by Rand Paul
Nevertheless, Hitler, in many ways, accepted and expounded traditional Marxian socialism. Like Marx, Hitler believed “the one and only problem of the age . . . was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.”15
Hitler, rather than rejecting socialism, considered his brand of national socialism to be an improvement over the Bolsheviks. Hitler believed he improved socialism by adding nationalism and a touch of his conception of Christianity—along with a side of racial hatred.
Hitler’s lieutenant Joseph Goebbels also was explicit in describing the Nazi goal of socialism.
In his diary, Goebbels described the Nazi dream for socialism. Goebbels predicted that when Germany defeated the Soviet Union, Bolshevik or Jewish socialism would be replaced by “real socialism.” Listening to the Nazis themselves in their own words, it seems they never wavered in their support of socialism. They simply believed they had a better form of socialism to offer.16
Likewise, the Nazi Gregory Strasser spoke of his fellow Nazis thus: “We are socialists. We are enemies, mortal enemies, of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!”17
Whether or not the Nazis were socialists is still important. Today’s socialists don’t want any part of their doctrine tainted with Nazism. Yet the Nazis’ history of national socialism and underlying hatred of capitalism are undeniable. None of which is to argue that today’s socialists are Nazis or will become Nazis. However, surrendering more and more freedom to the state is something socialism, fascism, and Nazism have in common.
Today’s socialists should look harder at what has happened in the past when the rights of the individual are made secondary to the desires of the collective, even in the name of fairness or social welfare. Democratic socialists argue, “Not to worry, the will of the collective will always be represented by the majority!” The question remains: is fully democratic, majoritarian rule immune from human envy, greed, or racial animus? Jim Crow and even lynching were countenanced by majorities in the South for decades. The left might argue that we need better people elected to government, to which Madison replied in Federalist Paper 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
As long as socialists continue to promote the will of the collective over the rights of the individual, it remains a danger that the determiners of the “collective will” may determine to carry out policies for their own self-interest, their own power, or even their own petty prejudices.
Hitler, like so many megalomaniacs before him, was proud of his unique modifications of Marxism. Hitler believed his great additions to Marxism were to achieve labor’s dominance over capitalists without a destructive class or civil war, to make Marxism consistent with nationalism, and to fire up and unite all classes for socialism using racial animus.
Watson summarizes Hitler’s confidant Otto Wagener: “Without race, [Wagener] went on, National Socialism ‘would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.’ Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him. Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism.”18
To Hitler, Wagener confided that “the future of socialism would lie in ‘the community of the volk,’ not in internationalism . . . and his task was to ‘convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists.’”19 Instead of class struggle killing off the bourgeoisie, the socialist workers’ state would come about without destroying the country in the process and without confiscating all property.
Hitler felt that this insight would allow him to succeed where the Bolsheviks had failed in Russia. Complete dispossession of all private property meant, Watson wrote, “Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.”20
So, rather than Hitler rejecting socialism, he found a different route to the same workers’ paradise. As Hitler told Wagener, the trick was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution.”21
As Watson summarizes Hitler’s hopes, “Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route—a long and needlessly painful route—and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had ‘averaged downwards’; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known.”22
For the past seventy years, Hitler’s horrific murder of millions of Jews and his obsession with race have, as Watson puts it, “prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist.”23 Failing to see the socialism in Nazism misses that which Hitler saw as his great insight—achieving socialism without civil war and in the name of nationalism driven by racial animus.
Hitler never denied his socialist platform. It can be argued, and easily accepted, that in the end his all-consuming desire for power made any other objectives secondary, but that really is the exact story we find when others, such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, achieved power. Power for power’s sake blinded them, but none of these dictators ever relinquished their goal of socialism.
Chapter 21
The Nazis Hated Capitalism
As the economic historian Chris Calton writes: “It is now the conventional wisdom that the Nazis were capitalists, not socialists,”1 despite the name “Socialist” being in the official party name—“the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” The long-standing movement to erase socialism from the history of Nazism is not without ulterior purpose. To conclude that the Nazis were capitalist is to cast historical aspersions on capitalism.
As Calton explains, “At a time when many members of the European intelligentsia were still enamored with the Soviet Union, this narrative of the Nazis as capitalists was a welcome lie.” No socialist wanted to be associated with Nazism, even though the Nazis proudly proclaimed their socialism. Acknowledging that Nazism was a variety of socialism did not, as Calton writes, “fit cleanly into the Soviet-Marxist worldview, and this false narrative survives today.”2
A decade before he published The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek had warned the world of national socialism. In 1933, before the depth of depravity of Hitler became known, Hayek wrote in a letter to William Beveridge, the head of the London School of Economics and a Fabian socialist, about the nightmare of national socialism. Even in 1933, Hayek understood that socialists would claim that national socialism was somehow “right-wing.” Hayek argued, “Nothing could be more superficial than to consider the forces which dominate the Germany of today as reactionary—in the sense that they want a return to the social and economic order of 1914.”3
Hayek wrote that the Nazis’ “persecution of the Marxists, and of democrats in general, tends to obscure the fundamental fact that National ‘Socialism’ is a genuine socialist movement, whose leading ideas are the final fruit of the anti-liberal tendencies which have been steadily gaining ground in Germany since the later part of the Bismarckian era, and which led the majority of the German intelligentsia first to ‘socialism of the chair’ and later to Marxism in its social-democratic or communist form.”4
As to the argument that Nazism is not socialism because of its affiliation with big business, Hayek replied,
One of the main reasons why the socialist character of National Socialism has been quite generally unrecognized, is, no doubt, its alliance with the nationalist groups which represent the great industries and the great landowners. But this merely proves that these groups too—as they have since learnt to their bitter disappointment—have, at least partly, been mist
aken as to the nature of the movement. But only partly because—and this is the most characteristic feature of modern Germany—many capitalists are themselves strongly influenced by socialistic ideas, and have not sufficient belief in capitalism to defend it with a clear conscience. But, in spite of this, the German entrepreneur class have manifested almost incredible short-sightedness in allying themselves with a movement of whose strong anti-capitalistic tendencies there should never have been any doubt.5
As for the Nazi platform, Hayek claimed that it differed from the Bolsheviks “only in that its socialism was much cruder and less rational.”6
To Hayek, “the dominant feature [of national socialism] is a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic—individualistic profit seeking, large scale enterprise, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, ‘international finance and loan capital,’ the system of ‘interest slavery’ in general.”7
Hayek recognized that Germans were attracted to national socialism because they “were already completely under the influence of collectivist ideas. . . .” National socialism, rather than being an abrupt break with the Bolsheviks, was rather socialism mixed with nationalism and animated by racial hatred.
Chapter 22
The Nazis Didn’t Believe in Private Property
Despite the common roots of national socialism and Russian socialism, the mainstream media of the day, as well as mainstream thought, refused to acknowledge them. Even after the war, when saner minds might have prevailed, most critics saw only the horrors of the Holocaust and not the link between that horror and the collectivism underlying socialism. Mainstream thought also ignored Stalin’s horrors for decades, and when they finally got around to acknowledging the terror of the gulag, they often refused to accept that terror was a consequence of socialism.
Shortly after World War II, in his essay “Planned Chaos,” Ludwig von Mises explained the superficial differences between Russian and German socialism.
Mises acknowledged that German socialism “seemingly and nominally, maintains private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship, and market exchange.”1 But Reisman points out that Mises “identified . . . that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government.”2
Ayn Rand in “The Fascist New Frontier” concurs: “The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”3
Leonard Peikoff reinforces this point in Ominous Parallels: “If ‘ownership’ means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a contentless deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.”4
Under national socialism there was, as Mises put it, “a superficial system of private ownership . . . but the Nazis exerted unlimited, central control of all economic decisions.” With profit and production dictated by the state, industry worked the same as if the government had confiscated all the means of production, making economic prediction and calculation impossible.5
In addition, the Nazis dictated the wages of workers. By 1935, one’s choice of occupation was often dictated by the government. Employment was guaranteed by the government, but a forced labor camp was not what most workers imagined full employment would be.
As Adam Young reports, “Every German worker was assigned a position from which he could not be released by the employer, nor could he switch jobs, without permission of the government employment office. Worker absenteeism was met with fines or imprisonment—all in the name of job security.”6
The Nazis, like the Soviets, used slogans to reinforce their message. Nazi slogans like “Put the common interest before self” could have just as easily been seen in communist Russia. Substitute the word “fairness” for “the common interest” and you have a talking point for many of today’s new democratic socialists in the United States.
Wage and price controls were enacted and interest rates were fixed. As Mises puts it, once prices are fixed, “The authority, not the consumers, directs production. The central board of production management is supreme; all citizens are nothing else but civil servants. This is socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify here something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.”7
Adam Young describes how extensive the Nazi economic controls became. The Nazis established the Reich Food Estate “to regulate the conditions and production of the farmers. Its vast bureaucracy enforced regulations that touched all areas of the farmer’s life and his food production, processing, and marketing.” So, while the Nazis, for the most part, did not confiscate the farmland (except those farms owned by Jews), they exerted control over every aspect of how the land was used.8
The Nazis paid for this the same way their predecessors had paid for reparations. They simply printed the money and manipulated their foreign exchange rate. Tariffs shut down international trade and wage and price controls wreaked havoc on the economy.9
It wasn’t just Jewish businesses. As Mises reminds us, the Nazis used the word “Jewish” as a synonym for “capitalist.” Even non-Jewish businesses worried that the Gestapo would come for the “white-Jews” next, explaining that the Nazi animus featured both racial and traditional socialist anger toward capitalists.10
Economic controls threatened everyone. As one factory owner complained: “It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory. Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”11
As Ralph Reiland reports, this was official policy: “In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, ‘practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.’ Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and ‘we shall take away the freedom still left you.’”12
Young gives us an idea of how extensive the Nazi economic controls were. “The bureaucratization of the economy necessarily followed suit. The minister of economics in 1937, reported that ‘Germany’s export trade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different forms must be filled out.’”13
Our Democratic regulation-loving colleagues should acknowledge the historic parallel of government overregulation and loss of freedom. The current U.S. government is awash in regulations. President Obama set the record for new regulations. In his last year in office he added 95,894 pages of them. In contrast, President Trump added the least amount of regulations in recent history but still managed to add 61,950 pages to the Federal Register. To its credit, the Trump administration did roll back some regulations; for example, a regulation mandating the number of cherries that must be used in a frozen cherry pie was repealed. I’m sure there are some democratic socialists complaining right now that our citizenry is no longer protected from the danger of purchasing a pie containing an insufficient number of cherries.
My friend Senator Mike Lee of Utah stacks the Federal Register of regulations in his office next to the corresponding legislation passed. The regulations reach to the ceiling and the laws are only a few inches high. The problem is that Congress, for decades, has delegated its authority to write regulations to the president.
While we don’t refer to our regulatory state as socialism (yet), the overwhelming regulatory control of business that occurred under the Nazis is a form of government control ove
r the means of production and is, in essence, a form of socialism.
As Young describes it, under Nazi socialism “businessmen and entrepreneurs were smothered by red tape, were told by the state what they could produce and how much and at what price, burdened by taxation, and were forced to make ‘special contributions’ to the party. Corporations below a capitalization of $40,000 were dissolved and the founding of any below a capitalization of $2,000,000 was forbidden, which wiped out a fifth of all German businesses.”14
Reisman explains that “what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.”15
Wage and price controls led to shortages and ultimately to chaos—not unlike what has happened in Venezuela. The Nazis, like Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, tried to counteract the shortages with rationing and ultimately with production controls.
Reisman reminds us that “the combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.”16
He continues, “This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.”17