Alice Weidel, the candidate for chancellor of the right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany“, said in a conversation with billionaire Elon Musk on Platform X that Adolf Hitler was actually a communist. Alice Weidel's claim is an attempt to revise history with regard to National Socialism. Similar attempts have been made before. However, they promote false claims and ignore historical truths, including about the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime from 1933 to 1945.
“Alternative for Germany“ (AfD), which is partly a far-right party, has constantly tried to distance itself from the Nazis, and influential US figures such as future Vice President J.D. Vance have also spread false claims about Germany's Nazi past.
Hitler was not a communist
“What Ms. Weidel says is pure nonsense that cannot be given any additional weight by being subjected to serious research“, wrote German historian Thomas Sandkühler in response to a question from DW.
“Hitler fought Marxism fiercely and brutally from the very beginning, and the first victims whom the Nazis imprisoned, tortured or outright killed in concentration camps as early as 1933 were leftists, communists, social democrats and socialists“, he recalled to DW.
And In purely economic terms, Hitler was not a leftist: "The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP - Hitler's party, ed.) did not change the property relations in society," Wild recalls.
"It is precisely in economic terms that Hitler was not a communist at all," adds historian Thomas Weber, author of the book "Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi." He explains: "Communism is against private property and a profit-oriented economy and advocates the nationalization of the means of production, such as mines and factories, as well as natural resources."
Hitler was an anti-Semite and a racist
Hitler cannot be called a communist, "because he is an anti-Semite and a racist. And this has nothing to do with the idea of a communist society in which people are equal. Quite the opposite, says historian Michael Wild.
The political movement of National Socialism is not socialist. Moreover, it did not arise during Hitler's time, but after the First World War. By the Second World War, however, it was becoming more and more established. The Center for Political Education in Brandenburg describes the ideology as follows: “National Socialism is extremely nationalistic, anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, anti-Semitic, racist, imperialist and anti-communist“. Furthermore, the racist marginalization of minorities, which even amounts to genocide, plays a central role in it.
Initially, there was also a socialist revolutionary wing
National Socialism made use of some ideas from socialism, as well as concepts such as “socialist“ and a “workers' party“ to win the votes of the working class and come to power in 1933. However, the Nazis' labor and social legislation after they came to power led to the suppression, persecution and murder of communists, social democrats and trade unionists.
Initially, the NSDAP had a wing that declared itself socialist, but it was liquidated before the party came to power in 1933. Hitler ordered the murder of Gregor Strasser, the leading figure in this wing, as well as the murders of his other opponents in the party. According to historian Wild, this “Strasser wing“ wanted a kind of populist socialism for the benefit of German workers, but was just as racist and anti-Semitic as the rest of the NSDAP.
Various attempts to distort history
That is why most historians have long agreed that National Socialism cannot be equated with socialism. However, this is precisely what many people try to do for political reasons, says Thomas Weber. “Usually this question is discussed within very narrow limits - whether Hitler was left-wing or right-wing. The right-wing tries to present Hitler as a classic socialist and left-winger, which is completely false. Or there is an attempt to use the use of the term “socialism“ by Hitler and the National Socialists as an election ploy. "This also makes no sense, because it does not take into account how Hitler and the National Socialists defined themselves, how they viewed the world, and how they tried to change it," historian Thomas Weber also points out.