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National Socialism (common English short form Nazism, German: Nationalsozialismus) was the ideology practiced by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany.^[1][2][3][4] It is a unique variety of fascism that incorporates biological racism and antisemitism.^[5] Nazism was founded out of elements of the far-right racist völkisch German nationalist movement and the violent anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture that fought against the uprisings of communist revolutionaries in post-World War I Germany.^[6] The ideology was developed as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.^[7] Nazis' paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA) engaged in violent attacks upon the movement's opponents, particularly communists, Jews, and social democrats.^[8] The Nazis promoted German territorial expansionism to be Lebensraum ("living space") for German settlers.^[9]

Nazism advocated the supremacy of the claimed Aryan master race over all other races.^[10] It claimed that Jews are the greatest threat to the Aryan race.^[11] The Nazis claimed that Jews are a parasitic race that attached itself to various movements and systems to maintain its self-preservation, such as capitalism, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, liberalism, liberal democracy, Marxism, and trade unionism.^[11] To.^[12] To maintain the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.^[13] Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for immediate extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included: homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.^[13]

Nazism promoted an economic system that supported a stratified economy with classes based on merit and talent while rejecting universal egalitarianism, retaining private property, freedom of contract, and promoted the creation of national solidarity that would transcend class distinction.^[14][15] Hitler claimed that unconditional equality of opportunity for all able racially-sound Aryan German males in Germany was the essence of the socialism of German National Socialism.^[16] Initially Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, though such aspects were later downplayed in the 1930s to gain the support from industrial owners for the Nazis; the focus shifting to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.^[17] The Nazis criminalized strikes by employees and lockouts by employers for being contrary to national unity and the state took over the approval process of setting wage and salary levels.^[18]

The Nazis were presented by Hitler and other proponents and viewed by some scholars as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but politically syncretic.^{[19][20][21][22]} Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, he accused the political left of committing treason against Germany when left-wing politicians signed the Treaty of Versailles, he accused the political right as deserving equal reproach as the left, for being cowards in allowing the disarmament of Germany as stipulated by Versailles.^[23] However major elements of Nazism have been deemed as clearly far-right, such as its goals of the right of claimed superior people to dominate while purging society of claimed inferior elements.^[24]

Etymology[link]

The full title of Adolf Hitler's party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The term Nazi was an "acronym formed from the first syllable of NAtional and the second syllable of SoZIalist. Such terms, usually formed from the initial letters or syllables of successive parts of compound names, were popular in the Third Reich. Another typical example was Gestapo for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)."^[25]

Position in the political spectrum[link]

Führer Adolf Hitler (first from left side), Hermann Göring (second from left side), Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (third from left side), Rudolf Hess (fourth from left side).

Nazis alongside members of the far-right reactionary and monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP), during the brief Nazi-DNVP alliance in the Harzburg Front from 1931 to 1932.

A majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.^[26] Far right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over others and purge society of supposed inferior elements.^[24] Adolf Hitler and other proponents, however, officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.^[19][20] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:

Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.^[27]

The Nazis were strongly influenced by the post-World War I far-right in Germany, which held common beliefs such as anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Semitism, along with a chauvinist nationalism, contempt towards the Treaty of Versailles, and condemnnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice in November 1918 that later led to their signing of the Treaty of Versailles.^[28] A major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organizations that engaged in political violence immediately after World War I.^[29] Initially, the post-World War I German far right was dominated by monarchists, but the far right's younger generation, who were associated with völkisch nationalism, were more radical than the older generation and did not express any emphasis on a restoration of the German monarchy.^[30] This younger generation desired to dismantle the Weimar Republic and create a new radical and strong state based upon a martial ruling ethic that could revive the "Spirit of 1914" that was associated with German national unity (volksgemeinschaft).^[31]

The Nazis, the far-right monarchist and reactionary German National People's Party (DNVP), and others, such as monarchist officers of the German army and several prominent industrialists, who shared a common opposition to the Weimar Republic, formed an alliance on 11 October 1931 in Bad Harzburg, officially known as the "National Front", but commonly referred to as the Harzburg Front.^[32] The Nazis stated that the alliance was purely tactical and that there remained substantial differences between them and the DNVP. The Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and called themselves an anti-bourgeois party.^[33] The alliance with the DNVP broke in 1932 after the election in which DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag, with the Nazis denouncing them as "an insignificant heap of reactionaries".^[34] The denouncements by the Nazis upon the DNVP for its reactionary stances were responded by the DNVP denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their street violence, and the "economic experiments" that would take place if the Nazis rose to power.^[35]

There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.^[36]

The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.^[36] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler, who was more conservative than Göring; and Reinhard Heydrich.^[37]

The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels, hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasize both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's supposed socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.^[36] Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party gaining power in Germany in 1933.^[38] Of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), many were committed to the party's official socialist program.^[38] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, supported a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program, and he demanded the replacement of the nonpolitical German army with a Nazi-led army.^[38]

Prior to becoming an anti-Semite and a Nazi, Hitler had served the Bavarian Soviet Republic from 1918 to 1919, where he was elected Deputy Battalion Representative of his communist-led battalion, and he attended the funeral of communist Kurt Eisner (a German Jew), where Hitler wore a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on the other.^[39] Hitler's political beliefs had not yet solidified by then, and at that time he supported the idea of a classless society and was an anti-monarchist.^[39] In Mein Kampf, Hitler never mentioned his service with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and he claimed that he became an anti-Semite in 1913 in Vienna, when in fact he was not an anti-Semite at that time.^[40] Hitler massively altered his political views in response to the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, and it was then that he became an anti-Semitic German nationalist.^[40] As a Nazi, Hitler both in public and in private, had expressed opposition to capitalism; he regarded capitalism as having Jewish origins, and accused capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.^[41]

Hitler took a pragmatic position between the conservative and radical factions of the Nazi Party, in that he accepted private property and allowed capitalist private enterprises to exist as long as they obeyed the goals of the Nazi state, but if a capitalist private enterprise resisted Nazi goals, he sought to destroy it.^[36] Upon the Nazis achieving power, Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction, without Hitler's authorization to do so.^[42] Hitler considered Röhm's independent actions to be violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German army.^[43] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.^[43]

Alhough he opposed communist ideology, Hitler on numerous occasions publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism.^[44] Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.^[45] While Hitler always intended to eventually bring Germany into territorial expansionist conflict against the Soviet Union to gain Lebensraum ("living space"), Hitler supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front to crush liberal democracies, particularly France.^[44]

Origins[link]

A 1919 Austrian postcard depicting the "stab-in-the-back" legend, which blamed Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I.

On 5 January 1919, the locksmith Anton Drexler, and five other men, founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP — German Workers' Party), the predecessor of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP — National Socialist German Workers' Party).^[46][47] In July 1919, the Reichswehr intelligence department despatched Corporal Adolf Hitler, as a Verbindungsmann (police spy) to infiltrate and report on the DAP. His oratory so impressed the DAP members, they asked him to join the party, and, in September 1919, the police spy Hitler became the party's propagandist.^[46][48] On 24 February 1920, the DAP was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, against Hitler's preferred "Social Revolutionary Party" name.^[46] Later, in consolidating his control of the NSDAP, Hitler ousted Drexler from the party and assumed leadership on 29 July 1921.^[46]

The post-war crises of Weimar Germany (1919–33) consolidated Nazism as an ideology: military defeat in the World War I (1914–18), capitulation with the Treaty of Versailles, economic depression, and the consequent societal instability. In exploiting, and excusing, the military defeat, Nazism proffered the political Dolchstosslegende ("Legend of the Dagger-stab in the Back") ^[49] claiming that the Imperial German war effort was internally sabotaged, by Jews, socialists, and Bolsheviks. Proposing that, because the Reichwehr's defeat did not occur in Germany, the sabotage included a lack of patriotism among their political antagonists, specifically the Social Democrats and the Ebert Government, whom the Nazis accused of treason.

Nationalism, antisemitism and racism[link]

The seminal ideas of Nazism originated in the German cultural past of the Völkisch (folk) movement and the superstitions of Ariosophy, an occultism that proposed the Germanic peoples as the purest examples of the Aryan race, whose cultures feature runic symbols and the swastika. From among the Ariosophs, only the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society) in Munich, features in the origin of Nazism; they sponsored the DAP.^[46]

Phillip Wayne Powell writes that "in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a powerful surge of German patriotism was stimulated by the disdain of Italians for German cultural inferiority and barbarism, which led to a counter-attempt, by German humanists, to laud German qualities."^[50] M.W. Fodor wrote in The Nation in 1936, "No race has suffered so much from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Coué method of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority".^[51]

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, considered one of the fathers of German nationalism.

One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis came from the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works Hitler read, and who was recognized by other Nazi members including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.^[52] In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French, and stressing the need of action by the German nation to free itself.^[53] Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, and spoke of the need of a "People's War" (Volkskrieg), putting forward concepts much like those the Nazis adopted.^[53] Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to be purified. This priority included purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon rising to power.^[53]

Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism, and secularized urban industrial society, while advocating a "superior" society based on ethnic German "folk" culture and way of life, based upon German "blood".^[54] It also denounced foreigners, foreign ideas and declared that Jews, national minorities, Catholics, and Freemasons were "traitors to the nation" and unworthy of inclusion in the German Volk.^[55] Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism, viewed societies as organic, it extolled the virtues of rural life, condemned the neglect of tradition and decay of morals, denounced the destruction of the natural environment, and condemned "cosmopolitan" cultures such as Jews and Romani.^[56]

During the era of Imperial Germany, völkisch nationalism was overshadowed by both Prussian patriotism and the federalist tradition of various states within Imperial Germany.^[57] The events of World War I including the end of the Prussian monarchy in Germany, resulted in a surge of revolutionary völkisch nationalism.^[58] The Nazis supported such revolutionary völkisch nationalist policies.^[57] The Nazis claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire.^[59] The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.^[60] While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck's creation of the German Empire, he was critical of Bismarck's moderate domestic policies.^[61] On the issue of Bismarck's support of a Kleindeutschland ("Lesser Germany", excluding Austria) versus the pan-German Großdeutschland ("Greater Germany") of the Nazis, Hitler claimed that Bismarck's attainment of Kleindeutschland was the "highest achievement" that Bismarck could have achieved "within the limits possible of that time".^[62] In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a "second Bismarck".^[62]

The concept of the Aryan race that the Nazis used stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.^[63] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages.^[63] Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science.^[63] Contemporaries of Herder utilized the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture.^[63]

Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the nineteenth century, with white supremacists maintaining that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" that is superior to all other races, and particularly superior to the Semitic race, which they associated with "cultural sterility".^[63] Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race.^[64] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,^[64] emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan and Jewish cultures.^[63]

Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.^[63] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and anti-Semitism in Germany.^[65] Chamberlain's work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish" spirit of selfishness and materialism.^[65] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.^[64] The book became popular, especially in Germany.^[64] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.^[64] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.^[66]

Antisemitic caricature shortly after the stock market crash of 1873

Beginning in the 1870s, German völkisch nationalism began to adopt anti-Semitic and racist themes and was adopted by a number of radical right political movements.^[67]

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) was an anti-Semitic forgery created by police of the Russian Empire. Anti-Semites believed it was real and the Protocol surged in popularity after World War I.^[68] The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.^[69] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected and that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology.^[70] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.^[71]

Radical anti-Semitism was promoted by prominant advocates of völkisch nationalism including Eugen Diederichs, Paul de Lagarde, and Julius Langbehn.^[56] De Lagarde called the Jews a "bacillus, the carrier of decay...who pollute every national culture...and destroy all faith with their materialistic liberalism" and he called for the extermination of the Jews.^[72] Langbehn called for a war of annihilation of the Jews and Langbehn's genocidal policies were published by the Nazis and given to soldiers on the front during World War II.^[72]

Johann Gottlieb Fichte accused Jews in Germany of having been, and inevitably continuing to be a "state within a state" in Germany that was a threat to German national unity.^[53] Fichte promoted two options to address this: the first was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine to impel the Jews to leave Europe.^[73] The other option was violence against Jews, saying that the goal would be "To cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea".^[74]

The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German national unification because of Jewish infiltration of the German parliament, and that their abolition of parliament ended the obstacle to unification.^[59] Using the "stab in the back" legend, the Nazis accused German Jews, and other populaces it considered non-German, of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German anti-semitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the perennial far right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.^[75][76]

Nazism's racial policy positions were also developed from the views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the father of genetics, German botanist Gregor Mendel. Lamarckism was an important influence on Nazism.^[77] In particular the variant developed by Ernst Haeckel, was utilized by the Nazis.^[78] Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or lower evolution from apes, simply categorizing humans as a whole of all as having progressed in evolution from apes.^[79] Many Lamarckians viewed "lower" races as having been exposed to debilitating conditions for too long for any significant "improvement" of their condition in the near future.^[80] Haeckel utilized Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging from being wholly human to subhuman.^[77]

Mendelism was supported by the Nazis and also mainstream eugenics proponents at the time were Mendelian.^[81] Mendelian theory of inheritance declared that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to another.^[81] Proponents of eugenics used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children, including mental disability; others also utilized Mendelian theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists claiming a racial nature of certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behaviour.^[82]

Fascism and National Socialism[link]

During World War I, sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a "National Socialism" in Germany within what he termed the "ideas of 1914" that were a declaration of war against the "ideas of 1789" (the French Revolution).^[83] According to Plenge, the "ideas of 1789" that included rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism were being rejected in favour of "the ideas of 1914" that included "German values" of duty, discipline, law, and order.^[83] Plenge believed that ethnic solidarity (volksgemeinschaft) would replace class division and that "racial comrades" would unite to create a socialist society in the struggle of "proletarian" Germany against "capitalist" Britain.^[83] He believed that the "Spirit of 1914" manifested itself in the concept of the "People's League of National Socialism".^[84] This National Socialism was a form of state socialism that rejected the "idea of boundless freedom" and promoted an economy that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state.^[84] This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism due to the components that were against "the national interest" of Germany, but insisted that National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in the economy.^[84] Plenge advocated an authoritarian rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state.^[85]

Plenge's arguments at the time were recognized by a diverse group of people as an important argument in favour of social justice promoted within a strong state, including: right-wing Social Democrats Konrad Haenisch, Heinrich Cunow, Paul Lench and Kurt Schumacher; Conservative Revolutionaries including Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Max Hildebert Boehm; and Nazis including Ernst Krieck, Gottfried Feder and Eduard Stadtler.^[85] Plenge's ideas formed the basis of Nazism.^[83]

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler, a German cultural philosopher, was a major influence on Nazism, although after 1933 Spengler became alienated from Nazism and was later condemned by the Nazis for criticizing Adolf Hitler.^[86] Spengler's conception of nationali socialism and a number of his political views were shared by the Nazis as well as the Conservative Revolutionary movement.^[87] Spengler's views were also popular amongst Italian Fascists, including Benito Mussolini.^[88]

Spengler's book The Decline of the West (1918) written during the final months of World War I, addressed the claim of decadence of modern European civilization, whicht he claimed was caused by atomizing and irreligious individualization and cosmopolitanism.^[86] In Decline of the West, Spengler's major thesis was that a law of historical development of cultures existed involving a cycle of birth, maturity, aging, and death when it reaches its final form of civilization.^[89] Upon reaching the point of civilization, a culture will lose its creative capacity and succumb to decadence until the emergence of "barbarians" create a new epoch.^[89] Spengler considered the Western world as having succumbed to decadence of intellect, money, cosmopolitan urban life, irreligious life, atomized individualization, and the end of biological fertility as well as "spiritual" fertility.^[89] He believed that the "young" German nation as an imperial power would inherit the legacy of Ancient Rome and lead a restoration of value in "blood" and instinct, while the ideals of rationalism would be revealed as absurd.^[89]

In Preussentum und Sozialismus ("Prussiandom and Socialism", 1919), Spengler described "socialism" outside of a class conflict perspective, saying: "The meaning of socialism is that life is controlled not by the opposition between rich and poor, but by the rank that achievement and talent bestow. That is our freedom, freedom from the economic despotism of the individual."^[87] Spengler utilized the anti-English ideas addressed by Plenge and Sombart during World War I that condemned English liberalism and English parliamentarianism while advocating a national socialism that was free from Marxism that would connect the individual to the state through corporatist organization.^[86] Spengler claimed that socialistic Prussian characteristics existed across Germany, including creativity, discipline, concern for the greater good, productivity, and self-sacrifice.^[90]

Spengler's definition of socialism did not advocate a change to property relations.^[87] He denounced Marxism for seeking to train the proletariat to "expropriate the expropriator", the capitalist, and then to let them live a life of leisure on this expropriation.^[91] He claimed that "Marxism is the capitalism of the working class" and not true socialism.^[91] True socialism, according to Spengler, would be in the form of corporatism, stating that "local corporate bodies organized according to the importance of each occupation to the people as a whole; higher representation in stages up to a supreme council of the state; mandates revocable at any time; no organized parties, no professional politicians, no periodic elections."^[92]

In Preussentum und Sozialismus Spengler prescribed war as a necessity, saying "War is the eternal form of higher human existence and states exist for war: they are the expression of the will to war."^[93]

Benito Mussolini (centre in suit with fists against body) along with other Fascist leader figures and Blackshirts during the March on Rome.

Fascism was a major influence on Nazism. The seizure of power by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome in 1922 drew admiration by Hitler who less than a month after the March had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.^[94] After the March on Rome, Hitler presented the Nazis as a German fascism.^[95][96] The Nazis attempted a "March on Berlin" modelled upon the March on Rome that resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923.^[97] Although Hitler strongly admired Mussolini and fascism, other Nazis — especially more radical Nazis such as Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler — rejected Italian Fascism, accusing it of being too conservative or capitalist.^[98] Alfred Rosenberg condemned Italian Fascism for being racially confused and having influences from philo-Semitism.^[99] Strasser criticized the policy of Führerprinzip as being created by Mussolini, and considered its presence in Nazism as a foreign import.^[100] Throughout the relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a number of lower-ranking Nazis scornfully viewed fascism as a conservative movement that lacked a full revolutionary potential.^[100]

Ideology[link]

Greater Germany in 1943, including annexed or occupied territories of other countries

The Nazis advocated a strong, central government under the Führer, for defending Germany and the German nation, the Volk, against communism and Jewish subversion. To the end of establishing Großdeutschland (Greater Germany), the German peoples must acquire Lebensraum (living space) from Russia.^[101]

Europe, with pre-WW2 borders, showing the extension of Generalplan Ost, i.e., the massive depopulation and ethnic cleansing within German Lebensraum.

Hitler, the Führer of Nazi Germany

From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf, a two-volume, biography and political manifesto.^[102]

Though Hitler for "tactical" reasons had rhetorically declared a 1920 party platform with socialist platitudes "unshakable," actually "many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans...Point 11, for example...Point 12...nationalization...Point 16...communalization.... put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism."^[103] In actual practice, such points were mere slogans, "most of them forgotten by the time the party came to power.... the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them."^[103] Historian Conan Fischer argues that the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective socialist, which the saw as inseparable from the adjective national, and meant it as a socialism of the master race, rather than the socialism of the "underprivileged and oppressed seeking justice and equal rights."^[104]

Social class[link]

In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower- and working-class young people:

The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.^[105]

Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party to the working class was neither true^{[dubious – discuss]} nor effective, because its politics mostly appealed to the middle class, as a stabilizing, pro-business^{[dubious – discuss]} political party, not a revolutionary workers' party.^[106][106] Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis.^[106] In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA — Storm Detachment).^[106]

Sex and gender[link]

Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church).^{[citation needed]}

Opposition to homosexuality[link]

Homophobia: Berlin Memorial to Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust; Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen (Struck Dead—Hushed Up)

After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated."^[107] In 1936, Himmler established the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion").^[108] The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.^[109] As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.^[110][111]

Racial policy[link]

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The Master Race: the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) depicts German war hero Karl von Müller as an exemplar Nordic type of the Herrenvolk.

A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in Buchenwald concentration camp. The Nazis sought the extermination of the Jewish people through the genocide known as the Holocaust.

Soldiers of the Free Arabian Legion of the German Army in Greece, September 1943.

Captured Soviet soldiers of Turkestani backgrounds were drafted in large numbers into the Ostlegionen of the Wehrmacht. France, 1943.^[112]

Haj Amin al-Husayni meeting with Adolf Hitler in December 1941.

Hitler viewed race as being in a hierarchy, and spoke of the "aristocratic idea of nature" in which there existed an inequality of races where the superior and higher values of the Aryan race was the basis of all civilization.^[113] Through struggle and proper "breeding", the "strong" would subdue the "weak" and rise to dominance.^[113] Nazi policy since 1920 emphasized that only people of "German blood" could be considered German citizens while no one of Jewish descent could be a German citizen.^[114] To maintain the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.^[13] Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included: homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.^[13] The number of German blacks was low, but there were some instances of them being enlisted within Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and later the Wehrmacht.^[115]

The racist subject of Nazism is Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism, who must unite under Nazi Party leadership, and, per the spartan nationalist tenets of Nazism: be stoic, self-disciplined and self-sacrificing until victory.^[116]

The Jewish–Bolshevism conspiracy theory derives from anti-Semitism and anti-communism; Adolf Hitler claimed to have first developed his worldview from living and observing Viennese life from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro–Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; per his interpretations, atop were the "Aryans", the ultimate, white master race, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom.^[101]

However, recent research strongly suggests that Hitler's virulent antisemitism was mostly a post war development, product of influences from the Russian civil war and that in his Vienna years it played little part in his thinking.^[117] The idea of the Russian roots of Nazism has been explored by Walter Laqueur^[118] and more recently filled out in much more detail by Michael Kellogg^[119]

Their ideas were synthesized by the Reichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a pseudoscientific treatise proposing that: "[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape".^[120] According to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf.^[121]

Sketch plan of Treblinka extermination camp. Between the years 1942 and 1943, more than 850,000 Jews were murdered there and only 54 survived.

.

Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering under them and dispensed concerns about such conflict being inhumane or an injustice, saying:

We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.^[122]

Nazi eugenics: "We Do Not Stand Alone" (1936).

Schutzstaffel insignia: white Sig Runes on a black background

In Germany, the master-race populace was realised by purifying the Deutsches Volk via (see: eugenics; the culmination was involuntary euthanasia of disabled people, and the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded. The ideologic justification was Adolf Hitler's consideration of Sparta(11th c.–195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:^[123][124]

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."^[125]

Church and State[link]

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Hitler receives the papal nuncio Cesare Orsenigo, on January 1, 1935

Point 24 of the Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations not inimical to the State and endorsed Positive Christianity to combat “the Jewish-materialist spirit”.^[126]

Relations between the Nazi state and the Catholic Church were regulated by the Concordat signed in July of that year, an agreement upheld by both parties despite breaches which were criticized in 1937 in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical With Burning Anxiety (Mit brennender Sorge).^[127]

The historian Joachim Remak thought that political innocence and misjudgement of the Nazis' true aims played their parts in the churches' acceptance of the new regime.^[128] Traditional Christianity in Germany had also been undermined by racist and pagan ideologues in the 19th century who had progressively stripped Christianity of its "Jewish" features" and attempted to remould the biblical Christ into an "Aryan" superman.^[129]

Hitler respected the power of the Catholic Church and was wary of the negative effect any open confrontation might have on German public opinion.^[130] Hitler saw the churches as embodying a socially conservative element that could not be replaced by party ideology.^[131] He was prepared to tolerate them as long as they recognised the supremacy of the State and did not interfere in secular affairs.^[132]

Dissenting voices were heard in both mainstream churches, especially on the question of the regime's policy of euthanasia.^[133] In the case of the Catholic Church opposition was expressed by individual priests and bishops who were punished by internment in concentration camps.^[130] Goebbels retaliated to growing criticism by orchestrating occasional smear campaigns in the press against priests and monks, often "arraigned in the courts on trumped-up charges ranging from financial malfeasance to sexual aberrations".^[133]

Memorial tablet on the YMCA building in Berlin-Kreuzberg commemorating meetings of Confessing Church activists

The historian Klaus Hildebrand gives a figure for 1937 of 800 members of the Confessing Church being arrested for their opposition.^[134] Official harassment of the churches ceased on the outbreak of war.^[135] While party fanatics like Bormann continued to press for a campaign against the churches (Kirchenkampf), Hitler wanted this postponed until after the war.^[136][137] Both mainstream churches continued to supply chaplains to the armed forces and offered prayers for the Führer from their pulpits.^[138] By the war's end the relationship between the Nazi state and the churches was still a "major unresolved issue".^[139]

Thule Society[link]

Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology.^[140] Generally, the society's lectures and excursions comprised anti-Semitism and Germanic antiquity, yet it is historically notable for having fought as a paramilitary militia against the Bavarian Soviet Republic.^[141][142] The DAP was initially supported by the Thule Society — but Hitler quickly excluded them in favour of a mass movement political party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics.^[143]

Luther and Nazi propaganda[link]

Julius Streicher

The Nazis publicly displayed an original of Martin Luther's On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies, and the city also presented a first edition of it to Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, which described Luther's treatise as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.^[144][145] Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse published a compendium of Martin Luther's writings shortly after Kristallnacht; in the introduction, he approved of the burning of synagogues and mentioned the coincidental date: "On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." He urged Germans to heed the words "of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews."^[146]

Luther's tract 'On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)

Scholars debate the extent of Luther's influence and whether it is anachronistic to view his work as a precursor of the racial antisemitism of the National Socialists. Some scholars see Luther's influence as limited, and the Nazis' use of his work as opportunistic. Biographer Martin Brecht points out that "There is a world of difference between his belief in salvation and a racial ideology. Nevertheless, Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch said that On the Jews and Their Lies was the blueprint for Kristallnacht.^[147] His misguided agitation had the evil result that Luther fatefully became one of the 'church fathers' of anti-Semitism and thus provided material for the modern hatred of the Jews, cloaking it with the authority of the Reformer."^[148] Theologian Johannes Wallmann, however, said Luther's anti-Semitic tract exercised no continual influence in Germany, that it was mostly ignored during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[149] Uwe Siemon-Netto agreed, arguing that it was because the Nazis were already anti-Semites that they revived Luther's work.^[150][151] Hans J. Hillerbrand agreed that to focus on Luther was to adopt an essentially ahistorical perspective of Nazi antisemitism that ignored other contributory factors in German history.^[152]

Economics[link]

Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934)

Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than "parasitical".^[153] Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals, the state could nationalize it.^[154] Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.^[155] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Adolf Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.^[156][157]

To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.^{[citation needed]} Farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed.^{[citation needed]} That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards, to control production and prices with a quota system.^{[citation needed]}

Anti-communism[link]

Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post-World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility to small businessmen, and its atheism.^[158] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.^[14]

During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to "Jewish Marxism."^[159] Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism and internationalism.^[160]

In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term ‘Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not."^[161] In 1931, during a confidential interview with influential editor Richard Breiting of the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, a pro-business newspaper, Hitler said: "I want everyone to keep what he has earned, subject to the principle that the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State ... The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners."^[162] In 1942, Hitler privately said: "I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative".^[163]

During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain; the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France; and the Cliveden Set, Lord Halifax, and associates of Neville Chamberlain in Britain.^[164]

Anti-capitalism[link]

The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences.^[158] Nazi propaganda posters in working-class districts emphasized anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."^[165]

Hitler, both in public and in private, expressed strong disdain for capitalism, accusing modern capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.^[166] He opposed free-market capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld.^[153] He distrusted capitalism for being unreliable, due to its egotistic nature, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk.^[166] Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews."^[166] Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that "Capitalism had run its course".^[166] Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them."^[167] Hitler admired Napoleon as a role model for his anti-conservative, anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois attitudes.^[168] However, Hitler had little tolerance for Goebbels insistence upon adherence to socialist ideas and alliance with leftist and socialist parties as Hitler had abandoned them by the time the party rose to power. In correspondence Goebbels tried to convince Hitler the Nazis and the left share a common enemy in capitalists, however, Hitler disagreed and adamantly stated that capitalists are not the enemy of Nazis.^[169]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism, in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.^[170] He believed that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.^[171] He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.^[170]

A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA).^[172] Röhm claimed that the Nazis' rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist "second revolution" was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled.^[42] Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.^[42] Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German army.^[43] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.^[43] Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels adamantly stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary that if he were to pick between Bolshevism and capitalism, he said "in final analysis", "it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism."^[173]

Strasserism[link]

Gregor Strasser, founder of Strasserism.

The Strasser brothers considered capitalism stained by Jewish finance, and called for a working-class, genuinely socialist and ultra-nationalist revolution following Hitler's rise to power (which they called a half-revolution), emphasizing the socialist component of National Socialism and proposing a cooperative economic ministry to direct Germany's economy in a more left-wing and guild-based direction.^[174][175]

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

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