National Socialism

Name and scope

In the German-speaking world "national socialism" had denoted combinations of nationalist and socialist ideas since about 1860. As a party name it was first used by the German Workers' Party founded in Austria in 1903, which renamed itself the German National Socialist Workers' Party (DNSAP) in 1918; the German Workers' Party (DAP) founded in Germany in 1919 likewise became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1920. With this name the new parties set themselves apart both from the internationalism of the Social Democrats and Communists and from the nationalism of the older conservative parties, offering themselves to workers and the middle classes as a better alternative. Hitler called the individual's devotion to the national community "nationalism" and the community's responsibility for the individual "socialism", while firmly rejecting the socialisation of the means of production. The words "Nazi" and "Nazism" came into use among opponents in the labour movement in the 1920s and remain the standard names outside the German-speaking world. This entry treats National Socialism as an ideology and movement, as distinct from the party itself.

Formation

Its roots lie in the völkisch movement that grew up in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary from the early 1880s. German antisemites organised in several parties and associations from 1879; the Pan-German League, founded in 1891, advocated the warlike expansion of German "living space"; the paper of the Thule Society, founded in Munich in 1918, later became the party organ Völkischer Beobachter. After the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, anti-communist groups multiplied, partly through Russian émigrés, and national-conservative elites and Freikorps equated Jews with communists under the slogan of "Jewish Bolshevism". National Socialism fused these currents; antisemitism was their strongest common bond. The 25-point programme adopted at the party's founding in 1920 combined a Greater Germany, the annulment of the Treaty of Versailles and the exclusion of Jews from public office with economic demands such as the "abolition of unearned income", the "breaking of interest slavery" and the nationalisation of trusts, ending with the slogan "common good before self-interest". After disputes over "socialism" within the party, the Bamberg leadership conference of 1926 declared the programme "unalterable" without fixing its interpretation.

Elements of the ideology

In Mein Kampf Hitler set out the theses that higher and lower races are locked in struggle and that "race mixing" weakens the higher race, and sought territorial expansion not in Western Europe or overseas but in Eastern Europe. Its counter-image was "world Jewry", which Hitler identified both with American "finance capital" and with its adversary "Bolshevism". Alfred Rosenberg introduced him to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and from 1920 Hitler claimed that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected. At first the party was a collective movement without a consistent ideology: Hans Frank said at Nuremberg that there had been "as many National Socialisms as National Socialists", and a party slogan ran "Our programme is Hitler". Propaganda and mass spectacle, one-party rule and the abolition of the separation of powers, militarism and imperialism, "blood and soil", the master-race doctrine and the cult of male dominance and masculinity are listed as further features. The state was organised on the leader principle; on 2 August 1934 Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, also became supreme commander of the armed forces.

Economics and the word "socialism"

The party contained a radical wing that stressed anti-capitalism, including Joseph Goebbels and Otto Strasser, and a conservative wing. Otto Strasser left to found the Black Front, believing that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist aims by endorsing capitalism. After 1929, as wealthy donors took an interest in the party as a bulwark against communism, the conservative faction gained influence. In 1930 Hitler said that "our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism", and in 1934 he purged Ernst Röhm and the radicals of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives. Scholars characterise the economic system differently. Franz Neumann in Behemoth (1944) described it as a private capitalist economy regulated by a totalitarian state, "totalitarian monopoly capitalism". Rainer Zitelmann stressed Hitler's social-revolutionary aims and Götz Aly a "dictatorship of favours" that promised Germans greater equality; Wolfgang Wippermann and Michael Burleigh replied that such readings play down the regime's racist character. Dietmar Petzina held that the Nazi system fits neither the category of a centrally administered economy nor that of a market economy.

Relations with the communist movement

In the 1920s and early 1930s communists and Nazis fought in the streets, the Nazi paramilitaries facing the communist Red Front and Anti-Fascist Action. After the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 Hitler declared it the start of a communist uprising, and a decree of the following day suspended most civil liberties, including freedom of assembly and of the press. The Nazis banned the Communist Party, alleging that it had been preparing a revolution and had set the 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. From 23 August 1939 to 22 June 1941 the German–Soviet non-aggression pact was in force. During the war the idea of living space in the East took shape in the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged settling millions of Germans in Eastern Europe and destroying, expelling or enslaving tens of millions of Slavs. In the Eastern Bloc, particularly in the GDR, the name "Hitler fascism" was widely used to avoid the connotation of the word "socialist".

Assessments and after 1945

Whether National Socialism can be explained by general concepts such as fascism or totalitarianism, or is a singular phenomenon, is disputed. Marxist theories of fascism classify it as a form of fascism. Ernst Nolte in 1963 called it "radical fascism" as distinct from Italian "normal fascism", and Wolfgang Benz in 2010 the "most radical manifestation of fascist ideologies". After 1945, in the United States and West Germany especially, it was described as totalitarianism and paralleled with Stalinism. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann argue that such general theories miss its core, the racial-ideological programme, and Karl Dietrich Bracher among others has argued for treating it as singular. The regime started the Second World War with the invasion of Poland in 1939, in the course of which the Holocaust killed about six million European Jews and the Sinti and Roma of Europe were subjected to genocide; it ended with the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945. Since then Nazi propaganda, the use of its symbols and political activity in the National Socialist sense have been banned in Germany and Austria, and present-day adherents are called neo-Nazis.