Hitler, Fascism and the right wing

[2aguy]

Indeed. I am sure the socialists who died in Auschwitz would be surprised to hear that they were living in a socialist country - especially given socialism was banned at the time.

This is a particularly stupid comment....I had this point brought to my attention on martialtalk....by an English woman who was highly emotional who claimed her family were socialists in Germany at the time.....

What is so hard to grasp about the idea that two groups of socialists....each with a different style of socialism....one who didn't give a rats ass about socialists in the Ukraine, and only cared about Germans.....the other a group of socialists who wanted a worldwide socialist existance....fighting each other for power and supporters in Germany...and when the one group lost, the international socialists.....the other left wing socialist did what socialists tend to do the world over....he sent his enemies to their deaths.....

again, the brain of the left has a sadly reduced area for rational thought, where truth and facts have a hard time finding a home....

 

[Iceweasel]

I very much sgree with Frigidweirdo in the left/right issues.

I run a small business, support nuclear power and think the death penalty has a role in crininal justice. I think our VAT rate is too high, and I think capitalism is the best solution to world poverty.

I also consider myself left wing, because my basic ideology is based on social justice and equal opportunity. Everything else stems from that.

And there's the problem. The right is for those things as well so you are misrepresenting facts. If the above is true I fail to see why you would go down that road, it makes no sense.

Likewise with Hitler, everything stemmed from the class system and the use of private capital, along with racial superiority, nationalism and a very conservative view of Germany's past and traditions. That was the core of his thinking.

I think a lot of posters have fallen into the trap of thinking that Hitler's form of capitalism was not 'pure' thus was not capitalism at all. That isn't the case at all - even a jaundiced, imperfect use of capital is still capitalism by definition.

I posted the definition of capitalism. I'll do it again since you don't understand what it means.

Capitalism - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Full Definition of CAPITALISM
: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

So to say it was less than perfect capitalism ignores the very foundation of capitalism itself, namely the capitalist decides how to interact in the marketplace with his capital. He fails or wins accordingly. Capitalism isn't controlled by the state.

Hanging your hat on the racial/national aspect to demonstrate how it can't be socialist is false, as I've posted before. This is from a historian (since you asked)...

Hitler and the socialist dream - Arts and Entertainment - The Independent
The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause. Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?"

The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.

 

[2aguy]

The conclusion of John Rays paper....and he explains very concisely why the "right" cannot be totalitarian......unlike the left that eventually gets there....

This is the heart of the point we on the "Right" conservatives, libertarians, tea party members make about right vs. left...especially here in America...

The account of Left/Right attitudes given in this paper suggests why this is so. For a start, the assumption that Fascists or Nazis are Right-wing is false. Hitler himself energetically claimed to be a socialist and Mussolini (the founder of Fascism) was a lifelong Marxist. The evidence for this has been summarized at great length in two previous papers (See Musso.txt and Hitler.txt on my website) so will not be further elaborated here.

Historically, the core of conservatism has always been a suspicion of government power and intervention and conservatives therefore accept only the minimum amount of government that seems needed for a civil society to function. So it is no wonder that there is no authoritarian version of conservative ideology. If it were authoritarian it could not be conservative.

Leftism, on the other hand, IS intrinsically authoritarian and power-loving and will always therefore tend in the direction of government domination. It is only non-authoritarian to the extent that is thwarted by external influences (such as democracy) from achieving its aims. Leftists in democratic societies do of course commonly deny authoritarian motivations but that is just part of their "cover". Deeds speak louder than words.

CONCLUSIONS

Although Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies have (thankfully) never gained power on anything like the scale achieved by Mao and Stalin, there have of course been Leftist governments and influential Leftist politicians in the economically successful "Western" democracies countries on many occasions and these have certainly managed to lay the stifling and impoverishing hand of bureaucracy on many endeavours. The twin disciplines of the ballot box and constitutional constraints have however limited what such politicians and governments can do. Their power has always been far from absolute.

But in all cases, bitter experience has shown that Leftists in power are very dangerous and destructive people. Where their power is effectively unchecked, they generally seems to resort sooner or later to mass murder (as in the case of the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Jim Jones and many Communist regimes and movements worldwide) and where they are partially thwarted by strong democratic traditions and institutions, they at least bring about large-scale impoverishment (as in post-independence India and pre-Thatcher Britain). By contrast, conservatives just muddle along with piecemeal reforms that don't require them to murder anybody. So giving any power to Leftists is a most dangerous thing to do and working to prevent that happening is a matter of no small importance.

 

[2aguy]

Hitler controlled the German economy...he was a socialist and socialism is a left wing economic system....to pretend otherwise is odd, because the other socialists, the communists, also controlled their economy....but the main point....the left wants to disown hitler because his crimes were public...everyone knows that he murdered at least, if not more, than 12 million people.....his death camps were liberated and his minions were put on trial for the world to see....

Not so his communist colleagues....their mass murder was hidden in vast empty places and was covered up by western fellow travelers like walter duranty and their agents in the west...who did everything they could to promote their brand of socialism and followed the orders of their socialist masters in the soviet union....the communist mass murder in China was hidden as well....and even today...you have people in obama's administration quoting mao favorably....and without shame....

So, the left has been able to hide the fact that leftism and socialism at it's worst leads to mass murder on a scale that is just hard for regular people to understand...as stalin or lenin is said to have pointed out....one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic....

Except for hitler....there is no way for them to hide his mass murder....and beside this, he didn't want socialism on an international scale...so the international socialists were against him for that....and the fact that at the outset he defeated them in Germany just really pissed them off....so they have every reason to separate his brand of socialism from theirs....

And the icing on the cake...........they can use him to smear their enemies.....that is not only a sound tactic...but they find much glee in claiming he was a capitalist....knowing that it isn't true....

The left knows one thing better than anyone else....they know how to lie, and lie big....and that is what they do with hitler....

 

[2aguy]

And the economic plans of the nazis...

HITLER WAS A SOCIALIST

But there is no claim that Hitler was WHOLLY like modern democratic Leftists. In ways other than those so far mentioned, Hitler was, as has already been detailed to some extent, more like his Communist predecessors.

Ludwig von Mises speaks of those similarities. Writing in 1944 he said:"The Nazis have not only imitated the Bolshevist tactics of seizing power. They have copied much more.

They have imported from Russia the one-party system and the privileged role of this party and its members in public life; the paramount position of the secret police; the organization of affiliated parties abroad which are employed in fighting their domestic governments and in sabotage and espionage, assisted by public funds and the protection of the diplomatic and consular service; the administrative execution and imprisonment of political adversaries; concentration camps; the punishment inflicted on the families of exiles; the methods of propaganda.

They have borrowed from the Marxians even such absurdities as the mode of address, party comrade (Parteigenosse), derived from the Marxian comrade (Genosse), and the use of a military terminology for all items of civil and economic life. The question is not in which respects both systems are alike but in which they differ..."

(For those who are unaware of it, Von Mises was an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a remarkably prescienteconomist. He got out of Vienna just hours ahead of the Gestapo. He did therefore have both every reason and every opportunity to be a close observer of Nazism. So let us also read a bit of what he said about the Nazi economy

The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend, enforce price control within a market economy. With them price control was only one device within the frame of an all-around system of central planning. In the Nazi economy there was no question of private initiative and free enterprise.

All production activities were directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual's tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.

What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control.

Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.

And let us look at the words of someone who was actually in Germany in the 1930s and who thus saw Nazism close up.

He said:"If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed."

Oh....but...I thought all historians said hitler wasn't a socialist.....except of course this guy.....a guy who lived at the time......

So who said that? It was the famous historian, Eric Hobsbawm (original surname: Obstbaum), who became a Communist instead and who later became known as perhaps Britain's most resolute Communist. Hobsbawn clearly saw only slight differences between Communism and Nazism at that time. And as this summary of a book (by Richard Overy) comparing Hitler and Stalin says:"But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.'

What did this "historian" say about nazis and communists........

And despite the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned industries.

[QUOTE]In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism. [/QUOTE]

As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies.'"

And again....what did hitler actually say......

And let us listen to Hitler himself on the matter:"There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will."

Soooo, again....you guys are wrong....hitler was a socialist....and a leftist....which is why we can't allow leftism to attain power....it always leads to death camps.....

 

[Saigon]

Bill -

I'm going to list 8 right-wing totalitarian socitites, and I'd like you to explain why or how they are not right-wing ir totalitarian, ok?

Is that fair?

Pinochet
Stroessner
Antonescu
Franco
Cristiani
Rios montte
Hungary - the Iron Guard
Argentina - the Dirty Generals

 

[Saigon]

Iceweasel -

Are you ready to stop dodging now?

Care to man up and answer one single question?

 

[Iceweasel]

Bill -

I'm going to list 8 right-wing totalitarian socitites, and I'd like you to explain why or how they are not right-wing ir totalitarian, ok?

Is that fair?

Pinochet
Stroessner
Antonescu
Franco
Cristiani
Rios montte
Hungary - the Iron Guard
Argentina - the Dirty Generals

Define right wing.

 

[dcraelin]

and a very conservative view of Germany's past and traditions. That was the core of his thinking.

Important point....Hitler and the Nazis kind of worshiped their own batch of founding fathers. This is similar to the American Conservatives.

 

[Iceweasel]

Iceweasel -

Are you ready to stop dodging now?

Care to man up and answer one single question?

Care to quit shoveling bullshit? Who do you think you're fooling?

 

[Saigon]

Weasel -

No one is disputing the meaning if capitalism. At least, not that I have seen.

Corporations in Germany were privately owned and often share listed - therefore it was a capitalist scoiety by your own definition.

There are entire books on the topic - which you refuse to read.

Spare us the endless C&Ps and start answering the questions you have dodged for days. Why do tou keep running away?

 

[2aguy]

Bill -

I'm going to list 8 right-wing totalitarian socitites, and I'd like you to explain why or how they are not right-wing ir totalitarian, ok?

Is that fair?

Pinochet
Stroessner
Antonescu
Franco
Cristiani
Rios montte
Hungary - the Iron Guard
Argentina - the Dirty Generals

I just responded with John Rays piece....military dictatorships can in fact be seen as "right' in a sense....but hitler was a lefty and a socialist.....

As to each of them....couldn't say...haven't studied them all...and I wouldn't trust you to accurately portray them since you still insist that hitler...a well known historical figure was a socialist and a lefty....

You can't see that so why would I believe what you say about the lesser known guys.....?

 

[Iceweasel]

and a very conservative view of Germany's past and traditions. That was the core of his thinking.

Important point....Hitler and the Nazis kind of worshiped their own batch of founding fathers. This is similar to the American Conservatives.

LOL.

 

[Saigon]

Iceweasel -

Are you ready to stop dodging now?

Care to man up and answer one single question?

Care to quit shoveling bullshit? Who do you think you're fooling?

Will you answer, or not?

It's a fairly simple question. Yes or no?

No does mean you concede defeat, of course.

 

[Meathead]

Hitler was anti-capitalist and a socialist. Get over it.

 

[2aguy]

.Hitler and the Nazis kind of worshiped their own batch of founding fathers.

Dude....you are delusional....granted....it comes from being educated in a government school run by democrats...but please....get an education....

 

[Saigon]

I just responded with John Rays piece....military dictatorships can in fact be seen as "right' in a sense....but hitler was a lefty and a socialist.....

You claimed right-wing dictatorships do exist.

I named EIGHT.

Answer the question, or concede defeat.[/QUOTE]

 

[Iceweasel]

Weasel -

No one is disputing the meaning if capitalism. At least, not that I have seen.

Corporations in Germany were privately owned and often share listed - therefore it was a capitalist scoiety by your own definition.

There are entire books on the topic - which you refuse to read.

Spare us the endless C&Ps and start answering the questions you have dodged for days. Why do tou keep running away?

Capitalists control their own capital, as i posted. Play your little girl games elsewhere, asshole.

 

[Saigon]

Hitler was anti-capitalist and a socialist. Get over it.

Actually, he banned socialism. Get over it.

 

[Iceweasel]

Iceweasel -

Are you ready to stop dodging now?

Care to man up and answer one single question?

Care to quit shoveling bullshit? Who do you think you're fooling?

Will you answer, or not?

It's a fairly simple question. Yes or no?

No does mean you concede defeat, of course.

Hitler and the socialist dream - Arts and Entertainment - The Independent
In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.
Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

That brutal view, which a generation later was to be fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been eager to forget it. But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.

So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it until after the war.

The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause. Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.

The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled. Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after 1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality". The Moscow view that fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German socialism".

By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.

By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a "physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that "a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind. The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes". Hitler had already come close to socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as "the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an economic free-for-all does not.

At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971 as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until 1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as recently as 1985. Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.

Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We are the first to exhume these teachings." The Jew, Hitler told Wagener, was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.

These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."

That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive, at once traditional and new. Like all so- cialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.

That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and "real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.

The Lost Literature of Socialism by George Watson is published by Lutterworth