The Mamnick Thread

Right, I still don't know anything much about 'Mamnick' and I have no great interest in it, especially after that summit-of-arseholery Tweet up there, but the claim that the Nazis were a socialist party often comes up.

It's really quite simple. Hitler effectively took over a small party active in Munich at the time, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) (German Workers(') Party). This was both nationalist/racist/anti-semitic as well as 'socialist'. (I would argue that nationalism/racism/anti-semitism are incompatible with socialism, but we've obviously just had a bit of a thing about that--part of what was behind the issue was just this toxic historical association.) Apparently, Hitler was the 55th member to join, so it wasn't exactly a large party at the time.

The party was soon renamed NSDAP, with the word 'socialist' added in a prominent position, but it's safe to say that Hitler never cared about this, using it for tactical reasons. He abandoned any pretence to it pretty much as soon as he got a sniff at power, when he began to make arrangements with powerful industrialists and other powerbrokers (and indeed that well-known socialist Paul von Hindenburg, the President of the Realm), whose political convictions were mostly German Nationalist, and whose support led fairly directly to his elevation to Chancellor of the Realm when German Nationalists entered a coalition with the NSDAP.

The most prominent 'socialists' in the NSDAP were the Strasser brothers, but Otto Strasser (a newspaper owner) left the party in 1930 and Gregor Strasser was assassinated during the "Night of Long Knives" (the murders of Ernst Röhm's faction of the party) in 1934. Joachim Fest on this:

Am 4. Juli [1930/JL] verkündeten daraufhin Otto Strassers Zeitungen: "Die Sozialisten verlassen die NSDAP!" Aber kaum jemand folgte ihm, die Partei besaß, so stellte sich heraus, fast keine Sozialisten und überhaupt kaum Menschen, die ihr politisches Verhalten theoretisch gedeutet wissen wollten.

('On the 4th of July [1930], Otto Strasser's newspapers announced: "The socialists are leaving the NSDAP!" However, hardly anyone followed him, as it turned out that the party had virtually no socialists, and also hardly any members who wanted their political behaviour to be interpreted by reference to a theory.')

(Joachim Fest, Hitler, S. 394f)

Source: https://www.h-ref.de/organisationen/nsdap/nazis-sozialisten.php

(This relies largely on Fest.)

So, the claim that Hitler was a socialist is baseless.