Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism came from Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movement prominent in the German nationalism of the time, and it was strongly influenced by the anti-Communist Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's "cult of violence" which was "at the heart of the movement."
Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a German homogeneous society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior" races.
The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization.
The Nazi Party's precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party – to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD) – and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organization. The National Socialist Program or "25 Points" was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalization of some industries. In Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"; 1924–1925), Hitler outlined the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion.
The Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, but still short of an outright majority. Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, in 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg, and a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis had soon established a one-party state.
The Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) functioned as the paramilitary organizations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany, which was also known as the "Third Reich", under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered. Many millions of people were eventually exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust during World War II, including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
Following Germany's defeat in World War II and the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology became universally disgraced. It is widely regarded as immoral and evil, with only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, describing themselves as followers of National Socialism.
Etymology
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Flag of the Nazi Party, similar but not identical to the national flag of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), in which the swastika is slightly off-centred
The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (English: National-Socialist German Workers' Party) for which they officially used the acronym NSDAP.
The term "Nazi" was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant, characterizing an awkward and clumsy person. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Ignatz (itself a variation of the name Ignatius) – Ignatz being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged.
In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this and – using the earlier abbreviated term "Sozi" for Sozialist (English: Socialist) as an example – shortened the first part of the NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive "Nazi", in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the term mentioned above.
The first use of the term "Nazi" by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi
["The Nazi-Sozi"]. In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word "Nazi" only appears
when linked with the word "Sozi" as an abbreviation of "National
Socialism".
After the NSDAP's rise to power in the 1930s, the use of the term "Nazi" by itself or in terms such as "Nazi Germany", "Nazi regime"
and so on was popularised by German exiles outside the country, but not
in Germany. From them, the term spread into other languages and it was
eventually brought back into Germany after World War II.
The NSDAP briefly adopted the designation "Nazi" in an attempt to reappropriate the term, but it soon gave up this effort and generally avoided using the term while it was in power. For example, in Hitler's book Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925, he never refers to himself as a "Nazi." A compendium of conversations of Hitler from 1941 through 1944 entitled Hitler's Table Talk does not contain the word "Nazi" either. In speeches by Hermann Göring, he never uses the term "Nazi." Hitler Youth leader Melita Maschmann wrote a book about her experience entitled Account Rendered.
She did not refer to herself as a "Nazi," even though she was writing
well after World War II. In 1933 581 members of the National Socialist
Party answered interview questions put to them by Professor Theodore Abel from Columbia University. They similarly did not refer to themselves as "Nazis."
In each case, the authors refer to themselves as "National Socialists"
and their movement as "National Socialism," but never as "Nazis."
Position within the political spectrum
Foreground, left to right: Führer Adolf Hitler; Hermann Göring; Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels; and Rudolf Hess
Nazis alongside members of the far-right reactionary and monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP) during the brief NSDAP–DNVP alliance in the Harzburg Front from 1931 to 1932
The majority of scholars identify Nazism in both theory and practice as a form of far-right politics.
Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people
have a right to dominate other people and purge society of supposed
inferior elements.
Adolf Hitler and other proponents denied that Nazism was either
left-wing or right-wing, instead they officially portrayed Nazism as a syncretic movement. In Mein Kampf, Hitler directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:
Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors ... But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.
In a speech given in Munich on 12 April 1922, Hitler stated that:
There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago.
When asked
whether he supported the "bourgeois right-wing", Hitler claimed that
Nazism was not exclusively for any class and he indicated that it
favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved "pure" elements
from both "camps" by stating: "From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism".
Historians regard the equation of National Socialism as
'Hitlerism' as too simplistic since the term was used prior to the rise
of Hitler and the Nazis and the different ideologies incorporated into
Nazism were already well established in certain parts of German society
before World War I.
The Nazis were strongly influenced by the post–World War I far-right in
Germany, which held common beliefs such as anti-Marxism,
anti-liberalism and antisemitism, along with nationalism, contempt for the Treaty of Versailles
and condemnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice in
November 1918 which later led it to sign the Treaty of Versailles. A major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organizations that engaged in political violence after World War I. Initially, the post–World War I German far-right was dominated by monarchists, but the younger generation, which was associated with Völkisch nationalism, was more radical and it did not express any emphasis on the restoration of the German monarchy.
This younger generation desired to dismantle the Weimar Republic and
create a new radical and strong state based upon a martial ruling ethic
that could revive the "Spirit of 1914" which was associated with German
national unity (Volksgemeinschaft).
The Nazis, the far-right monarchists, the reactionary German National People's Party
(DNVP) and others, such as monarchist officers in the German Army and
several prominent industrialists, formed an alliance in opposition to
the Weimar Republic on 11 October 1931 in Bad Harzburg, officially known as the "National Front", but commonly referred to as the Harzburg Front.
The Nazis stated that the alliance was purely tactical and they
continued to have differences with the DNVP. The Nazis described the
DNVP as a bourgeois party and they called themselves an anti-bourgeois
party.
After the elections of July 1932, the alliance broke down when the DNVP
lost many of its seats in the Reichstag. The Nazis denounced them as
"an insignificant heap of reactionaries".
The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their
street violence and the "economic experiments" that would take place if
the Nazis ever rose to power. But amidst an inconclusive political situation in which conservative politicians Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher
were unable to form stable governments without the Nazis, Papen
proposed to President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor at the
head of a government formed primarily of conservatives, with only three
Nazi ministers.
Hindenburg did so, and contrary to the expectations of Papen and the
DNVP, Hitler was soon able to establish a Nazi one-party dictatorship.
Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an
attempted communist revolution in Germany, initially supported the Nazi
Party. His four sons, including Prince Eitel Friedrich and Prince Oskar,
became members of the Nazi Party in hopes that in exchange for their
support, the Nazis would permit the restoration of the monarchy.
There were factions within the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical. The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries. Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Meanwhile, the radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels opposed capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core and he stressed the need for the party to emphasize both a proletarian and a national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser,
who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had allegedly
betrayed the party's socialist goals by endorsing capitalism.
Combining NSDAP and pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party in October 1938
When the Nazi Party emerged from obscurity to become a major
political force after 1929, the conservative faction rapidly gained more
influence, as wealthy donors took an interest in the Nazis as a
potential bulwark against communism.
The Nazi Party had previously been financed almost entirely from
membership dues, but after 1929 its leadership began actively seeking
donations from German industrialists, and Hitler began holding dozens of
fundraising meetings with business leaders.
In the midst of the Great Depression, facing the possibility of
economic ruin on the one hand and a Communist or Social Democratic
government on the other hand, German business increasingly turned to
Nazism as offering a way out of the situation, by promising a
state-driven economy that would support, rather than attack, existing
business interests.
By January 1933, the Nazi Party had secured the support of important
sectors of German industry, mainly among the steel and coal producers,
the insurance business and the chemical industry.
Large segments of the Nazi Party, particularly among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), were committed to the party's official socialist, revolutionary and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and an economic revolution when the party gained power in 1933. In the period immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, there were even Social Democrats and Communists who switched sides and became known as "Beefsteak Nazis": brown on the outside and red inside. The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm,
pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the
Nazis' seizure of power) that would enact socialist policies.
Furthermore, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German
Army into its ranks under his leadership.
Once the Nazis achieved power, Röhm's SA was directed by Hitler to
violently suppress the parties of the left, but they also began attacks
against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.
Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly
threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by
alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army. This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in 1934, in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.
Before he joined the Bavarian Army to fight in World War I, Hitler had lived a bohemian lifestyle as a petty street watercolour artist in Vienna and Munich
and he maintained elements of this lifestyle later on, going to bed
very late and rising in the afternoon, even after he became Chancellor
and then Führer. After the war, his battalion was absorbed by the Bavarian Soviet Republic
from 1918 to 1919, where he was elected Deputy Battalion
Representative. According to historian Thomas Weber, Hitler attended the
funeral of communist Kurt Eisner (a German Jew), wearing a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on the other, which he took as evidence that Hitler's political beliefs had not yet solidified. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler never mentioned any service with the Bavarian Soviet Republic
and he stated that he became an antisemite in 1913 during his years in
Vienna. This statement has been disputed by the contention that he was
not an antisemite at that time, even though it is well established that he read many antisemitic tracts and journals during time and admired Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna.
Hitler altered his political views in response to the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 and it was then that he became an
antisemitic, German nationalist.
Hitler expressed opposition to capitalism, regarding it as having
Jewish origins and accusing capitalism of holding nations ransom to the
interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.
He also expressed opposition to communism and egalitarian forms of
socialism, arguing that inequality and hierarchy are beneficial to the
nation. He believed that communism was invented by the Jews to weaken nations by promoting class struggle.
After his rise to power, Hitler took a pragmatic position on economics,
accepting private property and allowing capitalist private enterprises
to exist so long as they adhered to the goals of the Nazi state, but not
tolerating enterprises that he saw as being opposed to the national
interest.
Hitler greets British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax on the steps of the Berghof
German business leaders disliked Nazi ideology but came to support
Hitler, because they saw the Nazis as a useful ally to promote their
interests.
Business groups made significant financial contributions to the Nazi
Party both before and after the Nazi seizure of power, in the hope that a
Nazi dictatorship would eliminate the organized labour movement and the
left-wing parties.
Hitler actively sought to gain the support of business leaders by
arguing that private enterprise is incompatible with democracy.
Although he opposed communist ideology, Hitler publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism on numerous occasions. Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek. While Hitler had always intended to bring Germany into conflict with the Soviet Union so he could gain Lebensraum
("living space"), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front so
they could defeat liberal democracies, particularly France.
Hitler admired the British Empire and its colonial system as living proof of Germanic superiority over 'inferior' races and saw United Kingdom as Germany's natural ally. He wrote in Mein Kampf:
"For a long time to come there will be only two Powers in Europe with
which it may be possible for Germany to conclude an alliance. These
Powers are Great Britain and Italy."
Origins
Völkisch nationalism
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, considered one of the fathers of German nationalism
One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as an inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi Party members, including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck. In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic
France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national
revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public
speeches, arming his students for battle against the French and
stressing the need for action by the German nation so it could free
itself. Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, spoke of the need for a "People's War" (Volkskrieg) and put forth concepts similar to those which the Nazis adopted. Fichte promoted German exceptionalism
and stressed the need for the German nation to purify itself (including
purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis
undertook upon their rise to power).
Another important figure in pre-Nazi völkisch thinking was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose work—Land und Leute (Land and People,
written between 1857 and 1863)—collectively tied the organic German
Volk to its native landscape and nature, a pairing which stood in stark
opposition to the mechanical and materialistic civilization which was
then developing as a result of industrialization. Geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer
borrowed from Riehl's work as did Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg and
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, both of whom employed some of Riehl's philosophy
in arguing that "each nation-state was an organism that required a
particular living space in order to survive". Riehl's influence is overtly discernible in the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) philosophy introduced by Oswald Spengler, which the Nazi agriculturalist Walther Darré and other prominent Nazis adopted.
Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism and secularised urban industrial society, while advocating a "superior" society based on ethnic German "folk" culture and German "blood". It denounced foreigners and foreign ideas and declared that Jews, Freemasons and others were "traitors to the nation" and unworthy of inclusion. Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism and it viewed societies as organic, extolling the virtues of rural
life, condemning the neglect of tradition and the decay of morals,
denounced the destruction of the natural environment and condemned
"cosmopolitan" cultures such as Jews and Romani.
The first party that attempted to combine nationalism and socialism was the (Austria-Hungary) German Workers' Party, which predominantly aimed to solve the conflict between the Austrian Germans and the Czechs in the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire, then part of Austria-Hungary.
In 1896 the German politician Friedrich Naumann formed the
National-Social Association which aimed to combine German nationalism
and a non-Marxist form of socialism together; the attempt turned out to
be futile and the idea of linking nationalism with socialism quickly
became equated with antisemites, extreme German nationalists and the Völkisch movement in general.
Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a major exponent of Pan-Germanism
During the era of Imperial Germany, Völkisch nationalism was overshadowed by both Prussian patriotism and the federalist tradition of its various component states. The events of World War I, including the end of the Prussian monarchy in Germany, resulted in a surge of revolutionary Völkisch nationalism. The Nazis supported such revolutionary Völkisch nationalist policies and they claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire. The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.
While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck's creation of the German
Empire, he was critical of Bismarck's moderate domestic policies. On the issue of Bismarck's support of a Kleindeutschland ("Lesser Germany", excluding Austria) versus the Pan-German Großdeutschland ("Greater Germany") which the Nazis advocated, Hitler stated that Bismarck's attainment of Kleindeutschland was the "highest achievement" Bismarck could have achieved "within the limits possible at that time". In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a "second Bismarck".
During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian Pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavic sentiment and anti-Habsburg views. From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title and the model of absolute party leadership. Hitler was also impressed by the populist antisemitism and the anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger,
who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city used a
rabble-rousing style of oratory that appealed to the wider masses.
Unlike von Schönerer, Lueger was not a German nationalist and instead
was a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter and only used German nationalist
notions occasionally for his own agenda.
Although Hitler praised both Lueger and Schönerer, he criticized the
former for not applying a racial doctrine against the Jews and Slavs.
Racial theories and antisemitism
Arthur de Gobineau, one of the key inventors of the theory of the "Aryan race"
The concept of the Aryan race,
which the Nazis promoted, stems from racial theories asserting that
Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of
ancient India and ancient Persia.
Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the fact that words
in European languages and words in Indo-Iranian languages have similar
pronunciations and meanings. Johann Gottfried Herder
argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections to the
ancient Indians and the ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced
peoples that possessed a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint
and science.
Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a
distinction between what they deemed to be "high and noble" Aryan
culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture.
Notions of white supremacy
and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with
white supremacists maintaining the belief that certain groups of white people
were members of an Aryan "master race" that is superior to other races
and particularly superior to the Semitic race, which they associated
with "cultural sterility". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the purity of the Aryan race, a term which he only reserved for Germanic people. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan (Germanic) and Jewish cultures.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century would prove to be a seminal work in the history of German nationalism
Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious traditions, and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born German proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and antisemitism in Germany. Chamberlain's work, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899), praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism
while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish"
spirit of selfishness and materialism. Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism and socialism. The book became popular, especially in Germany.
Chamberlain stressed a nation's need to maintain its racial purity in
order to prevent its degeneration and argued that racial intermingling
with Jews should never be permitted. In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit. Madison Grant's work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) advocated Nordicism and proposed that a eugenics
program should be implemented in order to preserve the purity of the
Nordic race. After reading the book, Hitler called it "my Bible".
In Germany, the belief that Jews were economically exploiting
Germans became prominent due to the ascendancy of many wealthy Jews into
prominent positions upon the unification of Germany in 1871.
From 1871 to the early 20th century, German Jews were over represented
in Germany's upper and middle classes while they were underrepresented
in Germany's lower classes, particularly in the fields of agricultural
and industrial labour.
German Jewish financiers and bankers played a key role in fostering
Germany's economic growth from 1871 to 1913 and they benefited
enormously from this boom. In 1908, amongst the twenty-nine wealthiest
German families with aggregate fortunes of up to 55 million marks at the
time, five were Jewish and the Rothschilds were the second wealthiest German family.
The predominance of Jews in Germany's banking, commerce and industry
sectors during this time period was very high, even though Jews were
estimated to account for only 1% of the population of Germany. The overrepresentation of Jews in these areas fueled resentment among non-Jewish Germans during periods of economic crisis.
The 1873 stock market crash and the ensuing depression resulted in a
spate of attacks on alleged Jewish economic dominance in Germany and
antisemitism increased. During this time period, in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt antisemitic and racist themes and it was also adopted by a number of radical right political movements.
Radical Antisemitism was promoted by prominent advocates of Völkisch nationalism, including Eugen Diederichs, Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. De Lagarde called the Jews a "bacillus,
the carriers of decay ... who pollute every national culture ... and
destroy all faiths with their materialistic liberalism" and he called
for the extermination of the Jews.
Langbehn called for a war of annihilation against the Jews, and his
genocidal policies were later published by the Nazis and given to
soldiers on the front during World War II. One antisemitic ideologue of the period, Friedrich Lange, even used the term "National Socialism" to describe his own anti-capitalist take on the Völkisch nationalist template.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte accused Jews in Germany of having been and inevitably of continuing to be a "state within a state" that threatened German national unity. Fichte promoted two options in order to address this, his first one being the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine so the Jews could be impelled to leave Europe.
His second option was violence against Jews and he said that the goal
of the violence would be "to cut off all their heads in one night, and
set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single
Jewish idea".
Caricatures of Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin, Karl Radek, Julius Martov and Emma Goldman from Alfred Rosenberg's The Jewish Bolshevism, which assert that Bolshevism is a Jewish ideology
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) is an antisemitic forgery created by the secret service of the Russian Empire, the Okhrana. Many antisemites believed it was real and thus it became widely popular after World War I. The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg and from 1920 onwards he focused his attacks by claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected, that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology-this became known as "Jewish Bolshevism". Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.
Prior to the Nazi ascension to power, Hitler often blamed moral degradation on Rassenschande
("racial defilement"), a way to assure his followers of his continuing
antisemitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption. Prior to the induction of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 by the Nazis, many German nationalists such as Roland Freisler strongly supported laws to ban Rassenschande between Aryans and Jews as racial treason. Even before the laws were officially passed, the Nazis banned sexual relations and marriages between party members and Jews. Party members found guilty of Rassenschande were severely punished; some party members were even sentenced to death.
The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German
national unification because Jews had infiltrated the German parliament
and they claimed that their abolition of parliament had ended this
obstacle to unification. Using the stab-in-the-back myth,
the Nazis accused Jews—and other populations who it considered
non-German—of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating
German antisemitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the far-right political canard which was popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and its politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland was strong.
Nazism's racial policy positions may have developed from the
views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, through Ernst Haeckel's idealist version of Lamarckism and the father of genetics, German botanist Gregor Mendel.
However, Haeckel's works were later condemned and banned from bookshops
and libraries by the Nazis as inappropriate for "National-Socialist
formation and education in the Third Reich". This may have been because
of his "monist" atheistic, materialist philosophy, which the Nazis disliked. Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes
while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or
lower evolution from apes, but simply stated that all humans as a whole
had progressed in their evolution from apes.
Many Lamarckians viewed "lower" races as having been exposed to
debilitating conditions for too long for any significant "improvement"
of their condition to take place in the near future.
Haeckel utilised Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of
interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging
from wholly human to subhuman.
Mendelian inheritance,
or Mendelism, was supported by the Nazis, as well as by mainstream
eugenicists of the time. The Mendelian theory of inheritance declared
that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to
another.
Eugenicists used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the
transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children,
including mental disability, whereas others also utilised Mendelian
theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists
claiming a racial nature behind certain general traits such as
inventiveness or criminal behaviour.
Response to World War I and Italian Fascism
During World War I, German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a "National Socialism" in Germany within what he termed the "ideas of 1914" that were a declaration of war against the "ideas of 1789" (the French Revolution).
According to Plenge, the "ideas of 1789" which included the rights of
man, democracy, individualism and liberalism were being rejected in
favour of "the ideas of 1914" which included the "German values" of
duty, discipline, law and order. Plenge believed that ethnic solidarity (Volksgemeinschaft)
would replace class division and that "racial comrades" would unite to
create a socialist society in the struggle of "proletarian" Germany
against "capitalist" Britain. He believed that the "Spirit of 1914" manifested itself in the concept of the "People's League of National Socialism". This National Socialism was a form of state socialism
that rejected the "idea of boundless freedom" and promoted an economy
that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state.
This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism due to the components
that were against "the national interest" of Germany, but insisted that
National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in the economy. Plenge advocated an authoritarian, rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state, and his ideas were part of the basis of Nazism.
Oswald Spengler, a philosopher of history
Oswald Spengler,
a German cultural philosopher, was a major influence on Nazism,
although after 1933 he became alienated from Nazism and was later
condemned by the Nazis for criticising Adolf Hitler. Spengler's conception of national socialism and a number of his political views were shared by the Nazis and the Conservative Revolutionary movement. Spengler's views were also popular amongst Italian Fascists, including Benito Mussolini.
Spengler's book The Decline of the West (1918), written during the final months of World War I, addressed the supposed decadence of modern European civilization, which he claimed was caused by atomising and irreligious individualisation and cosmopolitanism.
Spengler's major thesis was that a law of historical development of
cultures existed involving a cycle of birth, maturity, ageing and death
when it reaches its final form of civilisation. Upon reaching the point of civilisation, a culture will lose its creative capacity and succumb to decadence until the emergence of "barbarians" creates a new epoch. Spengler considered the Western world as having succumbed to decadence of intellect, money, cosmopolitan urban life, irreligious life, atomised individualisation and believed that it was at the end of its biological and "spiritual" fertility. He believed that the "young" German nation as an imperial power would inherit the legacy of Ancient Rome, lead a restoration of value in "blood" and instinct, while the ideals of rationalism would be revealed as absurd.
Spengler's notions of "Prussian socialism" as described in his book Preussentum und Sozialismus ("Prussiandom and Socialism", 1919), influenced Nazism and the Conservative Revolutionary movement.
Spengler wrote: "The meaning of socialism is that life is controlled
not by the opposition between rich and poor, but by the rank that
achievement and talent bestow. That is our freedom, freedom from the economic despotism of the individual".
Spengler adopted the anti-English ideas addressed by Plenge and Sombart
during World War I that condemned English liberalism and English
parliamentarianism while advocating a national socialism that was free
from Marxism and that would connect the individual to the state through corporatist organisation.
Spengler claimed that socialistic Prussian characteristics existed
across Germany, including creativity, discipline, concern for the
greater good, productivity and self-sacrifice.
He prescribed war as a necessity by saying: "War is the eternal form of
higher human existence and states exist for war: they are the
expression of the will to war".
The Marinebrigade Erhardt during the Kapp Putsch in Berlin, 1920 (the Marinebrigade Erhardt used the swastika as its symbol, as seen on their helmets and on the truck, which inspired the Nazi Party to adopt it as the movement's symbol)
Spengler's definition of socialism did not advocate a change to property relations. He denounced Marxism
for seeking to train the proletariat to "expropriate the expropriator",
the capitalist and then to let them live a life of leisure on this
expropriation. He claimed that "Marxism is the capitalism of the working class" and not true socialism.
According to Spengler, true socialism would be in the form of
corporatism, stating that "local corporate bodies organised according to
the importance of each occupation to the people as a whole; higher
representation in stages up to a supreme council of the state; mandates
revocable at any time; no organised parties, no professional
politicians, no periodic elections".
The book Das Dritte Reich (1923), translated as "The Third Reich", by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck
Wilhelm Stapel, an antisemitic German intellectual, utilised
Spengler's thesis on the cultural confrontation between Jews as whom
Spengler described as a Magian people versus Europeans as a Faustian people.
Stapel described Jews as a landless nomadic people in pursuit of an
international culture whereby they can integrate into Western
civilisation.
As such, Stapel claims that Jews have been attracted to "international"
versions of socialism, pacifism or capitalism because as a landless
people the Jews have transgressed various national cultural boundaries.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was initially the dominant figure of the Conservative Revolutionaries influenced Nazism. He rejected reactionary conservatism while proposing a new state that he coined the "Third Reich", which would unite all classes under authoritarian rule. Van den Bruck advocated a combination of the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.
Fascism was a major influence on Nazism. The seizure of power by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome in 1922 drew admiration by Hitler, who less than a month later had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists. Hitler presented the Nazis as a form of German fascism. In November 1923, the Nazis attempted a "March on Berlin" modelled after the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.
Hitler spoke of Nazism being indebted to the success of Fascism's rise to power in Italy.
In a private conversation in 1941, Hitler said that "the brown shirt
would probably not have existed without the black shirt", the "brown
shirt" referring to the Nazi militia and the "black shirt" referring to
the Fascist militia.
He also said in regards to the 1920s: "If Mussolini had been
outdistanced by Marxism, I don't know whether we could have succeeded in
holding out. At that period National Socialism was a very fragile
growth".
Other Nazis—especially those at the time associated with the party's more radical wing such as Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler—rejected Italian Fascism, accusing it of being too conservative or capitalist. Alfred Rosenberg condemned Italian Fascism for being racially confused and having influences from philosemitism. Strasser criticised the policy of Führerprinzip as being created by Mussolini and considered its presence in Nazism as a foreign imported idea.
Throughout the relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a
number of lower-ranking Nazis scornfully viewed fascism as a
conservative movement that lacked a full revolutionary potential.
Ideology
Nationalism and racialism
Nazism emphasized German nationalism, including both irredentism and expansionism. Nazism held racial theories based upon a belief in the existence of an Aryan master race
that was superior to all other races. The Nazis emphasised the
existence of racial conflict between the Aryan race and
others—particularly Jews, whom the Nazis viewed as a mixed race that had
infiltrated multiple societies and was responsible for exploitation and
repression of the Aryan race. The Nazis also categorised Slavs as Untermensch (sub-human).
Irredentism and expansionism
Beginning of Lebensraum, the Nazi German expulsion of Poles from central Poland, 1939
The German Nazi Party supported German irredentist claims to Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the region now known as the Czech Republic and the territory known since 1919 as the Polish Corridor. A major policy of the German Nazi Party was Lebensraum
("living space") for the German nation based on claims that Germany
after World War I was facing an overpopulation crisis and that expansion
was needed to end the country's overpopulation within existing confined
territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being. Since the 1920s, the Nazi Party publicly promoted the expansion of Germany into territories held by the Soviet Union.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that Lebensraum would be acquired in Eastern Europe, especially Russia.
In his early years as the Nazi leader, Hitler had claimed that he would
be willing to accept friendly relations with Russia on the tactical
condition that Russia agree to return to the borders established by the
German–Russian peace agreement of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Vladimir Lenin of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1918 which gave large territories held by Russia to German control in exchange for peace.
In 1921, Hitler had commended the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as opening
the possibility for restoration of relations between Germany and Russia
by saying:
Through the peace with Russia the sustenance of Germany as well as the provision of work were to have been secured by the acquisition of land and soil, by access to raw materials, and by friendly relations between the two lands.
— Adolf Hitler
Topographical map of Europe: the Nazi Party declared support for Drang nach Osten (expansion of Germany east to the Ural Mountains), that is shown on the upper right side of the map as a brown diagonal line
From 1921 to 1922, Hitler evoked rhetoric of both the achievement of Lebensraum
involving the acceptance of a territorially reduced Russia as well as
supporting Russian nationals in overthrowing the Bolshevik government
and establishing a new Russian government.
Hitler's attitudes changed by the end of 1922, in which he then
supported an alliance of Germany with Britain to destroy Russia. Hitler later declared how far he intended to expand Germany into Russia:
Asia, what a disquieting reservoir of men! The safety of Europe will not be assured until we have driven Asia back behind the Urals. No organized Russian state must be allowed to exist west of that line.
— Adolf Hitler
Policy for Lebensraum planned mass expansion of Germany's borders to eastwards of the Ural Mountains. Hitler planned for the "surplus" Russian population living west of the Urals to be deported to the east of the Urals.
Racial theories
In its racial categorization, Nazism viewed what it called the Aryan race as the master race of the world—a race that was superior to all other races. It viewed Aryans as being in racial conflict with a mixed race people, the Jews,
whom the Nazis identified as a dangerous enemy of the Aryans. It also
viewed a number of other peoples as dangerous to the well-being of the
Aryan race. In order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the
Aryan race, a set of race laws was introduced in 1935 which came to be
known as the Nuremberg Laws.
At first these laws only prevented sexual relations and marriages
between Germans and Jews, but they were later extended to the "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring", who were described by the Nazis as people of "alien blood". Such relations between Aryans and non-Aryans were now punishable under the race laws as Rassenschande or "race defilement". After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans). At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, Romanis, Slavs and blacks. To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis eventually sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, Slavs and the physically and mentally disabled. Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but were subjected to exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents. One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel or enslave most or all Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe in order to acquire living space for German settlers.
A "poster information" from the exhibition "Miracle of Life" in Berlin in 1935
A Nazi era school textbook for German students entitled Heredity and Racial Biology for Students
written by Jakob Graf described to students the Nazi conception of the
Aryan race in a section titled "The Aryan: The Creative Force in Human
History".
Graf claimed that the original Aryans developed from Nordic peoples who
invaded ancient India and launched the initial development of Aryan
culture there that later spread to ancient Persia and he claimed that
the Aryan presence in Persia was what was responsible for its
development into an empire. He claimed that ancient Greek culture
was developed by Nordic peoples due to paintings of the time which
showed Greeks who were tall, light-skinned, light-eyed, blond-haired
people. He said that the Roman Empire was developed by the Italics who were related to the Celts who were also a Nordic people. He believed that the vanishing of the Nordic component of the populations in Greece and Rome led to their downfall. The Renaissance was claimed to have developed in the Western Roman Empire
because of the Germanic invasions that brought new Nordic blood to the
Empire's lands, such as the presence of Nordic blood in the Lombards (referred to as Longobards in the book); that remnants of the western Goths were responsible for the creation of the Spanish Empire; and that the heritage of the Franks, Goths and Germanic peoples in France was what was responsible for its rise as a major power. He claimed that the rise of the Russian Empire was due to its leadership by people of Norman descent. He described the rise of Anglo-Saxon societies in North America, South Africa and Australia as being the result of the Nordic heritage of Anglo-Saxons.
He concluded these points by saying: "Everywhere Nordic creative power
has built mighty empires with high-minded ideas, and to this very day Aryan languages
and cultural values are spread over a large part of the world, though
the creative Nordic blood has long since vanished in many places".
A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in Buchenwald concentration camp
In Nazi Germany, the idea of creating a master race resulted in efforts to "purify" the Deutsche Volk through eugenics and its culmination was the compulsory sterilization or the involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. After World War II, the euthanasia programme was named Action T4. The ideological justification for euthanasia was Hitler's view of Sparta (11th century – 195 BC) as the original Völkisch state and he praised Sparta's dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in order to maintain racial purity. Some non-Aryans enlisted in Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht, including Germans of African descent and Jewish descent.
The Nazis began to implement "racial hygiene" policies as soon as they
came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilization for people with a
range of conditions which were thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilization was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance.
An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933
and 1939. Although some Nazis suggested that the programme should be
extended to people with physical disabilities, such ideas had to be
expressed carefully, given the fact that some Nazis had physical
disabilities, one example being one of the most powerful figures of the
regime, Joseph Goebbels, who had a deformed right leg.
Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther argued that European peoples were divided into five races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine and East Baltic. Günther applied a Nordicist conception in order to justify his belief that Nordics were the highest in the racial hierarchy. In his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes
(1922) ("Racial Science of the German People"), Günther recognised
Germans as being composed of all five races, but emphasized the strong
Nordic heritage among them. Hitler read Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, which influenced his racial policy. Gunther believed that Slavs belonged to an "Eastern race" and he warned against Germans mixing with them. The Nazis described Jews as being a racially mixed group of primarily Near Eastern and Oriental racial types.
Because such racial groups were concentrated outside Europe, the Nazis
claimed that Jews were "racially alien" to all European peoples and that
they did not have deep racial roots in Europe.
Günther emphasized Jews' Near Eastern racial heritage. Günther identified the mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism
in the 8th century as creating the two major branches of the Jewish
people, those of primarily Near Eastern racial heritage became the Ashkenazi Jews (that he called Eastern Jews) while those of primarily Oriental racial heritage became the Sephardi Jews (that he called Southern Jews). Günther claimed that the Near Eastern type was composed of commercially spirited and artful traders, that the type held strong psychological manipulation skills which aided them in trade.
He claimed that the Near Eastern race had been "bred not so much for
the conquest and exploitation of nature as it had been for the conquest
and exploitation of people".
Günther believed that European peoples had a racially motivated
aversion to peoples of Near Eastern racial origin and their traits, and
as evidence of this he showed multiple examples of depictions of satanic
figures with Near Eastern physiognomies in European art.
Hitler's conception of the Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race") excluded the vast majority of Slavs from central and eastern Europe (i.e. Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.). They were regarded as a race of men not inclined to a higher form of civilization,
which was under an instinctive force that reverted them back to nature.
The Nazis also regarded the Slavs as having dangerous Jewish and
Asiatic, meaning Mongol, influences. Because of this, the Nazis declared Slavs to be Untermenschen ("subhumans").
Nazi anthropologists attempted to scientifically prove the historical
admixture of the Slavs who lived further East and leading Nazi racial
theorist Hans Günther regarded the Slavs as being primarily Nordic centuries ago but he believed that they had mixed with non-Nordic types over time.
Exceptions were made for a small percentage of Slavs who the Nazis saw
as descended from German settlers and therefore fit to be Germanised and
considered part of the Aryan master race. Hitler described Slavs as "a mass of born slaves who feel the need for a master". The Nazi notion of Slavs as inferior served as a legitimization of their desire to create Lebensraum
for Germans and other Germanic people in eastern Europe, where millions
of Germans and other Germanic settlers would be moved into once those
territories were conquered, while the original Slavic inhabitants were
to be annihilated, removed or enslaved.
Nazi Germany's policy changed towards Slavs in response to military
manpower shortages, forced it to allow Slavs to serve in its armed
forces within the occupied territories in spite of the fact that they
were considered "subhuman".
Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary
in order to save Germany from suffering under them and he dismissed
concerns that the conflict with them was inhumane and unjust:
We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.
Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels frequently employed antisemitic
rhetoric to underline this view: "The Jew is the enemy and the destroyer
of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race."
Social class
National Socialist politics was based on competition and struggle as
its organizing principle, and the Nazis believed that "human life
consisted of eternal struggle and competition and derived its meaning
from struggle and competition."
The Nazis saw this eternal struggle in military terms, and advocated a
society organized like an army in order to achieve success. They
promoted the idea of a national-racial "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) in order to accomplish "the efficient prosecution of the struggle against other peoples and states." Like an army, the Volksgemeinschaft
was meant to consist of a hierarchy of ranks or classes of people, some
commanding and others obeying, all working together for a common goal. This concept was rooted in the writings of 19th century völkisch
authors who glorified medieval German society, viewing it as a
"community rooted in the land and bound together by custom and
tradition," in which there was neither class conflict nor selfish
individualism.
Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, and it praised both German capitalists and German workers as essential to the Volksgemeinschaft. In the Volksgemeinschaft, social classes would continue to exist, but there would be no class conflict between them.
Hitler said that "the capitalists have worked their way to the top
through their capacity, and as the basis of this selection, which again
only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead."
German business leaders co-operated with the Nazis during their rise to
power and received substantial benefits from the Nazi state after it
was established, including high profits and state-sanctioned monopolies
and cartels.
Large celebrations and symbolism were used extensively to encourage
those engaged in physical labour on behalf of Germany, with leading
National Socialists often praising the "honour of labour", which
fostered a sense of community (Gemeinschaft) for the German people and promoted solidarity towards the Nazi cause.
To win workers away from Marxism, Nazi propaganda sometimes presented
its expansionist foreign policy goals as a "class struggle between
nations." Bonfires were made of school children's differently coloured caps as symbolic of the unity of different social classes.
In 1922, Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and working-class young people:
The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers—in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.
Nevertheless, the Nazi Party's voter base consisted mainly of farmers
and the middle class, including groups such as Weimar government
officials, school teachers, doctors, clerks, self-employed businessmen,
salesmen, retired officers, engineers, and students.
Their demands included lower taxes, higher prices for food,
restrictions on department stores and consumer co-operatives, and
reductions in social services and wages.
The need to maintain the support of these groups made it difficult for
the Nazis to appeal to the working class, since the working class often
had opposite demands.
From 1928 onward, the Nazi Party's growth into a large national
political movement was dependent on middle class support, and on the
public perception that it "promised to side with the middle classes and
to confront the economic and political power of the working class." The financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism.
Although the Nazis continued to make appeals to "the German worker,"
historian Timothy Mason concludes that "Hitler had nothing but slogans
to offer the working class."
Sex and gender
Obligations of Polish workers in Germany, warning them of the death penalty for any sexual relations between Germans and Poles
Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church). Many women enthusiastically supported the regime, but formed their own internal hierarchies.
Hitler's own opinion on the matter of women in Nazi Germany was that
while other eras of German history had experienced the development and
liberation of the female mind, the National Socialist goal was
essentially singular in that it wished for them to produce a child.
Based on this theme, Hitler once remarked about women that "with every
child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the
nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family".
Proto-natalist programs in Nazi Germany offered favourable loans and
grants to newlyweds and encouraged them to give birth to offspring by
providing them with additional incentives. Contraception was discouraged for racially valuable women in Nazi Germany and abortion
was forbidden by strict legal mandates, including prison sentences for
women who sought them as well as prison sentences for doctors who
performed them, whereas abortion for racially "undesirable" persons was
encouraged.
While unmarried until the very end of the regime, Hitler often
made excuses about his busy life hindering any chance for marriage.
Among National Socialist ideologues, marriage was valued not for moral
considerations but because it provided an optimal breeding environment. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler reportedly told a confidant that when he established the Lebensborn
program, an organisation that would dramatically increase the birth
rate of "Aryan" children through extramarital relations between women
classified as racially pure and their male equals, he had only the
purest male "conception assistants" in mind.
Since the Nazis extended the Rassenschande ("race defilement") law to all foreigners at the beginning of the war,
pamphlets were issued to German women which ordered them to avoid
sexual relations with foreign workers who were brought to Germany and
the pamphlets also ordered German women to view these same foreign
workers as a danger to their blood.
Although the law was applicable to both genders, German women were
punished more severely for having sexual relations with foreign forced labourers in Germany. The Nazis issued the Polish decrees on 8 March 1940 which contained regulations concerning the Polish forced labourers (Zivilarbeiter)
who were brought to Germany during World War II. One of the regulations
stated that any Pole "who has sexual relations with a German man or
woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner, will be punished
by death".
After the decrees were enacted, Himmler stated:
Fellow Germans who engage in sexual relations with male or female civil workers of the Polish nationality, commit other immoral acts or engage in love affairs shall be arrested immediately.
The Nazis later issued similar regulations against the Eastern Workers (Ost-Arbeiters), including the imposition of the death penalty if they engaged in sexual relations with German persons.
Heydrich issued a decree on 20 February 1942 which declared that sexual
intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of
war would result in the Russian man being punished with the death
penalty.
Another decree issued by Himmler on 7 December 1942 stated that any
"unauthorised sexual intercourse" would result in the death penalty.
Because the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour
did not permit capital punishment for race defilement, special courts
were convened in order to allow the death penalty to be imposed in some
cases.
German women accused of race defilement were marched through the
streets with their head shaven and placards detailing their crimes were
placed around their necks and those convicted of race defilement were sent to concentration camps.
When Himmler reportedly asked Hitler what the punishment should be for
German girls and German women who were found guilty of race defilement
with prisoners of war (POWs), he ordered that "every POW who has
relations with a German girl or a German would be shot" and the German
woman should be publicly humiliated by "having her hair shorn and being
sent to a concentration camp".
The League of German Girls
was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid race
defilement, which was treated with particular importance for young
females.
Opposition to homosexuality
Homophobia: Berlin memorial to homosexual victims of the Holocaust: Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen (Struck Dead—Hushed Up)
After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality by saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated". In 1936, Himmler established the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion"). The Nazi regime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s. As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges. Nazi ideology still viewed German men who were gay as a part of the Aryan master race,
but the Nazi regime attempted to force them into sexual and social
conformity. Homosexuals were viewed as failing in their duty to
procreate and reproduce for the Aryan nation. Gay men who would not
change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the "Extermination Through Work" campaign.
Religion
Members of the German Christians organization celebrating Luther Day in Berlin in 1933, speech by Bishop Hossenfelder
Hitler in 1935 with Cesare Orsenigo, the Catholic Church's nuncio to Germany
The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations which were not hostile to the State and it also endorsed Positive Christianity in order to combat "the Jewish-materialist spirit". Positive Christianity was a modified version of Christianity which emphasized racial purity and nationalism. The Nazis were aided by theologians such as Ernst Bergmann. In his work Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), Bergmann held the view that the Old Testament of the Bible was inaccurate along with portions of the New Testament, claimed that Jesus was not a Jew but was instead of Aryan origin and he also claimed that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.
Hitler denounced the Old Testament as "Satan's
Bible" and utilising components of the New Testament he attempted to
prove that Jesus was both an Aryan and an antisemite by citing passages
such as John 8:44 where he noted that Jesus is yelling at "the Jews", as well as saying to them "your father is the devil" and the Cleansing of the Temple, which describes Jesus' whipping of the "Children of the Devil". Hitler claimed that the New Testament included distortions by Paul the Apostle, who Hitler described as a "mass-murderer turned saint". In their propaganda, the Nazis utilised the writings of Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer. They publicly displayed an original edition of Luther's On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies. The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christians organization.
The Nazis were initially very hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the German Centre Party. Catholics opposed the Nazis' promotion of compulsory sterilization of those whom they deemed inferior and the Catholic Church
forbade its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi
violence occurred against Catholics due to their association with the
Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime's sterilization
laws. The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state. In their propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany's Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic Teutonic Knights and their campaigns in Eastern Europe.
The Nazis identified them as "sentinels" in the East against "Slavic
chaos", though beyond that symbolism, the influence of the Teutonic
Knights on Nazism was limited.
Hitler also admitted that the Nazis' night rallies were inspired by the
Catholic rituals which he had witnessed during his Catholic upbringing. The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and they endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic Kreuz und Adler, an organization which advocated a form of national Catholicism that would reconcile the Catholic Church's beliefs with Nazism. On 20 July 1933, a concordat (Reichskonkordat)
was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, which in
exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany required
German Catholics to be loyal to the German state. The Catholic Church
then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.
Historian Michael Burleigh
claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such
use required that "fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the
remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses". Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was "self-consciously pagan and primitive". However, historian Roger Griffin
rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although
there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg,
they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi
ideology beyond its use for symbolism. It is noted that Hitler denounced
Germanic paganism in Mein Kampf and condemned Rosenberg's and Himmler's paganism as "nonsense".
Economics
Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work (1934) – an example of reactionary modernism
Generally speaking, Nazi theorists and politicians blamed Germany's
previous economic failures on political causes like the influence of
Marxism on the workforce, the sinister and exploitative machinations of
what they called international Jewry and the vindictiveness of the
western political leaders' war reparation
demands. Instead of traditional economic incentives, the Nazis offered
solutions of a political nature, such as the elimination of organised trade unions, rearmament (in contravention of the Versailles Treaty) and biological politics.
Various work programs designed to establish full-employment for the
German population were instituted once the Nazis seized full national
power. Hitler encouraged nationally supported projects like the
construction of the Autobahn highway system, the introduction of an affordable people's car (Volkswagen) and later the Nazis bolstered the economy through the business and employment generated by military rearmament.
The Nazis benefited early in the regime's existence from the first
post–Depression economic upswing, and this combined with their public
works projects, job-procurement program and subsidised home repair
program reduced unemployment by as much as 40 percent in one year. This
development tempered the unfavourable psychological climate caused by
the earlier economic crisis and encouraged Germans to march in step with
the regime.
Upon being appointed Chancellor in 1933, Hitler promised measures
to increase employment, protect the German currency, and promote
recovery from the Great Depression. These included an agrarian
settlement program, labor service, and a guarantee to maintain health
care and pensions.
But above all, his priority was rearmament, and the buildup of the
German military in preparation for an eventual war to conquer Lebensraum in the East.
Thus, at the beginning of his rule, Hitler said that “the future of
Germany depends exclusively and only on the reconstruction of the
Wehrmacht. All other tasks must cede precedence to the task of
rearmament.”
This policy was implemented immediately, with military expenditures
quickly growing far larger than the civilian work-creation programs. As
early as June 1933, military spending for the year was budgeted to be
three times larger than the spending on all civilian work-creation
measures in 1932 and 1933 combined.
Nazi Germany increased its military spending faster than any other
state in peacetime, with the share of military spending rising from 1
percent to 10 percent of national income in the first two years of the
regime alone. Eventually, by 1944, it reached as high as 75 percent.
In spite of their rhetoric condemning big business
prior to their rise to power, the Nazis quickly entered into a
partnership with German business from as early as February 1933. That
month, after being appointed Chancellor but before gaining dictatorial
powers, Hitler made a personal appeal to German business leaders to help
fund the Nazi Party for the crucial months that were to follow. He
argued that they should support him in establishing a dictatorship
because "private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of
democracy" and because democracy would allegedly lead to communism. He promised to destroy the German left and the trade unions, without any mention of anti-Jewish policies or foreign conquests.
In the following weeks, the Nazi Party received contributions from
seventeen different business groups, with the largest coming from IG Farben and Deutsche Bank.
Historian Adam Tooze writes that the leaders of German business were
therefore "willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in
Germany." In exchange, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level. Business profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment. In addition, the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, but at the same time they increased economic state control through regulations.
Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged
creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had
to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than
"parasitical".
Private property rights were conditional upon following the economic
priorities set by the Nazi leadership, with high profits as a reward for
firms who followed them and the threat of nationalization being used
against those who did not. Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished, but Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him retain business competition and private property as economic engines.
Agrarian policies were also important to the Nazis since they
corresponded not just to the economy but to their geopolitical
conception of Lebensraum as well. For Hitler, the acquisition of land and soil was requisite in moulding the German economy. To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.
Farm ownership remained private, but business monopoly rights were
granted to marketing boards to control production and prices with a
quota system. The "Hereditary Farm Law of 1933" established a cartel structure under a government body known as the Reichsnährstand (RNST) which determined "everything from what seeds and fertilizers were used to how land was inherited".
The Nazis were hostile to the idea of social welfare in principle, upholding instead the social Darwinist concept that the weak and feeble should perish.
They condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic as well as
private charity, accusing them of supporting people regarded as racially
inferior and weak, who should have been weeded out in the process of
natural selection.
Nevertheless, faced with the mass unemployment and poverty of the Great
Depression, the Nazis found it necessary to set up charitable
institutions to help racially-pure Germans in order to maintain popular
support, while arguing that this represented "racial self-help" and not
indiscriminate charity or universal social welfare. Thus, Nazi programs such as the Winter Relief of the German People and the broader National Socialist People's Welfare
(NSV) were organized as quasi-private institutions, officially relying
on private donations from Germans to help others of their race -
although in practice those who refused to donate could face severe
consequences.
Unlike the social welfare institutions of the Weimar Republic and the
Christian charities, the NSV distributed assistance on explicitly racial
grounds. It provided support only to those who were "racially sound,
capable of and willing to work, politically reliable, and willing and
able to reproduce." Non-Aryans were excluded, as well as the "work-shy",
"asocials" and the "hereditarily ill." Successful efforts were made to get middle-class women involved in social work assisting large families, and the Winter Relief campaigns acted as a ritual to generate public sympathy.
Hitler primarily viewed the German economy as an instrument of
power and believed the economy was not about creating wealth and
technical progress so as to improve the quality of life for a nation's
citizenry, but rather that economic success was paramount for providing
the means and material foundations necessary for military conquest.
While economic progress generated by National Socialist programs had
its role in appeasing the German people, the Nazis and Hitler in
particular did not believe that economic solutions alone were sufficient
to thrust Germany onto the stage as a world power. The Nazis thus
sought to secure a general economic revival accompanied by massive
military spending for rearmament, especially later through the
implementation of the Four Year Plan,
which consolidated their rule and firmly secured a command relationship
between the German arms industry and the National Socialist government.
Between 1933 and 1939, military expenditures were upwards of 82 billion
Reichsmarks and represented 23 percent of Germany's gross national
product as the Nazis mobilised their people and economy for war.
Anti-communism
Anti-communist propaganda poster in Nazi-occupied Norway
The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility towards small business and its atheism. Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction. Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post–World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated his desire to "make war upon the Marxist principle that all men are equal." He believed that "the notion of equality was a sin against nature." Nazism upheld the "natural inequality of men," including inequality between races and also within each race.
The National Socialist state aimed to advance those individuals with
special talents or intelligence, so they could rule over the masses. Nazi ideology relied on elitism and the Führerprinzip
(leadership principle), arguing that elite minorities should assume
leadership roles over the majority, and that the elite minority should
itself be organized according to a "hierarchy of talent," with a single
leader - the Führer - at the top. The Führerprinzip
held that each member of the hierarchy owed absolute obedience to those
above him and should hold absolute power over those below him.
During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to Jewish Bolshevism. Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism and internationalism.
The Communist movement, the trade unions, the Social Democratic Party
and the left-wing press were all considered to be Jewish-controlled and
part of the "international Jewish conspiracy" to weaken the German
nation by promoting internal disunity through class struggle. The Nazis also believed that the Jews had instigated the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and that Communists had stabbed Germany in the back and caused it to lose the First World War. They further argued that modern cultural trends of the 1920s (such as jazz music and cubist art) represented "cultural Bolshevism" and were part of a political assault aimed at the spiritual degeneration of the German Volk. Joseph Goebbels published a pamphlet titled The Nazi-Sozi which gave brief points of how National Socialism differed from Marxism.
In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do
with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is
not".
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was the largest Communist Party in the world outside of the Soviet Union, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
In the 1920s and early 30s, Communists and Nazis often fought each
other directly in street violence, with the Nazi paramilitary
organizations being opposed by the Communist Red Front and Anti-Fascist Action.
After the beginning of the Great Depression, both Communists and Nazis
saw their share of the vote increase. However, while the Nazis were
willing to form alliances with other parties of the right, the
Communists refused to form an alliance with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest party of the left.
After the Nazis came to power, they quickly banned the Communist Party
under the allegation that it was preparing for revolution and that it
had caused the Reichstag fire.
Four thousand KPD officials were arrested in February 1933, and by the
end of the year 130,000 communists had been sent to concentration camps.
During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain, the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France and the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley.
Anti-capitalism
The Nazis argued that free market capitalism damages nations due to international finance and the worldwide economic dominance of disloyal big business, which they considered to be the product of Jewish influences. Nazi propaganda posters in working class
districts emphasised anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The
maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with
nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."
Both in public and in private, Hitler expressed disdain for
capitalism, arguing that it holds nations ransom in the interests of a
parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.
He opposed free market capitalism because it "could not be trusted to
put national interests first," and he desired an economy that would
direct resources "in ways that matched the many national goals of the
regime," such as the buildup of the military, building programs for
cities and roads, and economic self-sufficiency. Hitler also distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its egotism
and he preferred a state-directed economy that maintains private
property and competition but subordinates them to the interests of the Volk.
Hitler told a party leader in 1934: "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews". Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that capitalism had "run its course". Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them."
Hitler was personally disgusted with the ruling bourgeois elites of
Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic, who he referred to as
"cowardly shits".
In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism
in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories
should be seized by force, as he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.
Hitler argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to
have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on
world trade. He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.
Joseph Goebbels,
who would later go on to become the Nazi Propaganda Minister, was
strongly opposed to both capitalism and communism, viewing them as the
"two great pillars of materialism" that were "part of the international
Jewish conspiracy for world domination."
Nevertheless, he wrote in his diary in 1925 that if he were forced to
choose between them, "in the final analysis", "it would be better for us
to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under
capitalism".
He also linked his anti-Semitism to his anti-capitalism, stating in a
1929 pamphlet that "we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of
capitalism, the misuse of the nation's goods."
Within the Nazi Party, the faction associated with anti-capitalist beliefs was the Sturmabteilung (SA), a paramilitary wing led by Ernst Röhm.
The SA had a complicated relationship with the rest of the party,
giving both Röhm himself and local SA leaders significant autonomy.
Different local leaders would even promote different political ideas in
their units, including "nationalistic, socialistic, anti-Semitic,
racist, völkisch, or conservative ideas."
There was tension between the SA and Hitler, especially from 1930
onward, as Hitler's "increasingly close association with big industrial
interests and traditional rightist forces" caused many in the SA to
distrust him.
The SA regarded Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 as a "first
revolution" against the left, and some voices within the ranks began
arguing for a "second revolution" against the right.
After engaging in violence against the left in 1933, Röhm's SA also
began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with
conservative reaction.
Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly
threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by
alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army. This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives.
Totalitarianism
Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, 1936
Under Nazism, with its emphasis on the nation, individualism was
denounced and instead importance was placed upon Germans belonging to
the German Volk and "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft).
Hitler declared that "every activity and every need of every individual
will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party" and
that "there are no longer any free realms in which the individual
belongs to himself". Himmler
justified the establishment of a repressive police state, in which the
security forces could exercise power arbitrarily, by claiming that
national security and order should take precedence over the needs of the
individual.
According to the famous philosopher and political theorist, Hannah Arendt,
the allure of Nazism as a totalitarian ideology (with its attendant
mobilisation of the German population) resided within the construct of
helping that society deal with the cognitive dissonance resultant from
the tragic interruption of the First World War and the economic and
material suffering consequent to the Depression and brought to order the
revolutionary unrest occurring all around them. Instead of the
plurality that existed in democratic or parliamentary states, Nazism as a
totalitarian system promulgated "clear" solutions to the historical
problems faced by Germany, levied support by de-legitimizing the former
government of Weimar and provided a politico-biological pathway to a
better future, one free from the uncertainty of the past. It was the
atomised and disaffected masses that Hitler and the party elite pointed
in a particular direction and using clever propaganda to make them into
ideological adherents, exploited in bringing Nazism to life.
While the ideologues of Nazism, much like those of Stalinism,
abhorred democratic or parliamentary governance as practiced in the
United States or Britain, their differences are substantial. An
epistemic crisis occurs when one tries to synthesize and contrast Nazism
and Stalinism as two-sides of the same coin with their similarly
tyrannical leaders, state-controlled economies and repressive police
structures. Namely, while they share a common thematic political
construction, they are entirely inimical to one another in their
worldviews and when more carefully analysed against one another on a
one-to-one level, an "irreconcilable asymmetry" results.
Reactionary or revolutionary?
Although Nazism is often seen as a reactionary movement, it did not
seek a return of Germany to the pre-Weimar monarchy, but instead looked
much further back to a mythic halcyon Germany which never existed. It
has also been seen – as it was by the German-American scholar Franz Leopold Neumann – as the result of a crisis of capitalism
which manifested as a "totalitarian monopoly capitalism". In this view
Nazism is a mass movement of the middle class which was in opposition to
a mass movement of workers in socialism and its extreme form, Communism. Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, however, argues that,
Such an interpretation runs the risk of misjudging the revolutionary component of National Socialism, which cannot be dismissed as being simply reactionary. Rather, from the very outset, and particularly as it developed into the SS state, National Socialism aimed at a transformation of state and society.
and that, Hitler's and the Nazi Party's political positions
were of a revolutionary nature: destruction of existing political and social structures and their supporting elites; profound dispain for civic order, for human and moral values, for Habsburg and Hohenzollern, for liberal and Marxist ideas. The middle class and middle-class values, bourgeois nationalism and capitalism, the professionals, the intelligentsia and the upper class were dealt the sharpest rebuff. These were the groups which had to be uprooted...
After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch
in 1923, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment, Hitler decided that
the way for the Nazi Party to achieve power was not through
insurrection, but through legal and quasi-legal means. This did not sit
well with the brown-shirted stormtroopers of the SA,
especially those in Berlin, who chafed under the restrictions that
Hitler placed on them, and their subordination to the party. This
resulted in the Stennes Revolt of 1930-31, after which Hitler made himself the Supreme Commander of the SA, and brought Ernst Röhm
back to be their Chief of Staff and keep them in line. The quashing of
the SA's revolutionary fervor convinced many businessmen and military
leaders that the Nazis had put aside their insurrectionist past, and
that Hitler could be a reliable partner.
However, after the Nazis' "Seizure of Power"
in 1933, Röhm and the Brown Shirts were not content for the party to
simply carry the reigns of power. Instead, they pressed for a
continuation of the "National Socialist revolution" to bring about
sweeping social changes, which Hitler, primarily for tactical reasons,
was not willing to do at that time. He was instead focused on
rebuilding the military and reorienting the economy to provide the
rearmament necessary for invasion of the countries to the east of
Germany, especially Poland and Russia, to get the Lebensraum
("living space") he believed was necessary to the survival of the Aryan
race. For this, he needed the co-operation of not only the military,
but also the vital organs of capitalism, the banks and big businesses,
which he would be unlikely to get if Germany's social and economic
structure was being radically overhauled. Röhm's public proclamation
that the SA would not allow the "German Revolution" to be halted or
undermined caused Hitler to announce that "The revolution is not a
permanent condition." The unwillingness of Röhm and the SA to cease
their agitation for a "Second Revolution", and the unwarranted fear of a
"Röhm putsch" to accomplish it, were factors behind Hitler's purging of
the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934.
Despite such tactical breaks necessitated by pragmatic concerns,
which were typical for Hitler during his rise to power and in the early
years of his regime, Hitler never ceased being a revolutionary dedicated
to the radical transformation of Germany, especially when it concerned
racial matters. In his monograph, Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary?, Martyn Housden concludes:
[Hitler] compiled a most extensive set of revolutionary goals (calling for radical social and political change); he mobilized a revolutionary following so extensive and powerful that many of his aims were achieved; he established and ran a dictatorial revolutionary state; and he disseminated his ideas abroad through a revolutionary foreign policy and war. In short, he defined and controlled the National Socialist revolution in all its phases.
Of course, there were aspects of Nazism which were reactionary, such
as their attitude toward the role of women in society, which was
completely traditionalist,
calling for the return of women to the home as wives, mothers and
homemakers, although ironically this ideological policy was undermined
in reality by the growing labor shortages and need for more workers. The
number of women in the workplace climbed throughout the period of Nazi
control of Germany, from 4.24 million in 1933 to 4.52 million in 1936
and 5.2 million in 1938, numbers that far exceeded those of the Weimar Republic.
Another reactionary aspect of Nazism was in their arts policy, which stemmed from Hitler's rejection of all forms of "degenerate" modern art, music and architecture.
Overall, however, Nazism – being the ideology and practices of the Nazi
Party, and the Nazi Party being the manifestation of Hitler's will[287] – is best seen as essentially revolutionary in nature.
Post-war Nazism
Following Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II and the end of the Holocaust,
overt expressions of support for Nazi ideas were prohibited in Germany
and other European countries. Nonetheless, movements which self-identify
as National Socialist or which are described as adhering to National
Socialism continue to exist on the fringes of politics in many western
societies. Usually espousing a white supremacist ideology, many deliberately adopt the symbols of Nazi Germany.
