evidence and realized that Hitler was a socialist, and that his racism was his socialism, and that denying his socialism means you're denying his racism, which means you're denying the Holocaust, which I obviously couldn't do because of the evidence that the Holocaust happened. Upon realizing this, I instantly stopped being a socialist. And it was only after the initial backlash from the left and the accusations that I had read Mises, which I hadn't, that made me think, "Well, why are they all accusing me of reading Mises?" So I looked him up, and I'm glad I did. Every historian of the Third Reich needs to read Mises' "Omnipotent Government" at the very least, if not his book on "Socialism" and Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson," and Moira Offpart's "America's Great Depression," most of which are available as free PDFs at mises.org. So yes, contrary to the criticism, I was a socialist who saw the evidence and then abandoned the faith. The evidence led me to the conclusion, and the conclusion led me to the free market economics. It wasn't free market economics that led me to conclude that Hitler was a socialist. Plus, praxeology, the study of human action, which is inherent within history theory, is not an ideology. So this argument is utterly wrong, just as the idea that Hitler wasn't a socialist.
On that bombshell, here's one more final quote to end the video: "I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it. I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of the folk, made up of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate." Let me know what you guys think in the comments. The full five-hour video will be linked on the screen and in the description, and I encourage you to watch that for a full explanation of the argument. Thanks for watching, bye for now.