This question has been steeping in my mind in the years since a conversation with an ex-friend of mine (libertarian baby-fascist) regarding his self-identification as a “Nationalist” and his point that he thinks “The ‘socialism’ of Scandinavian countries would be okay here (United States) if it were only for the American citizens”.
It didn’t occur to me then to ask him if that made him a National Socialist and if he had any familiarity with that term, but… Now I don’t talk to that baby-fasc at all.
So anyway, the question that I have now is “Why Did The Nazis Call Their Party ‘Socialist’?” I understand they definitely weren’t socialist, they were extremely capitalist with private interests using the power of the state to plunder the networth of “undesirables”.
So why did they call themselves socialist? Was there a pretense that the state would build a socialist support network after it established itself as an imperial entity? (But) The Night of Long Knives was them scouring the party of any left-leaning members, right?
Did they call themselves socialist just as branding?
the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” would have sounded something to the average German in the 1930s like how an American today might hear “Liberal Conservative Pro-diversity, Anti-Woke, anti-Trump MAGA Democrat-Republicans for accountability and tort reform.”
The Nazi party name has two right-wing signifiers and two left wing signifiers. It’s a jumble of various terms that were in the popular political lexicon at the time. The Nazis also did seriously court existing socialist groups and ended up with some defectors from local communist/socialist parties. That was a huge part of it, using a faux working class identity to disrupt socialist organizations.
Weimar Germany was a desperate, confusing time and it was much more common back then to grab onto whatever organization seemed like a good opportunity. They had a term for it in German, the “Rindersteak-Nazi” (beefsteak nazi), implying they were brown on the outside, red on the inside. Socialists who’d join the Nazi party in order to bend it to a more left wing direction. In hindsight we see how well that worked out.
You also gotta understand that the early Nazi party was very much a power struggle between a nationalist/reactionary faction and a similarly reactionary faction who nonetheless knew they were courting the unemployed and working class contingent to fill up the ranks of the Brownshirts. Also don’t get this twisted: The upper echelons of the Nazi party were dumbfuck scumbags who were complete fucking nerds who flunked out of cavalry school for being too stuck up their own ass. They fought with one another over petty nonsense, a lot of them were addicted to meth, and they would have superficial interests in runes or opera because they thought it could get them laid. They weren’t thinking too hard about what it meant if they called themselves socialists, they were provocateurs who would make shit up.