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To: Man of the Right
The Nazi party was founded as a lefist party but Hitler captured it.

He captured by being an outstanding orator. They were going nowhere until he came on the scene. With him, they could recruit. Most importantly for their success, they used the socialist rhetoric of the Left to recruit the SA, their street fighters, without whom they could never have come to power. At the very least, one can say that without the socialist appeal and its street army, the SA, Hitler would never have risen to chancellor. At that point, he didn't need the SA any more and cut a better deal with the army (who didn't want a rival paramilitary force) and business (who never likes anything about socialism).

Until Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis were socialist. Hitler was just unprincipled about it and wanted a totalitarianism to unite German peoples and provide an expanded German empire in the East. Hence, the emphasis on race and culture under the Nazis.
26 posted on 02/22/2003 6:49:26 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: George W. Bush

>>>Until Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis were socialist.<<<

"Those Damn Nazis":

Background: This is a widely distributed Nazi pamphlet from before 1933. The title, loosely translated, is "Those Damned Nazis." At least several hundred thousand copies were printed. It is a good summary of the basic lines of Nazi propaganda just before Hitler's takeover in 1933. The booklet included five cartoons by Mjölnir, Goebbels' cartoonist, three of which I include here. Mjölnir also produced some of the most familiar Nazi posters.

The Source: Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).

Why Are We Socialists?

We are socialists because we see in socialism, that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state.

Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and the regaining of German freedom. Socialism therefore is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone, for freeing the German people from slavery is the goal of contemporary policy. Socialism gains its true form only through a total combat brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the Fatherland!

The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism's nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as nationalistic, state-building, liberating and constructive.

The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the Fatherland. The bourgeois does not want to recognize the strength of the working class. Marxism has forced it into a straitjacket that will ruin it. While the working class gradually disintegrates in the Marxist front, bleeding itself dry, the bourgeois and Marxism have agreed on the general lines of capitalism, and see their task now to protect and defend it in various ways, often concealed.

We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right. Incorporating him in the state organism is not only a critical matter for him, but for the whole nation. The question is larger than the eight-hour day. It is a matter of forming a new state consciousness that includes every productive citizen. Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers' state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.

29 posted on 02/22/2003 7:15:02 AM PST by Remedy
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