Various shades of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic
are reawakening to the dangers of something called ‘socialism’. Last month the
Trump White House published an assessment of the
‘Opportunity
Costs of Socialism’, sternly warning that a pick-up truck is much more
expensive in Scandinavia than the US. Coincidentally, it has become a
right-wing trope – erupting somewhere on social media every couple of weeks –
to point out that the Nazis were really socialists. So not only will socialism
crash the economy and make pick-up trucks prohibitively expensive, it also
shares as its intellectual kin the most barbaric, genocidal regime in history.
All told, better stick with mass exploitation and craven submission to
corporate power.
It’s very easy to type five words on a keyboard, no matter
how ignorant. But this particular meme has gone a lot further. Last month,
senior
Conservative MEP Syed Kamall claimed in the European Parliament that Nazism
was “a strain of socialism” and a “left-wing ideology”. So I think now it’s
high time to take a considered trawl through the historical evidence and sift
fact from fiction.
What’s in a Name?
The case that the Nazis were really socialists usually starts
and finishes on the fact that they called themselves ‘National
Socialists’. Adolf Hitler was the 11
th
member of an entity called the German Workers’ Party, which changed its name in
1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). But its reason
for including the word ‘socialist’ was to appeal to working class Germans to
whom it had considerable allure – this was only a year after the aborted
German
Revolution. Still, according to historian, (Samuel W. Mitcham in
Why Hitler: The Genesis of the Nazi Reich,
p 68), “Hitler did not like the addition of the term ‘Socialist’ but acquiesced
because the executive committee thought it might be helpful in attracting
workers from the left.”
What is true is that the NSDAP had a socialist wing – or at
least a wing that believed in widespread nationalisation. But this faction – represented
by Gregor Strasser and initially Josef Goebbels – was decisively defeated in
the mid-1920s, when the Nazis were electorally insignificant and years before they
came remotely close to power. The occasion was a referendum* on whether to transfer
the landed estates of German royalty and princes to the Weimar Republic (the
country was a monarchy until 1918). The Social Democrats and Communists were in
favour and Strasser and his followers thought the Nazis should be too. He
called a meeting of the Northern German Nazis to make sure the party was behind
the expropriation drive and to put in place a new, more radical economic
programme. According to William L Shirer in The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
Hitler was furious. Several of
these former rulers had kicked in with contributions to the party. Moreover, a
number of big industrialists were beginning to become financially interested in
Hitler’s reborn movement precisely because it promised to be effective in
combating the Communists, the Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and
Goebbels got away with their plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately
dry up. [160-161]
So in February 1926, Hitler called another conference in
Bamberg, Southern Germany, which was packed with his supporters. “And at the
Fuehrer’s insistence they [Strasser and Goebbels] were forced to capitulate and
abandon their programme”.
So the Nazis decisively ended their dalliance with anything
resembling ‘socialism’ in 1926.
Some recalcitrant members remained, however. One such was
Gregor Strasser’s brother, Otto, who supported nationalization of industry and
some strikes called by socialist-supporting trade unions. But, in May 1930,
Hitler insisted he recant, accusing him of indulging in ‘democracy and
liberalism’. When he refused, he was expelled from the NSDAP.
Otto Strasser responded by forming a ‘Union of Revolutionary
National Socialists’, known as the
Black Front, which took
part in national elections. Tellingly, however, this ‘left-wing’ Nazi rival to
the main Nazi movement failed dent Hitler’s support in any way.
The following year, 1931, Hitler began a concerted attempt
to court influential business owners who could provide the movement with vital funds.
According to Walther Funk, the intermediary between Hitler and business, “The
Fuehrer personally stressed time and again during talks with me and industrial
leaders to whom I had introduced him, that he was an enemy of the state economy
and of the so-called ‘planned economy’ and that he considered free enterprise
and competition as absolutely necessary in order to gain the highest possible
production.”
Supporters included Emil Kirdorf, a “union-hating coal
baron” from the Ruhr, to whom the Nazis gave a state funeral when he died in
1938, the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, directors of pharmaceutical
conglomerate, I.G. Farben, and several banks. Among the backers were companies
that still prosper today such as
Deutsche
Bank and insurance giant,
Allianz.
However, according to Shirer, the identity of these people
was a secret, “kept from all but the inner circle around the Leader. The party
had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and
the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists
were truly ‘socialists’ and against the money barons. On the other hand, money
to keep the party going to had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample
supply of it.” (181)
In February 1933 – after he had been appointed Chancellor
but before Germany’s last multi-party elections the following month – Hitler called
a private meeting of well-known industrialists, telling the invited audience
that “private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is
conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality”
(Shirer, p 238). He promised to “eliminate Marxism”. He collected three million
marks in donations.
The lesson is that not only were Nazis not socialists but,
had they been socialist in any genuine way, they would have remained a complete
irrelevancy. In much the same fashion as its precursor, Italian Fascism, German
National Socialism had to expunge its socialist side (or confine it to mere
rhetoric) in order to win the support of the powerful and get anywhere near
power. All that followed – the creation of totalitarian state, the Second World
War, the Holocaust – stemmed from the fact that the Nazis were not socialists.
The Nazis in power
When in power, the National Socialists remained true to their (private) word. Hitler abolished
trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike. A law, known as
the ‘Charter of Labour’, was introduced in 1934. According to Shirer, the
charter:
… put the worker in his place and
raised the employer to his old position of absolute master – subject, of
course, to interference by the all-powerful state. The employer became the
‘leader of the enterprise’, the employees the ‘following’ or Gefolgschaft. Paragraph Two of the law
set down that ‘the leader of the enterprise makes the decisions for the
employees and labourers in matters concerning the enterprise’. And just as in
ancient times the lord was supposed to be responsible for the welfare of his
subjects so, under Nazi law, was the employer made ‘responsible for the
well-being of the employees and labourers’. In return, the law said ‘employees
and labourers owe him faithfulness’ – that is, they were to work hard and long,
and no back talk or grumbling, even about wages. (327)
Wages were set by ‘labour trustees’ who were appointed by the
Labour Front, the organisation that had replaced trade unions. “In practice,” writes
Shirer, “they set the rates according to the wishes of the employer – there was
no provision for workers even to be consulted on such matters”. Hitler declared
himself against annual increases in wage rates – wages were to rise only if
performance did.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the German worker share in the
national income fell from 56.9% in 1932 (before the Nazis took power) to 53.6%
in 1938. Simultaneously, the share going to capital and business rose from
17.4% to 26.6% (Shirer 328). Nazi anti-capitalism is a complete fiction:
All the propagandists in the Third
Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches
against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the
worker. But the sober duty of the official statistics, which perhaps few German
bothered to make, revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers,
benefited the most from Nazi policies. (329)
As the economy became more directed towards war, labour
conscription was introduced and workers who left their job or didn’t turn up
for work with good reason were fined or imprisoned.
It should be pointed out that, though capitalism was
strengthened not overthrown under the Third Reich, the Nazi stance towards the
working class actually mimicked in many respects practices under the Communist
totalitarian governments. Under
Stalin’s Five Year Plan in
the Soviet Union, for example, factories kept records of workers’
absenteeism, lateness and shoddy work. “If the worker’s record was poor,” wrote
American journalist Eugene Lyons, “he was accused of trying to sabotage the
Five Year Plan and if found guilty could be shot or sent to work as forced
labour on the Baltic Sea Canal or the Siberian Railway.”
However, what both had in common was an unwavering hostility
to an independent labour movement. In many ways, what Nazism was fixated
against was workers’ control or syndicalism, which was still a palpable threat
in those days – the
Spanish
Revolution, with its worker-controlled factories, restaurants and barber
shops, happened in 1936 – and industrial democracy was implicit in collective
labour action such as general strikes. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labour
Front,
proclaimed,
“We are all soldiers of labour, amongst whom some command and the others obey.
Obedience and responsibility have to count amongst us again … We can’t all be
on the captain’s bridge, because then there would be nobody to raise the sails
and pull the ropes.”
Nazism and Capitalism
What is still quite startling about Nazism is the degree to
which profit-making and capital accumulation were inserted in the very heart of
a state-controlled war economy. Nazi extermination camps were
privately insured and,
as Hannah Arendt pointed out in
Eichmann in Jerusalem, famous firms
such as I.G. Farben, Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert had plants in the vicinity of
Auschwitz and other death camps in which they ‘employed’ slave workers.
“Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent,” Arendt noted
… “As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor … at
least 25,000 of the approximately 35,000 Jews who worked for one of the I.G.
Farben plants died.” (p 79)
So entwined was the relationship between the Nazis and
business, that the Nazis instituted the first privatisation programme in
history (sadly that accolade does not belong to Augusto Pinochet or Margaret
Thatcher). They called it
‘reprivatisation’
and sold public ownership in a number of firms in the mid-1930s – in sectors
such as banking, steel, mining, ship-building and railways. The motivation was
both to raise money and to solidify support among business leaders.
No, the Nazis were not socialists. But they did diverge from
today’s liberal-capitalist orthodoxy in significant ways. I will examine how in
part two of this post.
*
The
referendum did take place in June 1926. The NSDAP, purged of left-wing ideas,
proposed that Jewish immigrants, rather than the princes, be expropriated. Actually,
a very large majority voted in favour of expropriation but because of a boycott
and a ruling that 50% of the population had to support the ‘yes’ option for it
to be valid, nothing happened.
