In a 1923 interview with pro-Nazi writer George Sylvester Viereck, Hitler said, “In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work.”
In Hitler’s version of National Socialism, socialism was “Aryan” and focused on the “commonwealth” of everyday Germans — a group of people he unites as one based entirely on their race. In that same interview with Viereck, Hitler added:
“Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic... We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”
Both Otto Strasser and his brother Gregor paid the price for challenging Hitler and advocating for socialism within the Nazi party. Gregor was murdered during the Night of Long Knives in 1934, a mass purge of the left wing of the Nazi Party in which between 85 and 200 people were killed as part of an effort, in Hitler’s words, to prevent a “socialist revolution.” Otto Strasser fled Germany, ultimately seeking refuge in Canada.
Of party leader and dissenter Otto Strasser (whose similarly-minded brother, Gregor, would ultimately be assassinated by the Nazis), William Shirer writes:
Unfortunately for him, he had taken seriously not only the word “socialist” but the word “workers” in the party’s official name of National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He had supported certain strikes of the socialist trade unions and demanded that the party come out for nationalization of industry. This of course was heresy to Hitler, who accused Otto Strasser of professing the cardinal sins of “democracy and liberalism.” On May 21 and 22, 1930, the Fuehrer had a showdown with his rebellious subordinate and demanded complete submission. When Otto refused, he was booted out of the party.
This excerpt from a speech Hitler gave in 1922 (quoted in William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published in 1960) is indicative:
Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of the nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, “Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land — that man is a Socialist.
Hitler was never a socialist. But although he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state.
The “National Socialists” wanted to unite the two political camps of left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity.