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Comment by FranzFerdiNaN | Hacker News Reader

Nazi Germany was of course an example of national-socialism, which was a branch of fascism, not socialism. The name is very difficult for people to understand (although loads of people willfully misunderstand it), but saying it was socialism is like saying the Democratic People's Republic of Koreais an example of why democracy or republicanism is terrible.

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Fascism was socialism by itself.

The creator of Fascism was Mr Mussolini, himself a member of the communist party in Italy.

It was only that Mussolini wanted to create a socialist movement independent of the International Socialist , the Komintern, which was controlled(and financed) by Soviet Russia, following the interests of that country.

So he created a socialist movement with the interest of Italians first, nationalistic. Hitler then copied the movement in Germany.

To say that nazis were not socialistic(and socialized the means of production) is like saying that Trosky was not communist because he was assassinated by Stalin.

Of course they were the worst enemies between each other, but there were not big differences in the way they planned the economy.

In the civil war in Spain, in the left side there were independent anarchist and socialistic leaders and they were killed by Stalin, not Franco.

You start with a set of things and you map them to a smaller set of categories. The more you learn about things, the bigger your set of categories becomes, until eventually you find the sets are equal.

Far too much effort is wasted arguing along the way.

If you look at the Nazi program, up to 50% is clearly Socialist in nature, while the rest is Nationalist and Nationalist-Socialist. Thus it's fair to say that there are more similarities between Socialism and Nazism, than differences. Critics use the fact that Hitler "cooperated" with the big companies, rather than fully nationalizing them, as a way to claim that he wasn't Socialist, however that is misleading. While Socialists would send the Kulaks to their deaths in the Gulags, Hitler kept his business leaders alive as long as they cooperated. Thus Russia threw away expertice, while Hitler kept it. This lead to great economical advances in Germany, though at a terrible human cost. Meanwhile the more traditional Socialist approach in Russia didn't really lead to much ecnomical progress at all, while having a comparably terrible human cost.

If you think Nazis had anything to do with Socialism, I suggest you read up on what the Nazis did to the Socialists in Germany ...

They send the competition to the camps, but at the same time for example made it really tough to evict people from flats for landlords. Nationalistic socialism was a socialism too. They even had the enormous debts and mismanagment (Mefo-Wechsel), that in addition with racism and a non-fertilizer agriculture made the "Expansion" in all directions necessary to avoid collapse.

The "great economical advances" of Nazi Germany were just Nazi propaganda.

That is what is taught in school, and I always thought it was right. But many Italian facists started as socialists and they certainly learned the methods:

- Individualism is squashed in both systems. The citizen solely exists for the state and is to be exploited as a worker or cannon fodder.

- Both systems had worker holiday cities for propaganda and constant reeducation.

- Both systems had many youth organizations for indoctrination.

- Both systems had nationalized radio.

- Both systems sent their opponents into Gulags/camps.

- In both systems, if you pretended to be a follower, you'd be taken care of (that arguably is the socialist aspect of national socialism).

National socialism did not actually nationalize companies, but they were certainly under control of the state.

The point is that while the ideologies were different, the outcome was not completely dissimilar (even antisemitism with purges was there under Stalin). National socialism had an overtly murderous ideology, while the marxist one pretended to do one thing and did quite another.

Those are effective means of population control. Propaganda and indoctrination for example where used by every country in WWII because they where efficient methods independent of ideology.

At most you can look at efficient surface similarities and say this ideology does not prohibit these actions.

Isn't that what people are doing here: Looking for significant overlaps? Consider the NSDAP KdF program and mentally replace the swastika with a hammer and sickle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_Through_Joy

Obviously NS is not 100% equal to abstract pure socialism, I think we can assume that everyone here knows that.

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