In , for example, 15, Germans died in nine days of fighting between left-wing groups and right-wing groups on the streets of Berlin. Into that environment stepped Adolf Hitler, a failed artist from Braunau am Inn, Austria, who recognized the unique vulnerabilities of not just the German political system but the German populace itself, a populace that had just lost 19 percent of its male population to the war and was still enduring massive food shortages nationwide.
Far from it. In fact, in July , Hitler briefly left the NSDAP because an affiliate of the party in Augsburg signed an agreement with the German Socialist Party in that city, only returning when he had been largely given control of the party itself. Whatever interest Hitler had in socialism was not based on an understanding of socialism that we might have today — a movement that would supplant capitalism in which the working class would seize power over the state and the means of production.
A horrible night! Surely one of the greatest disappointments of my life. But Hitler did not agree. You see, the great mass of workers only wants bread and circuses. Ideas are not accessible to them and we cannot hope to win them over.
We attach ourselves to the fringe, the race of lords, which did not grow through a miserabilist doctrine and knows by the virtue of its own character that it is called to rule, and rule without weakness over the masses of beings. In fact, Hitler dismisses even the idea of challenging the status of capitalism, telling Strasser that his socialism is actually Marxism and making the argument that powerful businessmen were powerful because they were evolutionarily superior to their employees.
They have acquired this right by natural selection: they are members of the higher race. But you would surround them with a council of incompetents, who have no notion of anything. No economic leader can accept that. Strasser then asks him directly what he would do with powerful steel and arms manufacturer Krupp, known today as ThyssenKrupp.
Would Hitler permit the company to stay as big and powerful as it was in ? The state will only intervene if people do not act in the interest of the nation. There is no need for dispossession or participation in all the decisions. The state will intervene strongly when it must, pushed by superior motives, without regards to particular interests.
He is making the case for fascism — in his view, not just an ideal system to organize government, but the only real option. However, in the Nazi imagination, communism was recast as Judeo-Bolshevism. Judeo-Bolshevism claims that communism was a Jewish plot designed at German expense.
The existence of a communist state so close to Germany was not merely a political threat, but also an existential racial and ideological threat. For Nazis, both Jews and communists were made worse by their supposed identification with one another. As soon as the Nazis rose to power, they began targeting communists, both inside and outside Germany. In , the first concentration camp opened at Dachau to hold political prisoners.
The first prisoners were all communists. Later in the Nazis banned all political parties. They intensified the targeting of Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. As early as —before the Nazi regime had made any significant moves against Jews or the disabled—German Communists were detained in mass arrests and tortured.
Once the war began, the Commissar Order demonstrated the depth of Nazi fear and hatred of communism. Bergen, Doris. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Evans, Richard J.
The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Books, Evans, Richard. The Third Reich in Power, New York: Penguin, Hanebrink, Paul. Hayes, Peter.
Explaining the Holocaust. New York: Norton, More left-leaning members of the Nazi party were also targeted; Otto Strasser and his brother Gregor followed a strand of Nazism that wanted to remove the elites Hitler courted from power. Gregor was killed along with other pro-worker members during the Night Of the Long Knives.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content— here. News this year has fractured communities, and caused confusion and panic for many of us. No one can control what will happen next. But you can support a debate based on fair, accurate and transparent information. As independent, impartial fact checkers, we rely on individuals like you to ensure the most dangerously false inaccuracies can be called out and challenged.
Yes, Mussolini had been a socialist early during the First World War, but broke with his comrades to support Italian expansionism, and then formed his fascist party to crush them.
As in fascist Italy, Nazi ideas were self-consciously formulated to negate those of the left, not to imitate them. When Hitler took over the party in , he shredded the anti-capitalist parts of the old party's platform.
This was a politics forged in the late days of the German revolution, when Hitler began to imagine Germany assailed by a double threat of Jews and Bolsheviks emanating from the Russian east: "Judeo-Bolshevism. Far from supporting anti-colonial movements at the time, as did socialists around the world, he admired the British Empire as a paragon of "Aryan" rule over inferiors, and hoped to cooperate with the British in rescuing Western civilization from Soviet "Asiatic" barbarism.
Under Hitler, the party looked squarely to the middle classes and farmers rather than the working class for a political base. Hitler realigned it to ensure that it was an anti-socialist, anti-liberal, authoritarian, pro-business party - particularly after the failed Beerhall Putsch of The "socialism" in the name National Socialism was a strategically chosen misnomer designed to attract working class votes where possible, but they refused to take the bait.
The vast majority voted for the Communist or Social Democratic parties. The minority anti-capitalist strand of Nazism Strasserism on which van Onselen fastens was eliminated well before , when Gregor Strasser and the Storm Trooper SA leader Ernst Roehm were murdered with over eighty others in the "Night of the Long Knives.
Here, Hitler brought the dissidents back into line, denouncing them as "communists" and ruling out land expropriations and grassroots decision-making.
He heightened the party's alliance with businesses small and large, and insisted on the absolute centralisation of decision-making - the " Fuehrer leader Principle. When the already isolated Strasser brothers tried to reinvigorate their project one last time in , Hitler and Goebbels banded together to force Otto Strasser to leave the party and Gregor Strasser to publicly recant.
The "Night of the Long Knives" purged the old SA, not because they were a hidden vestige of socialism, but because Roehm's army of street thugs were a potential threat to Hitler's personal consolidation of power.
A struggle over socialism in the Nazi party played absolutely no role in the purge of For their part, businesses welcomed the Nazis' promises to suppress the left. On 20 February , Hitler and Goering met with a large group of industrialists when Hitler declared that democracy and business were incompatible and that the workers needed to be dragged away from socialism.
He promised bold action to protect their businesses and property from communism. The industrialists - including leading figures from I. Farben, Hoesch, Krupp, Siemens, Allianz and other senior mining and manufacturing groups - then contributed more than two million Reichsmarks to the Nazi election fund, with Goering tellingly suggesting that this would probably be the last election for a hundred years.
Business leadership happily jettisoned democracy to rid Germany of socialism and to smash organised labour. After fighting four elections between and on an anti-left and anti-Jewish platform that pledged to slay the mythical beast of "Judeo-Bolshevism," Hitler became Chancellor in and made good on his promises to business and his voters to destroy socialism in Germany.
Most of was spent persecuting socialists and communists, liquidating their parties, incarcerating and in numerous cases killing their leadership and rank-and-file members.
0コメント