Were Hitler and the Nazis politically Left or Right Wing?
In order to answer the question as to whether we can ascertain if the Nazis were ideologically left wing or right wing, we must first define some very important terms and also the acceptable context of the answer to the question.
For the purposes of this paper I am going to use American definitions and argue from the American perspective, I will also define the two ends of the political spectrum so we are clear as to what things are definitively left wing and what things are definitively right wing.
Left wing Ideology definition
Most of us can agree that today’s left-wing definition comes from Marx philosophy so we are looking at the following idealisms
1. Socialism
2. Egalitarianism
3. Collectivism
4. Large Government
Right wing Ideology definition
Right wing philosophy comes from the likes of Adam Smith and John Locke
1. Laissez-Faire Capitalism
2. Conservatism
3. Individuality
4. Small Government
These definitions typically manifest in the following ways
FIG 01 — Economic Policy
Left Wing Income equality; higher tax rates on the wealthy; government spending on social programs and infrastructure; stronger regulations on business.
Right Wing Lower taxes; less regulation on businesses; reduced government spending; balanced budget.
Healthcare Policy
Left Wing Access to healthcare is a fundamental right of all citizens. Support universal healthcare, the Affordable Care Act, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid.
Right Wing Oppose government-provided universal healthcare and the Affordable Care Act. Favour competition to Medicare from private insurance companies; oppose Medicaid expansion.
Immigration Policy
Left Wing Pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; moratorium on deportations or prosecutions of undocumented immigrants who are young adults and have no criminal record.
Right Wing No “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants; stronger border patrol and fence to check illegal immigration. Belief that illegal immigration is lowering wages for citizens and documented immigrants.
Education Policy
Left Wing Favour expanded free, public education.
Right Wing Believe parents who want to home-school their kids or send them to private school should be able to opt out of the public-school system. Generally, not opposed to public education.
Abortion
Left Wing Generally, in favour of unpenalised access to abortion.
Right Wing Generally, against abortion rights.
Gay Rights
Left Wing Generally, support gay marriage; support anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBT against workplace discrimination.
Right Wing Generally opposed to gay marriage; opposed to certain anti-discrimination laws because they believe such laws conflict with important freedoms.
Gun Rights
Left Wing In favour of gun control laws like background checks or waiting periods before buying a gun; banning automatic weapons; and disallowing concealed weapons.
Right Wing Strongly opposed to gun control laws; strong proponents of the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), believing it’s a deterrent against authoritarian rule.
Environmental Policy
Left Wing Preferring to ban economic activity that may create jobs but could potentially harm the environment, favourable towards climate change.
Right Wing Belief the free market will find its own solution to environmental problems. Generally, against climate change action.
Voter ID Laws
Left Wing Against voter ID.
Right Wing For voter identification laws to combat voter fraud.
Core Beliefs
Left Wing Minority rights, economic equality, gun control, environmental protection, expanded educational opportunity, social nets.
Right Wing Limited Government at National or Federal Level. Local Governments should have the most control over decisions affecting local population. Individual freedom and personal property rights.
Famous Proponents
Left Wing Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Einstein, Francois Hollande, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, Warren Buffett.
Right Wing Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Washington, Winston Churchill, George W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tony Abbott, Mitt Romney
Another important area of discussion is nationalism, most people tend to think, due to Fascism and more specifically Nazism that nationalism is inherently a ‘right wing’ ideology but throughout history there have been plenty of left-wing nationalists, here is a link to Wikipedia that shows quite clearly that there has been a massive history of left wing nationalists, meaning it is not restricted to one ideological position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Left-wing_nationalist_parties
The Premise
At this point I will clearly and openly state what I believe to be true and then provide the evidence for this in a systematic way using comparative analysis, historical records and reasoned argument.
Stage 1: Spectrum Comparative analysis
I am going to take the list from FIG01 in order to compare them with what the Nazis believed and how they were applied.
Economic Policy
The official state platform for the Nazis included:
· State-Controlled Healthcare
· Profit sharing for workers in large corporations
· Money lenders and profiteers punished by death
· State control of Education
· State control of media and the press
· State control of banks and industries
· Seizure of land without compensation
· State control of religious expression
Read this list at a democratic convention today and possibly aside from death as punishment, they would be absolutely for it, and the only reason for the condition of death is because the democrats have not gone so far as to become communists.
Healthcare Policy
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany (1933–45) based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilisation and extermination of those who they saw as sub-humans, which culminated in the Holocaust.
This policy come directly from the Nuremberg Laws 1935 the anti-Semitic and racist laws that Nazis created in order to ‘deal with the Jews’, it helped them do things like define what a Jew was, whether for example the question of whether a Jew with a Jewish father but a German mother could be classed as a Jew, they considered the ‘one drop rule’ where it was defined at the time as ‘Any discernible black ancestry makes one count as black’ but even that was ‘too racist’ for them so they decided on Jewish descent using the black laws created by democrats as their template.
Racism is however not unique to Fascism, it is within communism too, this first appeared in January 1849, in Marx’s journal, “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” Engels wrote about the class war, in Marxist terms.
FIG02 “When socialist revolution happens, war class happens, there will be primitive societies in Europe, two stages behind, because they are not even capitalists yet. And he had in mind the Basques, Bretons, the Scottish islanders, the Serbs. He calls them ‘racial trash’. And they would have to be destroyed, because being two stages behind in the historic struggle, it would be impossible to bring them up to the point of the revolutionary.”
Education Policy
Hitler’s hatred of intellectualism is clear from his statement “Put young men in the army, whence they will return refreshed and cleansed of eight years of scholastic slime” (Pine, 2010), in communism the aim was to produce zealous revolutionaries ready to rebel against the old society and fight to establish a new order, the reason for this difference in opinion I will assert was that he was a nationalist fighting for his cause, he did fully control the curriculum and indoctrinated those children in education in exactly the same way as communists, but Hitler’s preference was nationalism and in his case he had a war to fight.
Abortion
Germany’s eugenics laws liberalised abortion for both Aryan and non-Aryan women, Hitler himself send letters of admiration to Margret Sanger, a woman who wrote about wanting to wipe out a portion of America, she was a self-styled eugenicist and creator of the organisation called ‘Planned Parenthood’.
Gay Rights
Many believe that Hitler hated gay people because he executed leaders of the brownshirts who had challenged his authority in the “night of the long knives” but Hitler knew that the leader of the brownshirts Ernst Röhm was a homosexual as were many other brownshirts, then Hitler went to arrest Röhm he encountered Röhm in bed with another man and all Hitler cared about was that Röhm was going about telling everyone he was the true leader of the Nazi party. Heinrich Himmler a main architect of the Holocaust urged Hitler to purge homosexuals from the brownshirts Hitler refused saying that he did not care what the brownshirts did in private as long as they were good fighters.
Gun Rights
The perennial gun-control debate in America did not begin in America. The same arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration. Law-abiding persons complied with the law, but the Communists and Nazis committing acts of political violence did not.
In 1931, Weimar authorities discovered plans for a Nazi takeover in which Jews would be denied food and persons refusing to surrender their guns within 24 hours would be executed. They were written by Werner Best, a future Gestapo official. In reaction to such threats, the government authorised the registration of all firearms and the confiscation thereof, if required for “public safety.” The interior minister warned that the records must not fall into the hands of any extremist group.
This particular policy was not anything to do with the Nazis, but the removal of guns was implemented and kept under Nazi occupation.
Stage 2: Communist comparative analysis
The Premise
We are all aware of the argument most people make regarding the Nazis, that they were not socialists even though Hitler specifically changed the parties name from “German Workers Party” to the “National Socialist German Workers Party”, but the question remains as to whether what the majority of people believe was in fact the truth, that Nazism has nothing to do with socialism.
Let’s first define socialism and compare what the Nazis believed to Marx philosophy, I have already demonstrated that their policies seem to have been very ‘left wing’, that their economic policies seem to form joinder with left wing idealisms, but like the Nordic countries, just because you have higher tax, social healthcare and abortion for example, that certainly does not make you a socialist country, and having socialist tendencies, the antithetical of Laissez-Faire Capitalism is a leading definition of ‘left wing’.
Socialism, the definition
The definition of socialism in the Oxford dictionary is described as
“A political and economic theory of social organisation which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
A much simpler definition was from Mussolini himself
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
The question is, can this description be applied to Nazi Germany?
Most would attempt to argue that since businesses owned their businesses and the state did not own them, then it was a capitalist society. It would also be only too easy simply to state that the Oxford dictionary is very specific in saying “owned or regulated“, not “owned and regulated” so let’s look a little deeper.
This is where it gets a little grey in regards to the definition, so to make it easier we can see what the Nazis said about comparing their ideology to communism
Joseph Goebbels championed Lenin, not Hitler, as liberator of Germany. He fought to secure the Nazi alliance with Soviet Russia. He emphasised the socialism in National Socialism. Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis would install “real socialism” after Russia’s defeat in the East. And Hitler’s favourite Albert Speer, the Nazi armaments minister whose memoir became an international bestseller, wrote Hitler viewed Stalin as a kindred spirit, ensuring his POW son received good treatment, and even talked of keeping Stalin in power in a puppet government after Germany’s eventual triumph.
Hitler described the bourgeoisie as “worthless for any noble human endeavour, capable of any error of judgment, failure of nerve and moral corruption.” In 1931 as the Nazis gained power in elections, Goebbels wrote an editorial warning about these newcomers so-called “Septemberlings,’ the bourgeoisie intellectuals who believed they could wrest the party what from they considered the “demagogue” old guard. One of the reasons Hitler persecuted the Jews was because he believed they were the bourgeoisie destroying Germany. This sort of cull was sanctioned by Marx himself when within FIG02.
Fredrich Hayek, a major social theorist and political philosopher describes Nazism as a “genuine socialist movement” and thus left wing by modern American standards. Indeed, the Austrian-born Hayek wrote the book from his essay ‘Nazi-Socialism’ that countered prevailing opinion at the London School of Economics where he taught. British elites regarded Nazism as a virulent capitalist reaction against enlightened socialism — a view that persists today which explains current and historical academic bias on this subject.
Bibliography
Pine, L. (2010). Education in Nazi Germany .
