Fact check: was Hitler a communist?

AfD's chancellor candidate Alice Weidel claimed in an interview with Elon Musk on the X platform that Hitler was not a right-winger, but a communist. Historians deny this.

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Alis Vajdel, Photo: REUTERS
Alis Vajdel, Photo: REUTERS
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

The richest man in the world and the candidate for chancellor of the right-wing populist and partly far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party spoke on the X platform on Thursday, January 9th about a variety of topics. Elon Musk and Alice Weidel made many claims that DW had previously verified.

But one of them, the one about Nazism and World War II, is particularly controversial: Alice Weidel claims that Adolf Hitler was not a “right-winger,” but a “communist.” This revisionist claim, or attempt to reinterpret history in relation to Nazism, is not new. It comes up again and again.

This is a fact check from Deutsche Welle:

Assertion: “[The Nazis] nationalized the entire industry. (…) The greatest achievement after that terrible era of our history was to call Adolf Hitler a right-winger and a conservative. But he was the complete opposite. He was not a conservative. He was this socialist-communist type,” Alice Weidel said during an interview on the X platform. In a subsequent interview with the German private television station ntv, she reiterated: “I am not backing down from that: Adolf Hitler was a leftist.”

DW Fact Check: incorrect

This claim is false and downplays the crimes committed under Adolf Hitler's Nazi leadership between 1933 and 1945. The Alternative for Germany, which is considered in some parts of Germany to be a proven right-wing extremist, often tries to distance itself from the Nazis. And influential Americans, such as Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, sometimes spread inaccurate statements about Germany's Nazi history.

Hitler wasn't a communist.

"What Ms. Weidel is saying is pure nonsense, which I do not want to further legitimize by taking seriously," wrote German historian Thomas Sandkiller in response to a DW inquiry. At the same time, many Internet users seem to believe Alice Weidel's claims.

Historian Michael Wild, an expert on Nazism, calls Alice Weidel's claim "a great deal of stupidity." "From the very beginning, Hitler harshly and brutally attacked Marxism, and the first victims, who were arrested, tortured and killed in concentration camps in 1933, were leftists, communists, social democrats, socialists," Wild explains in an interview with DW. From an economic perspective, Hitler was not a leftist either. "The NSDAP did not touch property relations," says the historian.

"Especially from an economic perspective, Hitler was not a communist," confirms Thomas Weber, historian and author of "Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi," in an interview with DW. "Communism aims to abolish private property, abolish the profit-oriented economy, and transfer key means of production (e.g. mines and factories) and natural resources to common ownership," says Weber. Hitler rejected all of this.

Hitler was an anti-Semite and a racist

Hitler also cannot be called a communist because he was an anti-Semite and a racist. "And that has nothing to do with the idea of ​​a communist society in which people are equal, it is the complete opposite," says historian Wild.

The political movement of Nazism was not socialism. It did not emerge until the time of Hitler, but after the First World War – but it had become firmly established by the Second World War. The Brandenburg Central Office for Political Education describes this ideology as follows: “Nazism was strongly nationalistic, anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, anti-Semitic, racist, imperialistic and anti-communist.” In addition, racist discrimination against minorities played a central role until the genocide.

Alice Weidel ahead of her conversation with Elon Musk
Alice Weidel ahead of her conversation with Elon Muskphoto: REUTERS

There was a social revolutionary wing of the NSDAP

Nazism used some socialist ideas and terms like "socialist" and "workers' party" to win the votes of workers and come to power in 1933. But the Nazis' labor and social rights, after taking power, resulted in repression, persecution, and murder of communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.

In the early days of the NSDAP, there was a self-proclaimed socialist wing, but it was eliminated before it took power in 1933. In June 1934, Hitler ordered the assassination of one of the leaders of this wing, Gregor Strasser, along with other opponents within the party. This so-called Strasser wing, according to historian Wild, wanted national socialism for the benefit of German workers, but remained racist and anti-Semitic like the rest of the NSDAP.

That's why most historians have long agreed that Nazism and socialism cannot be equated. But that's exactly what many are trying to do – for political reasons, says Thomas Weber.

"This question is usually considered too narrowly - was Hitler a leftist or a rightist. Then, on the right, they try to portray him as a classic socialist and a leftist, which makes no sense. Or they try to reduce Hitler's and the Nazis' use of the term 'socialism' to an election gimmick. That also makes no sense, because it ignores how Hitler and the Nazis defined themselves, how they viewed the world and how they tried to change it," Weber concludes.

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