this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
-4 points (35.7% liked)

AskHistorians

1471 readers
1 users here now

QUESTIONS

  1. Be civil.
  2. Be specific.
  3. Historical topic must be from at least 20 years ago.
  4. Post questions in the title. Elaboration is for the text box.

RESPONSES

  1. Be civil.
  2. Provide comprehensive answers.
  3. Please provide primary and secondary sources upon good faith request. Tertiary sources, like Wikipedia, are not accepted.

askhistorians is a community for academic answers to questions about history. Polls, opinions, bigotry, grammar pedantry, and personal insults will be removed.

Be sure to check out our partner community at: !askscience@lemmy.world !ireland@lemmy.world !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world !canada@lemmy.ca !world@lemmy.world

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Patnou@lemmy.world
PugJesus@piefed.social
Rat_in_a_hat@lemmy.ca
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
-4
Nazis are far-right, so why were/are they called National Socialists? (piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Green_Mouse@piefed.social to c/askhistorians@lemmy.world
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Socialism is leftism, Nazism is not, so why were they called, and some people still call them, the National Socialists?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/

(This article is from 2017 and adorably states that "Nobody, least of all the millions of rank-and-file right-leaning Americans who voted for Donald Trump, wants to be lumped in with Nazis. It's a fact, however, that Nazi-friendly organizations, Nazi symbols, and Nazi gestures were in evidence at the disastrous Charlottesville event, whose unfortunate title was not "Unite the Left," but "Unite the Right.")

The full name of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, the political movement that brought him to power and supplied the infrastructure of the fascist dictatorship over which he would preside, was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to historians, the complicated moniker reveals more about the image the party wanted to project and the constituency it aimed to build than it did about the Nazis' true political goals, which were building a state based on racial superiority and brute-force governance.

[...]

And this is what came out of Adolf Hitler's mouth on another occasion when a comrade riled him by harping on socialism (as reported by Henry A. Turner, author of German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985): "Socialism! What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism."