During Thursday’s live discussion between Elon Musk and Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the nationalist Alternative for Germany ( AfD ) party in February’s election, on the X ( formerly Twitter ) platform, both participants made many hard-to-verify claims, several 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 off: Weidel said Adolf Hitler was not “right-wing”, but a” communist”. This historical sophistry, an effort to recount the history of National Socialism, is hardly new. As patriots rise in international politicians, it is often being repeated.
Claim: “]The National Socialists ] nationalised the whole business…. Adolf Hitler’s label as correct and conservative was the biggest success from that bad time in history. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a traditional…. He was a communist, communist guy”, Weidel told Musk. In a follow-up meeting with the European journalist ntv, she frequently emphasised:” I don’t stray from this either: Adolf Hitler was a marxist”.
DW fact check: False
This state trivializes the crimes committed between 1933 and 1945 under the leadership of Hitler and the Nazis. The AfD has made numerous attempts to range itself from Nazism, which is frequently categorized as much right to extraordinary right in Germany. Right-wing politicians in the United States, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have also spread false statements about Germany’s Nazi history ( read DW’s fact check on these claims here ). Many individuals online seem to feel the AfD president’s claim anyway.
” What Ms. Weidel is saying is pure nonsense, which I don’t want to market by taking it seriously”, German scholar Thomas Sandkühler told DW via internet.
Michael Wildt, a prominent writer of the Third Reich, likewise told DW that Weidel’s state was “huge bullshit”.
” Hitler fought Marxism fiercely and cruelly straight from the start”, Wildt said,” and the first patients to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed in the concentration camps in 1933 were socialists, communists, Social Democrats and communists”.
Hitler’s plans instantly contradicted the objectives of socialism. ” From an economic point of view in special, Hitler was hardly a communist”, Thomas Weber, writer and author of the book Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, told DW. “Economically, socialism aims to overcome personal property, to defeat a profit-oriented market, and to move the most important means of production ( like mines and factories ) and natural resources into popular property”, Weber said. Hitler refrained from pursuing these objectives.
He was a discriminatory and an ideologue, he claimed.
Because he was an ideologue and a racist, Hitler can’t be called a communist, according to Wildt. And that is exactly the opposite of what a communist world would look like.
National Socialism’s democratic movement wasn’t actually socialism. And it didn’t just start with Hitler’s day; it had already started after World War I, becoming more and more firmly rooted in World War II. ” National Socialism was extremely patriotic, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, racist, racist, colonial and anti-communist”, according to the Brandenburg Center for Political Education site, which adds that the bigoted rejection of minorities up to and including murder played a key role in the ideology.
Some of the suggestions of socialism were used by National Socialism to help it get working-class votes before it gained power in 1933. But, the Nazi labor and cultural regulations that followed led to the destruction, oppression, and crime of socialists, Social Democrats and trade unions.
” The important point here is that, from Hitler’s and some National Socialists ‘ point of view, the’ communism’ in the group name was not an unoccupied formula or a trick”, Weber said. Instead, it outlined Hitler’s perspective on himself and his desire to restore the globe. Both in private and public, he constantly stressed this.
Before the NSDAP took office in 1933, there was a self-declared communist wing, but this was abandoned. Hitler had Gregor Strasser, a leading figure in this aircraft, killed in June 1934, along with other competitors within the group. The so-called Strasser wing was equally racist and racist as the rest of the NSDAP, despite its attempts to create a national socialist movement in favor of the European working class.
Most historians have long agreed that National Socialism may be confused with socialism for these reasons. Officials also make attempts for political purposes, according to Weber.
” This problem is often discussed very just — along the lines of: was Hitler left-wing or right-wing”? Weber said. ” And then either the right-wing side attempts to portray Hitler as a classic socialist and leftist, which is absurd, or there is an attempt to conjure up Hitler and the National Socialists ‘ use of the term” socialism” as an electoral campaign ploy. That doesn’t make feeling either, because it ignores how Hitler and the National Socialists defined themselves, how they saw the earth, and how they tried to change the world”.
