Were the Nazis Left-Wing?: The parallels between Nazism and communism complicate the standard left–right divide. (Gerfried Ambrosch, 24 Feb 2025, Quillette)
Hitler himself, however, did consider Nazism a form of socialism. In a 1923 interview, he stated,
Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. 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.
In other words, Hitler considered Marxian communism a socialist heresy. Yet his description of National Socialism as “socialism in evolution, a socialism in everlasting change” echoes the Marxist view of history as a process of dialectical change.Although Hitler’s version of socialism did not, as he put it, “repudiate private property,” it shared with communism a strong emphasis on collectivism over individualism, with the state not only enforcing the supposed interests of the collective but claiming identity with it. In this regard, the two movements were less ideological enemies than competitors—with liberal democracy as their common enemy. To quote F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, “The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic.”
This also helps explain the strikingly similar iconographies that emerged in the totalitarian regimes the Nazis and communists went on to establish. Both these popular movements conceived of history as being propelled by “revolutionary struggle” and sought to remake man in the image of their respective ideologies. Hitler commented, “There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism … above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former communists to the party immediately.” According to Hitler, “all these new means of the political struggle used by us are Marxist in origin.”
And the parallels run deeper than means and mentality alone.