SSDD
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- Nov 6, 2012
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I found one of the old posts I was looking for to bring forth (never use the quote function on this site to set aside a quote-- search ignores it)-- the quotations here will be rendered in blue with topical emphais added:
The German Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler had objected to the party's previous leader's decision to use the word "Socialist" in its name, as Hitler at the time preferred to use "Social Revolutionary". Upon taking over the leadership, Hitler kept the term but defined socialism as being based upon a commitment of an individual to a community. Hitler did not want the ideology's socialism to be conflated with Marxian socialism.
... Nazism, or National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus) in full, was the ideology of the Nazi Party in Germany and related movements outside Germany. It is a variety of fascism that incorporates biological racism and antisemitism. Nazism developed in Germany from the influence of the far-right racist Völkisch German nationalist movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture which fought against the communists in post-World War I Germany.
... The Nazis were strongly influenced by the post-World War I far-right in Germany, which held common beliefs such as anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Semitism, along with nationalism, contempt towards the Treaty of Versailles, and condemnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice in November 1918 that later led to their signing of the Treaty of Versailles. A major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organizations that engaged in political violence after World War I.
-- Nazism
March 20, 1933 - Dachau Opens - Heinrich Himmler, SS leader and chief of the Munich police, announces the opening of the Dachau concentration camp. The camp is located about 10 miles northwest of Munich in southern Germany. Dachau is one of the first concentration camps the Nazis establish. The first prisoners arrive two days later. They are mainly Communists and Socialists and other political opponents of the Nazi party.
In the space of fourteen months in 1935-36, 2,197 persons from left-wing circles were arrested in Berlin alone. In 1936, 11,687 persons were arrested throughout Germany for illegal socialist activity. In 1936 the Gestapo seized 1,643,200 illicit leaflets distributed by the Communist and Social-Democratic Parties alone and, in 1937, 927,430.
---- History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945 (p. 16)
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior.
Nazism is a right wing ideology. It is violently racist, anti-socialist, and it targets the political left for extermination. This is underscored by Albert Einstein's embrace of socialism throughout his life -- and in particular in his 1949 essay, Why Socialism? -- along with the fact that Einstein's name was included on a nazi death list with a bounty of $50,000 offered for his assassination. If nazism really is socialism, why would Einstein have identified himself as a socialist a scant four years after WWII?