During a live discussion on the Many of which DW’s fact checkers have already looked into.
But one claim in particular about the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), or Nazis, and World War II was particularly false: Weidel said that Adolf Hitler was not a “rightist” but a “communist.” This historical revisionism, the attempt to retell the history of National Socialism, is not new. This is being repeated again and again as nationalists rise in international politics.
claim: ,[The National Socialists] Nationalized the entire industry. …The greatest success since that terrible era in our history was to declare Adolf Hitler right and conservative. He was quite the opposite. He was not conservative. … He was a communist, a socialist,’ Weidel told Musk. In a follow-up interview with German broadcaster NTV, he repeatedly stressed: “I am not distracted by this: Adolf Hitler was a leftist.”
DW Fact Check: False
This claim is false and trivializes the atrocities committed under Hitler and the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. The AfD, which is often classified as far from the far right in Germany, has repeatedly tried to distance itself from Nazism. Right-wing politicians in the United States, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, have also spread false statements about Germany’s Nazi history (read DW’s fact check on these claims here). Yet many people online appear to believe the AfD leader’s claim.
“What Ms. Weidel is saying is sheer nonsense, which I don’t want to take seriously and publicize,” German historian Thomas Sandkühler told DW via email.
Michael Wildt, a prominent historian of the Third Reich, also told DW that Weidel’s claim was “a lot of nonsense”.
“Hitler fought Marxism fiercely and brutally from the beginning,” Wildt said, “and the first victims to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed in concentration camps in 1933 were leftists, communists, social democrats, and socialists.”
Hitler’s policies directly contradicted the goals of communism. Historian and book author Thomas Weber said, “Especially from an economic point of view, Hitler was not a communist.” Becoming Hitler: The Making of a NaziTold DW. Weber said, “Economically, the goal of communism is to overcome private property, overcome a profit-oriented economy, and transfer the most important means of production (such as mines and factories) and natural resources into common property.” Hitler rejected these objectives.
‘He was anti-Semitic and racist’
Wildt said, “Hitler also cannot be described as a communist because he was anti-Semitic and racist.” “And it has nothing to do with the idea of a communist society in which people are equal – rather, it is quite the opposite.”
The political movement of National Socialism was not actually socialism. And it emerged not just in Hitler’s time, but had already emerged after World War I, and was increasingly leading to World War II “National Socialism is extremely nationalistic, undemocratic, anti-pluralistic, anti-Semitic, racist. , was anti-imperialist and anti-communist,” according to the Brandenburg Center for Political Education website, which states that racist exclusion and even genocide of minorities played a central role in the ideology.
National Socialism benefited from some of the ideas of socialism, using them to win the votes of the working class on its way to taking power in 1933. However, this was followed by the repression, persecution and murder of communists and social democrats due to Nazi labor and social legislation. And trade unionists.
Weber said, “The essential point here is that from the point of view of Hitler and many National Socialists, ‘Socialism’ in the name of the party was not an empty formula or gimmick.” “Rather, it defined how Hitler saw himself and how he wanted to remake the world. He emphasized this repeatedly in private and in public.”
In the early days of the NSDAP, there was a self-proclaimed socialist wing, but it was abolished before the party came to power in 1933. Hitler executed Gregor Strasser, a leading figure in this wing, along with others in June 1934. Opponent within the party. Although the so-called Strasser wing sought National Socialism on the side of the German working class, it was just as racist and anti-Semitic as the rest of the NSDAP.
For these reasons, most historians have long agreed that National Socialism cannot be equated with socialism. But there are politicians who still try to do it for political reasons, Weber said.
“This question is usually discussed very narrowly – like: Was Hitler a leftist or a rightist?” Weber said. “And then either the right wing tries to portray Hitler as a classic socialist and a leftist, which makes no sense, or an attempt by Hitler and the National Socialists to downplay the use of the word ‘socialism’ in the election campaign. That’s a trick. It also doesn’t make sense, because it ignores how Hitler and the National Socialists defined themselves, how they tried to change the world.”
This article was originally written in German.