Why did Hitler then have all the socialists killed, like Ernst Roehm, in the "Night of the Long Knives:?
Despite naming themselves the national socialist party, the Nazi’s policies - including the persecution of left-wing critics - did not align with socialist ideals.
fullfact.org
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The Nazis were not socialists
Multiple posts on social media have claimed that the Nazi party were socialists, due to their full name—the
National Socialist German Workers' Party.
This
argument has been
used to attack socialism through association with Nazi policies. It has also led to confusion, as Nazism is normally associated with fascism and far-right-wing views.
The issue of whether the Nazis were socialists isn’t a straightforward one, due to how the Nazi party developed and grew its base of support. But the consensus among historians is that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were not socialists in any meaningful sense.
Historians have regularly disavowed claims that Hitler adhered to socialist ideology. Historian Richard Evans
wrote of the Nazis’ incorporation of socialist into their name in 1920, “Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism….Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism”. Or as simply put by historian and Hitler expert Ian Kershaw, “
Hitler was never a socialist.”
Socialism, for supporters of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, appeared to
substitute Marx’s idea of class war with a race one.
The Nazis didn’t create the term “National socialism” themselves; both the left-leaning
Czech National Socialist Party and right-leaning
Austrian National socialism movement predated the Nazi party in Germany. The term was added to the party’s title in 1920—turning the German Worker’s Party into the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. This, along with their
manifesto, was done to appeal to the working classes.
This can lead to confusion as to what national socialism meant. Though they sometimes
described themselves as
socialist, their general ideology and treatment of left-wing figures reflected their true views.
In Hitler’s speeches, he established his idea of socialism as something only for select Germans the Nazi party deemed worthy. In his 1920
speech “
Why We Are Anti-Semites” he claimed Judaism was the opposite of socialism by aligning it with capitalism at a time when
Germany’s workers were suffering.
In the same year, the party outlined their party
programme, which included a number of points which could be seen to align with socialist and anti-capitalist ideals. However, historian of the period Karl Dietrich Bracher has referred to the programme as “
propaganda” through which Hitler gained support and then discarded once he achieved power.
Hitler worked closely with industrialists—in
1933 he held a meeting with a number of German industrial figures and gained their trust by speaking of the communist threat. In return, they gave millions of Reichmarks to fund the Nazi party in the upcoming elections. Many
developed close relationships with the Nazi regime and flourished under the ideology—the
Krupp family supplied Germany with arms during World War Two, readily dismissed Jewish employees, and it's then head Alfried Krupp joined the Nazi party in 1938.
Hitler also
suppressed trade unions and
refused to
give the
homes of German princes to the people, as he felt this would move the party towards communism.
Socialists, along with other left-wing political activists
opposed the Nazi regime and were persecuted under it. The Communist Party and Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany were banned in
1933, along with the limitation of the power of all those who opposed Nazi rule.
Many SPD members were arrested, sent to concentration camps, or
exiled to Prague, Paris and London. The first concentration camp in
Dachau, built-in 1933, was intended to
inter the Nazi’s left-wing opponents. Hitler was also vocally
critical of the “November criminals”—those who led Germany after the First World War and signed the
Armistice and the
Treaty of
Versailles. These leaders were social democrats.
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.
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