The Party was socialist as founded by Drexler and envisioned by Strasser. But the nascent party of Drexler was tiny (40 people or so). Despite the intentions of the founders and early members, Hitler seized power (Strasser was killed on his orders) and reformulated the Party in his own image.
There is no doubt that the original German Workers Party, the National Socialist German Workers Party or the Nazi Party were socialist, but its origins are irrelevant once Hitler seized control of it.
It’s never a bad suggestion to ask someone to read anything. But a point of clarification:
Authors like Jonah Goldberg and Gene Edward Veith, Jr. routinely point out that the doctrinaire study of Nazism essentially becomes a redefinition of it into something coming out of the political right, rather than from the left. Nazism was hijacked by scholars coming from the “mainstream” (which means from the left) and transformed into a bogeyman from the “other side” (i.e. the right). This was a process began by Stalin, continued by the Soviet communists, and picked up by Marxist and post-Marxist scholars in the West (as well as those influenced by them).
In any event, regardless of what Shirer or any other scholar might say, when I read the Nazi Party Platform, I most certainly don’t see a guy or a party out to win the hearts and minds of capitalists, industrialists, or the right wing in any way, shape, or form.
And all the scholars in the world can tell me that a 2 of clubs is really an ace of spades, and I will still continue to believe my lying eyes (as the song goes).
Agree with me that Hitler - and the Nazis - were leftist, and then much of any “argument” we might have would largely be semantic, or over minor details.