During between and , the chancellor candidate for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party , on the platform, both participants made many hard-to-verify claims, several of which DW’s fact checkers have already .
But one claim in particular, about the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), or Nazis, and World War II, was particularly off: Weidel said was not “right-wing,” but a “communist.” This historical revisionism, an attempt to retell the history of , is not new. As nationalists rise in international politics, it is frequently being repeated.
Claim: “[The National Socialists] nationalized the entire industry. … The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a conservative. … He was a communist, socialist guy,” Weidel told Musk. In a follow-up interview with the German broadcaster ntv, she repeatedly emphasized: “I don’t deviate from this either: Adolf Hitler was a leftist.”
DW fact check: False
This claim is false and trivializes the atrocities committed under Hitler and the Nazis from 1933 through 1945. The AfD, which in Germany is often classified as far right to extreme right, has repeatedly tried to distance itself from Nazism. Right-wing politicians in the United States, including Vice President-elect , have also spread false statements about Germany’s Nazi history (read DW’s fact check on these claims ). Many people online seem to believe the AfD leader’s assertion nonetheless.
“What Ms. Weidel is saying is sheer nonsense, which I don’t want to promote by taking it seriously,” German historian Thomas Sandkühler told DW via email.
Michael Wildt, a prominent historian of the Third Reich, also told DW that Weidel’s claim was “huge nonsense.”
“Hitler fought Marxism fiercely and brutally right from the start,” Wildt said, “and the first victims to be imprisoned, tortured and killed in the concentration camps in 1933 were leftists, communists, Social Democrats and socialists.”
Hitler’s policies directly contradicted the goals of communism. “From an economic point of view in particular, Hitler was not a communist,” Thomas Weber, historian and author of the book Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, told DW. “Economically, communism aims to overcome private property, to overcome a profit-oriented economy and to transfer the most important means of production (like mines and factories) and natural resources into common property,” Weber said. Hitler rejected these aims.
‘He was an antisemite and a racist’
Hitler also can’t be described as a communist “because he was an and a racist,” Wildt said. “And that has nothing to do with the idea of a communist society in which people are equal — rather, it is exactly the opposite.”
The political movement of National Socialism was not in fact socialism. And it did not just emerge during Hitler’s time, but had already emerged after World War I, becoming increasingly entrenched toward . “National Socialism was extremely nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, antisemitic, racist, imperialist and anti-communist,” according to the Brandenburg Center for Political Education website, which adds that the racist exclusion of minorities up to and including genocide played a central role in the ideology.
National Socialism benefited from some of the ideas of socialism, using them to win working-class votes en route to taking power in 1933. However, the Nazi labor and social legislation that followed led to the suppression, persecution and murder of communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists.
“The essential point here is that, from Hitler’s and many National Socialists’ point of view, the ‘socialism’ in the party name was not an empty formula or a trick,” Weber said. “Rather, it defined how Hitler saw himself and how he wanted to rebuild the world. He repeatedly emphasized this in private and in public.”
In the early days of the NSDAP, there was a self-proclaimed socialist wing, but this was eliminated before the party came to power in 1933. Hitler had Gregor Strasser, a leading figure in this wing, killed in June 1934, along with other opponents within the party. Though the so-called Strasser wing sought a national socialism in favor of the German working class, it was just as racist and antisemitic as the rest of the NSDAP.
For these reasons, most historians have long agreed that National Socialism cannot be equated with socialism. But there are politicians who still attempt to do so for political reasons, Weber said.
“This question is usually discussed too narrowly — along the lines of: was Hitler left-wing or right-wing?” Weber said. “And then either the right-wing side tries to portray Hitler as a classic socialist and leftist, which makes no sense, or there is an attempt to reduce the use of the term ‘socialism’ by Hitler and the National Socialists to an election campaign ploy. That doesn’t make sense either, because it ignores how Hitler and the National Socialists defined themselves, how they saw the world, and how they tried to change the world.”
This article was originally written in German.
The post Fact check: AfD head called Hitler ‘communist.’ He was not appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
