Racism uber alles 0 Auschwitz looms as a testament to the rabid
quest for 'racial purity' undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis.
But rather than a product of the Left or the Right, writes
Queen's professor Timothy Smith, Nazism was 'tyranny with an
unabashedly brutal face.' Was Hitler a socialist? Certainly he
had nothing in common with the strain of Social Democracy that
emerged during the 1930s in Scandinavia and survives there and
in Germany. This variant of socialism respects the rule of law
and private property; it is not under examination in this
article. But was Nazism related to Soviet-style socialism?
Hitler’s party was, after all, named the National Socialist
German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Early on, the party’s message was
peppered with anti-big-business and anti-labor-union rhetoric
alike. Some of the early leaders of the party (Hitler did not
take full control for several years after joining it) were anti-
capitalist, and Hitler’s early speeches can indeed be mined for
denunciations of high finance an