No, obviously they weren’t socialist. It’s true that the Nazis occasionally used the term affirmatively. Some people cynically latch onto that as evidence: “They were socialists because they called themselves socialists!” But they were strongly anti-socialist in any real sense of the term.

We have to understand the context in which they applied the term. In our own days, right-wing politicians no longer use the term. Why? Because socialism is no longer so popular. But back then, anti-communists faced the challenge of gaining access to socialist strongholds and convincing as many working-class voters as possible. So, they had to present their policies as agreeing with the interests of the working class. The trick was to benefit from the popularity of socialism, which was widely seen as the force of the future, but at the same time to distance themselves as much as possible from its substance.

They were strongly capitalist. The Nazis placed great emphasis on private property and free competition. It’s true that they intervened in the free market, but it was also a time of a systemic failure of capitalism on a global scale. Almost all states intervened in the market at the time, and they did so to save the capitalist system from itself. This has nothing to do with socialist sentiment: it was pro-capitalist. In a way, there’s a parallel there with the way big banks were bailed out by governments after the 2008 financial crisis broke out. That, of course, did not reflect socialist intentions in any way, either. It was merely an attempt to stabilize the system a little bit.

Not necessarily. State interventions at that time took place in agreement with industry. The capitalists even demanded it, because free-market policies are not always in the best interest of capitalists. They sometimes need the state to succor the free market. So, interventions were not simply imposed on the economy by the fascists — it was a consensual development reflecting requirements by many important sections of industry. The goal was essentially to steer the system in favor of big business.

Hitler is often accused of subordinating economic interests to his political views, a claim that is partially true. But what exactly were his political views? If we think about Hitler’s most fanatical obsessions – for example, social Darwinism, eugenics, or even his antisemitism — at first blush it appears as though these can only be understood in isolation from economic considerations. However, if we look more closely at each of these elements, we see that they had an indispensable economic basis.

Social Darwinism is actually a form of hypercapitalism. It takes from capitalism the focus on competition as a struggle of all against all. And the Nazis argued: “Well, that’s just the way nature is.” This was not a break with capitalism, but an intensification of economic views. Capitalism, in the Nazis’ view, is simply a part of nature. So, it is not just a matter of political domination, but of naturalizing economic contradictions. Hitler then said that it is above all “the Jew” who is trying to play a little trick on nature in order to make the struggle for survival superfluous. The will to tamper with the economy made Jews insidious, from the Nazi point of view.

Hitler didn’t invent all of this, of course; it was part of the conservative and indeed economically liberal mainstream. One could hear very similar statements about the need for ruthless competition in the liberal economic discourse of the time. That someone like Hitler could become the “leader” of a major industrial nation was, after all, the culmination of certain widely held views about economics and about the due limits of popular, political agency. Hitler’s policies met the wishes of many industrialists — which made him so attractive to large sections of the bourgeoisie and the educated classes. The National Socialists were seen as liberating the economy from unnecessary burdens of political and humanistic sensitivity.

Exactly. The murder of people with physical, mental, and psychological disabilities was also directly linked to economic concerns — it was intended to rid the economy of people who were considered a burden. The Nazi language was quite economic and financially minded in this respect. For example, a typical propaganda poster read: “60,000 Reichsmarks throughout his life: that is the cost of this hereditary sick person for the Volksgemeinschaft [the Nazi word for national community]. Volksgenosse [national comrade], that is also your money.”

Even the Shoah is related to economic considerations. For in Nazi ideology, Jews were seen as the ultimate obstacle. Obstacle to what? To capitalism, not least. They were considered the backbone of Marxism. The Nazis construed Marxism as an essentially Jewish conspiracy against the capitalist economy — and thus against the natural order. Of course, the Shoah was the result of many factors and the culmination of various Nazi obsessions, phobias, and hatreds. But among all these, one shouldn’t lose sight of this socioeconomic factor.

By the term “socialism” they didn’t mean anything that we would even remotely recognize as socialist, but rather their policy of intervening in the free market for the benefit of the capitalists. By the term “Marxism,” on the other hand, they meant social democracy and the protection of basic workers’ rights. In Mein Kampf, Hitler says that his antisemitic world view was finally formed the moment he realized that the Jews were the masterminds of social democracy. Nazi discourse was a very convenient — if cynical — way of manipulating concepts and ascribing them completely new meanings.

Well, this is actually not so new, and has a long history. Already during the time of fascism there were attempts to portray the Nazis as socialists, for example by Ludwig von Mises. But in general, the efforts to establish a direct link between Marxism and National Socialism was a minority position. Then, beginning in the 1980s, a turning point occurred when a revisionist current began to emerge in fascism studies. It sought to link fascism much more strongly with the political left, with revolution and with anti-capitalism. This happened at a time when neoliberalism was beginning to dismantle the welfare state. Which made this ideological move very convenient. Advocates of this policy could say: “The Nazis actually stood for an authoritarian form of socialism!” Attacking the welfare state could thus be presented as an anti-fascist act, a resistance to Nazism and a purging of its political residues.

That’s right. When did intellectuals actually start writing books accusing the Nazis of having pursued socialist economic policies? When did they start accusing the Nazis of having assisted the masses at the expense of the bourgeoisie? Exactly at the time that politicians tried to impose neoliberal reforms on the labor market. In this way, historiography is linked to economic realities. Policymakers used these theories to support their attacks on the welfare state. Götz Aly, the German historian, said in one of his interviews at the turn of the millennium that it was the task of the Social Democratic government under Gerhard Schröder to finally put an end to the “Volksgemeinschaft.” Thus, by liberalizing the economy, the last vestiges of National Socialism would be removed from German politics. This thinking shows how current political fashions are linked to the ways we perceive the past.

There was never a truly forthright and direct reckoning with this legacy. In the postwar years, there was a consensus that the state had to moderately improve the situation of workers — even within a liberal framework. If there was a liberal admission of guilt, it was made on the premise that Nazi policies had not been true liberalism. Nazi liberalism — so argued the few scholars that admitted any relationship between the two ideologies — had been half-baked, helplessly old-fashioned, and renounced the democratic dimension inherent to liberalism.

Later, however, there was a radical change. Suddenly, liberals were much more inclined to say: “National Socialism was socialist. And if you fight against socialism to create a market that is as free as possible from any political interference, you’re a good anti-fascist.” That was the much more enduring, anti-“populist” phase of liberal engagement with the past.

I think we should make a distinction between the economic and the political dimensions of liberalism. At the beginning, they sometimes went hand in hand. But at a certain stage, the economic and the political aspect drifted apart. Liberals then had to decide where their priorities lay. Are they economic liberals who defend private property, class society, and the free market at all costs, or do they prefer liberal democracy to actually deliver on its promise of freedom and self-determination for all people? This contradiction has not yet been resolved. And the need to make a choice between the two options abides.

The conventional wisdom is that liberalism always goes hand in hand with political and individual freedoms, which is sometimes true. But what is forgotten is that from the very beginning liberalism not only opened up political possibilities, but also severely restricted them. What liberalism had to make clear from the beginning was that private property is untouchable; that it forms the unassailable basis of the political order.

So, important liberal thinkers insisted as early as John Locke, you can’t tax the rich without their consent. If you do so, you give the victims of these policies a good reason to rebel and use violence against the usurpers. Liberal politics thus had a dictatorial option inscribed in it from the very beginning. And so it became a dogma to assume that the main task of politics is to protect property, and its principal sin to inveigh against it. But of course, that is a very narrow definition of what politics can or should do. And we suffer from that confinement to this day. In a typical Western democracy, you can do many things — as long as you refrain from infringing on private property.

Capitalism is essentially an antidemocratic economic structure: it means, above all, domination over workers. Capitalism is hierarchical, not egalitarian. There is also a massive concentration of wealth, which raises a crucial question: How can we redistribute it? Classical liberalism says: “Don’t do anything to change the situation.” But that strictly limits the political sphere, and enormously reduces its possibilities. If we keep the economy secluded from political deliberation, democracy is seriously hamstrung. So, the liberal economic view is to say to the masses, “Don’t try to be too logical when you think about democracy! Don’t try to take democracy at its word. It only creates a lot of trouble!”

Exactly. And that remains the case very much today. Elon Musk’s statements provide a treasure trove of examples for what we’re discussing here, because he’s pretty frank and blatant about it. He recently said that Americans are trying to shirk hard work and that they should take a cue from Chinese workers “burning the midnight oil.” That’s a very clear statement because, of course, he knows that Chinese workers have no way to democratically resist hard working demands. He implies that the democratic system is far too lax and indulgent and we need a much stricter system to discipline workers, to make them work hard and accept low wages — a system like we see in China.

That’s a fine indication of the dictatorial option built into liberal thinking. I’m by no means saying that all liberals would support anything like that. But it’s very hard to reconcile economic and political liberalism. As a result of this conundrum, some political liberals choose a different path economically, and others vacillate back and forth between the two poles without ever really being able to resolve the fundamental conflict. To some extent, it could be argued that socialism is itself a child of political liberalism. Marx and Engels started out as political liberals and never abandoned the basic ideas of liberalism: freedom and democratic participation for all. They merely developed their concept further because they recognized that under capitalism the prospects for the realization of a genuine democratic project were seriously limited.