The Nazis
were Marxists,
no matter what our tainted academia and corrupt media wishes us to believe.
Nazis, Bolsheviks,
the Ku Klux
Klan, Maoists,
radical
Islam and Facists
-- all are on the Left, something that should be increasingly apparent
to decent, honorable people in our times. The Big Lie which places Nazis
on some mythical Far Right was created specifically so that there would
be a bogeyman manacled on the wrists of those who wish us to move "too
far" in the direction of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater.
The truth about the Nazis was that they
were the antithesis of Reagan and Goldwater. Let us consider the
original Nazi movement and its evolution. The National Socialist
movement began in Austria with Walter
Riehl, Rudolf
Jung and Hans
Knirsch, who were, as M.W.
Fodor relates in his book South of Hitler, the three men who
founded the National Socialist Party in Austria, and hence indirectly in
Germany. In November, 1910, these men launched what they called the
Deutschsoziale
Arbeiterpartei. That party was successful politically. It established
its program at Inglau in 1914.
What was this program?
It was against social and political
reaction, for the working class, against the church and against the capitalist
classes. This party eventually adopted the name Deutsche
Nationalsozialistche Arbeiter Partei, which, except for the order of
the words, is the same name as "Nazi." In May 1918, the German National
Socialist Workers Party selected the Harkendruez, or swastika, as its symbol.
Both Hitler and Anton
Drexler, the nominal founder of the Nazi Party, corresponded with this
earlier, anti-capitalistic and anti-church party.
Hitler, before the First World War,
was highly sympathetic to socialism. Emile
Lorimer, in his 1939 book, What Hitler Wants, writes about Hitler
during these Vienna years that Hitler already had felt great sympathy for
the trade unions and antipathy toward employers. He attended sessions
of the Austrian Parliament. Hitler was not, as many have portrayed
him, a political neophyte in 1914.
The very term "National
Socialist" was not invented by Hitler nor was it unique to Germany.
Eduard Benes,
President of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich Conference, was a
leader of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party. Ironically, at the
time of the Munich Conference, out of the fourteen political parties in
the Snemovna (the lower chamber of the Czechoslovakian legislature) the
party most opposed to Hitler was the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party.
The Fascist Party in Czechoslovakia was also anti-Nazi.
The first and only platform of the National
Socialist German Workers Party called for very Leftist economic policies.
Among other things, this platform called for the death penalty for war
profiteering, the confiscation of all income unearned by work, the acquisition
of a controlling interest by the people in all big business organizations
and so on. Otto
Strasser, the brother and fellow Nazi of Gregor
Strasser, who was the second leading Nazi for much of the Nazi Party's
existence, in his 1940 book, Hitler and I revealed his ideology
before he found a home in the Nazi Party. In his own words Otto Strasser
wrote: "I was a young student of law and economics, a Left Wing student
leader."
Consider the following text from that
platform adopted in Munich on February 20, 1920 and ask yourself whether
it sounds like the notional Right or the very real Left:
"We ask
that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens
with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The
activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests
of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the
good of all. Therefore, we demand an end to the power of the financial
interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand
a broad extension of care for the aged. The government must undertake
the improvement of public health."
In his 1939 indictment of Nazism, Germany
Rampant, Hambloch has an entire chapter on political parties under
the German Empire before the First World War and political parties under
the
Weimar Republic. Hambloch lists parts of the "Left," "Right" and
"Centre" in the German Empire pre-1914, but there are no "Left," "Right"
or "Centre" parties in the Weimar
Republic, but rather "Weimar Parties, i.e. those who supported the
republican constitution," "National Reactionary Parties" and "Revolutionary
Parties." The Nazis are listed, along with the Communist Party of
Germany, as the two "Revolutionary Parties." Pointedly, the Nazis were
not considered a "National Reactionary Party."
Consider these remarks of Nazi leaders.
Hitler on May 1, 1927:
"We
are socialists. We are enemies of today's capitalistic system for
the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with
its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property
instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy
this system under all conditions."
Goebbels, who was the only major Nazi leader
who stayed with Hitler to the very end, wrote in Der Angriff in 1928:
"The worker
in a capitalist state - that is his greatest misfortune - no longer a human
being, no longer a creator, no longer a shaper of things. He has
become a machine."
That image sounds almost identical to what
Charlie Chaplin, a Marxist, was portraying in his caricature of industrial
society, Modern
Times. In 1930, Hitler tasked Hans
Buchner to clarify what Nazi economic policies were. What did
Buchner elect to call the economic policies of the Nazis? "State
socialism."
As the Nazis began to become a serious
political party, in the 1930s, the Nazi deputies introduced a flurry of
proposals:
(1) to ban trading in stocks
and bonds;
(2) to nationalize all large banks;
(3) to require registration of stock
ownership with a state agency;
(4) to limit interest by law to five
percent;
(5) to confiscate all profits acquired
by inflation.
These measures were not hidden; they were
trumpeted on the front pages of Nazi periodicals to ensure that party members
knew what the Nazi Party in the Reichstag was doing. Some Nazi proposals
sound eerily modern. The Nazis, for example, proposed that old age and
disability benefits (Social Security) be paid out of general revenue, rather
than from the contributions of the individual recipient, and that the benefits
be indexed to the cost of living.
In 1932, months before the Nazis actually
took power, a leading opponent of Nazism writing under the pseudonym Nordicus,
in his the book, Hitlerism:
The Iron Fist in Germany, notes what Josef
Goebbels, leading propagandist for the Nazis, was writing: "War
against profiteers, peace with workers! Destruction of all capitalistic
influences on the political system of the country." The same author notes
the economic principles of Nazism included support for the general welfare,
and that this included old age pensions, the confiscation of war profits,
and opposition to capitalism.
The Nazis simply did not ride to power
on the backs of wealthy industrialists. In fact, after the Nazis
had acquired power and when it would have been very advantageous to have
"backed the right horse," Ernst
von Borsig, the prominent Berlin industrialist, said that he and his
colleagues provided very little support to the Nazis. As early as
1921, Paul Reush,
the leading industrialist in the Ruhr, actively insisted that his company
officers not support the Nazis. The Krupp
family, famous for producing arms for Germany, opposed Hitler in the 1932
presidential election. Nazis received very little support even from industrialists
who would benefit from rearmament until 1930.
Hendrik
Willem van Loon, in his 1938 book, Our Battle, written
before the Nazi-Bolshevik non-aggression pact and while Nazis were presenting
themselves to the world as sworn enemies of Bolshevism, wrote that
Big Business mistrusted a political program which made a point of denouncing
with bitterness all those who made profits by loaning out money at interest,
and that because Hitler "pretended" to be the enemy of Communists, industrialists
would occasionally give him some money, but they were careful not to take
sides.
The putative connection between Nazis
and industrialists was invented simply for convenience by Communists.
Opponents of the Nazis in 1923 claimed that Hugo
Stinnes, the leading industrialist in Germany, was providing support
to the Nazis. At this very point in history, not only was Nazi propaganda
attacking Stinnes, but Hitler himself specifically attacked Stinnes in
his speeches. The Weimar Republic, like the Third
Republic of France had no Right in the way that Americans would conceive
of it.
Hitler, for example, loathed the Kaiser
and Imperial Germany. The Tat
Circle, that enigmatic group which influenced Nazism, was profoundly
anti-capitalist. The title of Tat Circle member Ferdinand Freid's
1931 bestseller was The
End of Capitalism, which asserts that capitalism not only was doomed,
but also that it was unjust. The Tat Circle is an example of what
passes for the Far Right in the Weimar Republic, and if an anti-capitalism
and anti-Christian movement is the Right, one must wonder what the Left
in Weimar Germany believed. Germany never had "capitalism," and in
his 1938 book, Germany
Puts the Clock Back, Edgar Mower writes that when in April 1931
a number of German industrialists visited Soviet Russia they were enthusiastic
about the unlimited authority of the Bolsheviks over the workmen, which
was what many of them dreamed about for Germany, noting that German owners
long since ceased to believe in anything so vigorous as Western capitalism
and competition.
While Nazi rhetoric consistently attacked
the rich, the well born, the war profiteers, and the industrialists and
while Nazi rhetoric consistently championed the working poor, the old,
and the unemployed, how did the Nazis act once they had acquired actual
power? If anything, Nazis in power were more hostile to business
and to the "rich" when they ran Germany as when they were seeking power
through democratic means. In 1937, four years after the Nazis gained
power, Freund wrote of Hitler in Zero Hour that "Only in domestic
affairs did Hitler follow his original plan to the letter." Graf
von der Golz, the Deputy Commissar in the Ministry of Economics in a speech
to businessmen reported in the Nazi periodical Völkischer Beobachter
on July 15, 1934: "Any organization that represents the interests
of the employer will be regarded as illegal and disbanded and the guilty
parties will be prosecuted." Fritz Thyssen, one of the industrialists
who did help bring the Nazis to power, said in 1940: "Soon Germany
will not be any different from Bolshevik Russia; the heads of enterprises
who do not fulfill the conditions which the ‘Plan' prescribes will be accused
of treason against the German people, and shot."
The Nazis on October 16, 1934 raised
the highest income tax rate from 40% to 50%, and on February 17, 1939 raised
that highest rate again to 55%. A decree of September 9, 1939 again
increased income taxes, but exempted incomes of 2,400 Reichmarks a year
or less. Comparative Major European Governments, a 1937 book, notes
that through several new laws on December 4, 1934 banking, credits, and
stock exchanges passed under complete government control and that the Loan-Stock
Law limited stock company dividends to six percent in some cases and to
eight percent in others, with profits over that required to be transferred
to the Gold Discount Bank, which was in turn required to invest them in
government loans or municipal debt service bonds.
Nazi hostility to individual wealth
was matched by its hostility to big business. The same act of October
16, 1934 removed the exemption on business taxes for many types of businesses
and it increased the progressivity of the business taxes; an act of August
27, 1936 raised the general business tax rate from 20% to 25% and to 30%
for each year thereafter; then on July 25, 1938 corporate profits of more
than 100,000 Reichmarks per year were subjected to an additional tax of
35% with that rising to 40% for each year thereafter; and on March 20,
1939, the Nazis imposed an excess profits tax. In four years, Nazis
had raised taxes to approximately one fourth of the national income.
Stephen Roberts, in his 1937 book, The
House That Hitler Built, noted that compulsory loans had been extracted
from banks and insurance companies, and that these grew to such an extent
that armament firms complained that they no longer could bear this in addition
to all the other assessments like the eight percent Labor Front charges
assessed. Dr. Schacht, an economist who worked for the German government
after the Nazis took power, had been compelled to fight with the Leftist
economists within the Nazi Party, and that he had refused to join the Nazi
Party for a long time. Dr. Schacht had also opposed the anti-Jewish
policies of the Nazis as economically unsound.
The Loan Stock Law of December
4, 1934 virtually confiscated all dividends of six percent or, in some
cases, eight percent by ordering the beneficiaries of stock dividends to
invest those monies in state bonds. Even this was deemed to be too
generous to the rich. The original promise to pay these stockholders in
cash or other bonds was revoked in 1937 through the issuance of tax certificates
which bore no interest at all, and beyond that, the owners of these tax
certificates could not use them to pay their income taxes or their capital
profits tax -- they could only use them beginning in April 1952, and then
only in installments. In January 1935, all mortgage banks
and similar institutions were authorized to "offer" to owners of obligations
issued by them a cut to 4.5% per cent in annual interest, for which the
owner was to be compensated through a special payment corresponding to
two percent of the face value of the obligation and this was "deemed" accepted
unless the owner rejected it "in writing" and "within ten days"; in the
latter case he also was forced to deposit the obligation with the credit-giving
institution.
David Shoenbaum states in his book,
Hitler's
Social Revolution, that business was frustrated by the failures
of the Nazis and soon began simply reading official scripts. And
from the 1937 book, The House That Hitler Built, Roberts dismisses
as "fantastic" the stories that Hitler came to power as the nominee of
the
Thyssen group, noting that Hitler received little money from industrialists
until 1930, and the Krupp group, a major armaments builder, opposed Hitler
as late as 1932. Once in power, the Nazis checked the industrialists,
grabbed for the state dividends above six percent, forced employers to
keep unnecessary workers, made them scrap modern labor-saving machinery,
and coerced contributions for all kinds of Party purposes.
The Nazis passed legislation to make
it difficult to form or maintain corporations and to limit the authority
of directors of corporations or of stockholders in corporations. Directors
of corporations, for example, were allowed to grant bonuses only upon condition
that they were directly tied to profit and upon condition that the board
of directors authorize "voluntary social contributions" to employees, granting
employees effectively an automatic share in corporate profits. Later,
the tax on directors' fees was increased from 10% in March 1933 to 20%
in February 1939. The capital market in Germany was almost completely
closed to private issues and banks were subject to a succession of compulsory
levies, confiscated reserves and increasingly high taxes. In March
1939, a decree liquidated virtually all holdings of foreign securities.
The Nazis also simply expropriated,
with or without compensation to the business owners, canals, dams, roads
and other private enterprises if ownership was deemed in the interest of
the Reich. Even if some compensation was given to the owners, the
owners themselves could not request compensation for virtual seizure of
their businesses when the government wished to seize them. The same
year, the Reich Supreme Court for Finance and Taxation invalidated claims
for tax deductions for two spinning mills in Saxony, noting that prior
law could be ignored and that tax laws had to be interpreted according
to a "National - Socialistic" perspective, to the great detriment of business.
Even when private property rights were suspended by the Nazis in the interests
of the "people's community," if there was any compensation to the property
owners, "speculative gains" were taxed away.
Vera
Micheles Dean in her 1939 book, Europe in Retreat, written before
the Second World War began, said that the Nazis had introduced into Germany
a form of graduated Bolshevism, focusing first upon Jewish bankers, industrialists
and businessmen, but then upon other businesses, noting that the Nazi goal,
from which it had not deviated, was to establish an egalitarian society
in which everyone is equal and subordinate to the state. The same year
Time Magazine wrote that the "most cruel joke of all" has been how Hitler
treated those capitalists and small businessmen who thought National
Socialism would save them from radicalism. Some businesses had
been expropriated; some were subjected to a capital tax; all had profits
strictly controlled; and all were subjected to intense government regulation.
The Nazi regime also had taken over
big estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure
fundamentally similar to Russian Communism. The same year Dorothy
Thompson wrote that, having robbed the Jews, the Nazis were beginning
to rob the Church, and later will almost certainly expropriate the property
of the bourgeoisie. Rauschning in 1938 wrote of Nazi economic policies,
"The expropriation of property will inevitably follow, as well as the complete
abolition of private enterprise."
Lunn noted the very same year that the
decline of economic conditions in Germany was because of socialism and
bureaucracy which was leading Germany toward foreign adventures.
Two years later, in 1941, Karl Lowenstein wrote that even if industry and
big business had helped Hitler into power, these men found a much sterner
master in National Socialism. The Nazis regulated business to death and
they were completely indifferent to the effect this had upon businessmen,
who the Left often had presented as the secret masters of Nazism. The
Anatomy of Nazism, published by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'rith in 1961, noted that many industrialists who had supported Hitler
found out that the Nazis were their masters, not servants, and that an
enormous amount of private correspondence was simply new bureaucratic red
tape imposed by a vast, new Nazi system of controls.
Fodor the following year wrote that
now there was no doubt that the National Socialist regime truly
justified the second part of its name, which a few years ago probably was
only "window-dressing." In 1941, former Nazi boss of Danzig, Hermann
Rauschning, wrote that the last part of the German Revolution was Nazism,
which was just as much a realization of Marxist as of nationalist ideas,
and he notes that the only ones who refuse to admit this are supporters
of Marxist theories and Nazis themselves. Rauschning also writes
in his book that Marxism itself was part of a single great revolutionary
movement which included Marxist Socialism, Nazism, Communist Bolshevism,
Fascism and nihilism. Rauschning knew Hitler well and repudiated
him and his movement at great risk before the rest of the world recognized
the full danger of Nazism.
Karl
Lowenstein in the 1940 book, Governments of Continental Europe,
writes that there was a convergence in Bolshevism and National Socialism
regarding private property, and that this was clear long before Hitler
and Stalin became allies. Such things as freedom of contract, inviolability
of private property, and the right to dispose of one's estate were cited
as examples of the deep-reaching restrictions in both totalitarian states.
National Socialists were socialists. They had nothing but contempt
for what socialists call "capitalism" or what normal people call economic
freedom. While it is convenient to portray Nazis as beholden to industrialists
and militarists, even from the earliest days Nazis loathed not only industrialists
in general but armament makers in particular. The Nazis raised taxes,
punished profits, reduced the power of owners, of managers, and of directors
and championed the right of the state or the party to "protect" Germany
and German workers from abuses of "capitalists.
Nazis were Marxists, through and through.
Although Nazi condemned Bolshevism, the particular incarnation of Marx
in Russia, and although the Nazis often bickered and fought with Fascism,
the particular incarnation of Marx in Italy, Hitler and his ghastly accomplices
were always and forever absolutely committed to that which we have come
to call the "Far Left." Nazis were Marxists. |