Racism uber alles 0
Auschwitz looms as a testament to the rabid quest for 'racial purity' undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis. But rather than a product of the Left or the Right, writes Queen's professor Timothy Smith, Nazism was 'tyranny with an unabashedly brutal face.'
Was Hitler a socialist? Certainly he had nothing in common with the strain of Social Democracy that emerged during the 1930s in Scandinavia and survives there and in Germany. This variant of socialism respects the rule of law and private property; it is not under examination in this article.
But was Nazism related to Soviet-style socialism? Hitler’s party was, after all, named the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Early on, the party’s message was peppered with anti-big-business and anti-labor-union rhetoric alike. Some of the early leaders of the party (Hitler did not take full control for several years after joining it) were anti-capitalist, and Hitler’s early speeches can indeed be mined for denunciations of high finance and monopoly capitalism, which Hitler equated with the Jews.
These criticisms are largely rooted in Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his contempt for the profiteering of large firms during the war—they don’t stem from a sympathetic reading of Marx. In power, the Nazi party expanded the welfare state, just as Mussolini had done in Italy, and just as conservative governments did in France. Hitler subsidized leisure programs and he increased the value of family allowances (for those deemed racially “fit”). But this does not make him a socialist.
The Nazis were obsessed with the class conflict in general, and they strove to “solve” it—on their authoritarian terms. But the pursuit of racial “purity” was Hitler’s revolutionary principle. His social policy was always subordinated to his racial policy. Hitler’s world-view revolved around biological determinism; the Soviets’ world-view centred on the inevitability of the class conflict.
Under Hitler, rampant individualism would be replaced by a martial devotion to the racially pure Nation. The Nazis were suspicious of many traditional institutions. Hitler was no conservative, even if he needed, and got in 1933, the reluctant support of conservative leaders naive in the belief that they could control him.
Hitler displayed no ideological commitment to curtailing the rights of private property. He mobilized a war economy, and like the democracies during both World Wars, he requisitioned factories, but he accepted the basic contours of capitalism. There was no plan to collectivize German farms, nor were businesses and bank accounts taken over for the sake of taking them over.
Jews and political enemies were robbed of their property and eventually their lives. The Nazis’ willingness to violate property rights stemmed entirely from their racism and militarism; the state did not direct the production of basic consumer goods, as it did in the USSR.
One cannot understand Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the USSR without reference to his ideology of “Jewish Bolshevism.” Describing his own political awakening in Vienna, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “in this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names ... Marxism and Jewry.”
Addressing the judge at the trial of the Beer Hall Putsch conspirators, a failed coup d’état Hitler launched in 1923, he said: “I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism.” Shortly after becoming Chancellor, Hitler imprisoned Socialist and Communist leaders on trumped-up charges. Next he murdered several of them and demolished their unions and political parties.
Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler had contempt for individual political rights, that quaint bourgeois notion. Like the Soviets, Hitler crushed civil society, politicizing everyday life, from the composition of city councils to the boards of directors of charities and athletic clubs.
Soviet-style Socialism was tyranny with a supposedly humane goal—the abolition of poverty, the dawning of equality, and the liberation of the individual from the alienation of modern industrial life and the backwardness of quasi-serfdom in the countryside. Hitler had no such concerns. Nazism was tyranny with an unabashedly brutal face. The end goal was certainly European domination (some historians believe world domination), the elimination of the Jews and the Marxists, and the enslavement of Eastern Europeans.
Communism and fascism treated individuals as mere abstractions, to be murdered or imprisoned if need be. But the end goals were profoundly different. Hitler did not seek to overthrow capitalism. If he threw “socialistic” crumbs of comfort to the workers who toiled in his war machine it was not out of ideological commitment. His concern was to prop up his regime and to ensure “racial fitness.” Like the men who ruled the USSR, Hitler was, in politics, a collectivist - but he was no socialist. The difference is more than semantic. Hitler was first and foremost a racist whose associated military goals required a form of intervention in the economy that should not be confused with socialism.
Timothy Smith is a history professor at Queen's University and an expert in modern European history.