What the fuck? You think Nazi Germany wasn't a centrally planned economy?
You just can't see through the fog of Democrat programming. That's the most ignorant thing I've seen you say, and there's some pretty stiff competition for that title
The Nazi's allowed private ownership of property and of industry. The state set rules and goals on production - but did not own the means of production nor did the people own the means of production. You can logically argue it was a hybrid of socialism and capitalism and Naziism in entirety was a mongrel ideology. Turning Hitler into a leftwing socialist is (not surprisingly) a modern attempt at rewriting history.
Debunking the claim that Hitler was socialist
The Myth: Adolf Hitler, starter of World War 2 in Europe and driving force behind the Holocaust, was a socialist.
The Truth: Hitler hated socialism and communism and worked to destroy these ideologies. Nazism, confused as it was, was based on race, and fundamentally different from class focused socialism.
Hitler as Conservative Weapon
Twenty-first century commentators like to attack left leaning policies by calling them socialist, and occasionally follow this up by explaining how Hitler, the mass murdering dictator around whom the twentieth century pivoted, was a socialist himself. There’s no way anyone can, or ever should, defend Hitler, and so things like health-care reform are equated with something terrible, a Nazi regime which sought to conquer an empire and commit several genocides. The problem is, this is a distortion of history.
Hitler as the Scourge of Socialism
Richard Evans, in his magisterial three volume history of Nazi Germany, is quite clear on whether Hitler was a socialist: “…it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth of, socialism.” (The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans, p.
173). Not only was Hitler not a socialist himself, nor a communist, but he actually hated these ideologies and did his utmost to eradicate them. At first this involved organizing bands of thugs to attack socialists in the street, but grew into invading Russia, in part to enslave the population and earn ‘living ‘ room for Germans, and in part to wipe out communism and ‘Bolshevism’. More on the early Nazis.
The key element here is what Hitler did, believed and tried to create. Nazism, confused as it was, was fundamentally an ideology built around race, while socialism was entirely different: built around class. Hitler aimed to unite the right and left, including workers and their bosses, into a new German nation based on the racial identity of those in it. Socialism, in contrast, was a class struggle, aiming to build a workers state, whatever race the worker was from. Nazism drew on a range of pan-German theories, which wanted to blend Aryan workers and Aryan magnates into a super Aryan state, which would involve the eradication of class focused socialism, as well as Judaism and other ideas deemed non-German.
When Hitler came to power he attempted to dismantle trade unions and the shell that remained loyal to him; he supported the actions of leading industrialists, actions far removed from socialism which tends to want the opposite. Hitler used the fear of socialism and communism as a way of terrifying middle and upper class Germans into supporting him. Workers were targeted with slightly different propaganda, but these were promises simply to earn support, to get into power, and then to remake the workers along with everyone else into a racial state. There was to be no dictatorship of the proletariat as in socialism; there was just to be the dictatorship of the Fuhrer.
...Before 1934 some in the party did promote anti-capitalist and socialist ideas, such as profit-sharing, nationalization and old-age benefits, but these were merely tolerated by Hitler as he gathered support, dropped once he secured power and often later executed, such as Gregor Strasser. There was no socialist redistribution of wealth or land under Hitler – although some property changed hands thanks to looting and invasion - and while both industrialists and workers were courted, it was the former who benefitted and the latter who found themselves the target of empty rhetoric. Indeed, Hitler became convinced that socialism was intimately connected to his even more long standing hatred - the Jews – and thus hated it even more. Socialists were the first to be locked up in concentration camps. More on the Nazi rise to power and creation of the dictatorship.
The key parts of socialism are elimination of the class structure, collective and/or social ownership of all property and of the means of production. In terms of economy, the
broad objectives of socialism are
"to increase the material and cultural standards of the people, to attain full employment and 'to achieve economic equality." Typically a redistribution of wealth or land to achieve that. Most of that is not a component of Hitler's ideology - and stating state control (not ownership) over the economy, alone, does not make it socialism.
No shit....that's not even open for debate....
Fascism depends on socialism to control the people of industry (owners and workers)....without socialism, fascism can't exist....
And that my friend, is left wing....
Fascism controls the people through authoritarianism and nationalism. Not socialism.
Wrong.
Prove it.
Business Under Nazis
In 1944, Ludwig von Mises published one of his least-known masterworks:
Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Drawing on his prewar experience in Vienna, watching the rise of the National Socialists in Germany (the Nazis), who would eventually take over his own homeland, he set out to draw parallels between the Russian and German experience with socialism.
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. "The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer's goods for his consumption."
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern "maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets." But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. "Market exchange," says Mises, "is only a sham."
Mises's account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is
The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year-old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the "monster machine" of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
"Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessmen for the preceding two, three, or more years until some error or false entry was found," explains Reimann. "The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error."
Reimann quotes from a businessman's letter: "You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except 'distributing the wealth.' Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
"While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a 'profiteer' or 'saboteur,' followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
"There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the 'white Jews' (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen."
As Mises says, we are "independent" only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist "must be servile to the representatives of the state" and "must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred." It's the businessman, characteristically independent, who is "most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously."
"Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party," recounts Reimann. "The party man, whose goodwill he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz's bakery and Herr Schmidt's butcher shop. He would regard these men as 'enemies of the state' if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble."
"Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations," Reimann explains. "The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling."
Says another businessman: "Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law."
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a "collaborator," i.e., a "lawyer" with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who "knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law." Nazi officials, explains Reimann, "obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection," paying for their protection "as did the helpless peasants of feudal days."
"It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory," laments a factory owner. "Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office."
Reports another factory owner: "The greater part of the week I don't see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see." In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, "practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake." Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and "we shall take away the freedom still left you."
In 1933, six years before Reimann's book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: "It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there's not a sound from anyone. Everyone's keeping his head down."
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann's account of doing business under the Nazis and the "compassionate," "responsible," and regulated "capitalism" of today's U.S. economy. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
