https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ydl63/why_did_the_nazis_call_themselves_socialist_when/d6mykrr/Quote
o trace the evolution of the idea of "National Socialism," we have to differentiate between three different approaches: conservative theorists who first proposed systems of nationalistic socialism after World War One, radicals within the Nazi movement who took the class warfare promise of socialism seriously, and Hitler's attempts in the electoral campaigns of 1929-1933 to make his party palatable to the disaffected middle classes. And we must acknowledge that Nazism was Janus-faced, accommodating different interest groups and classes at different times.
These different view points can be understood by the narrative of 1918-1934: in this period, Hitler took a crude conservative brainchild of the post war, that of cramming together the ideas of nationalism and socialism, tweaked it to appeal to middle class voters, and then extirpated (or let whither) the truly socialistic element.
The idea behind Anton Drexler's "German Socialist Party" - the party a young Austrian corporal joined in 1919 - was neither unique nor original. In the days after the armistice that ended the Great War many a conservative theorist dreamed of a state that would both respect the national identity of the German community and provide its masses with an official alternative to Bolshevism. Their version of socialism did not have as its primary purpose the well-being of the worker but rather the harnessing of the worker's energies in the service of the German state/German volksgemeneischaft. "German" or nationalist socialism would concomitantly balance the working class's interest with that of the ruling class, especially the factory owner and entrepreneur.
The socialist revolution of 1918 encouraged some of these hopes, as when labor unions and industrial managers came together in November, 1918 to hammer out a compromise on wages, working hours and strikes. In the shadow of the Spartacist (Communist) movement, here was a corporatist modus operandi where business magnate and worker could come together for the stabilization of society against the menace of Bolshevism. At a time when Bolshevik revolution appeared all but inevitable, such a nationalistic socialism seemed to conservatives a practical way of staving off the worst. Walter Rathenau, the Jewish war planner and industrialist who served as foreign minister until his assassination in 1922, exemplified the accommodation of nationalism-industry-socialism that many on the right hoped for.
Meanwhile, in the intellectual hothouse of the post-war, conservative thinkers scrambled for an ideological system to replace the Kaiser's state. Authors Ernst Niekisch, Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler all proposed nationalistic socialisms that can be seen as theoretical forerunners of Nazism. Schematically: Niekisch proposed "National Bolshevism" as a dictatorship of the proletariat that would rise up to reject the internationalism of Moscow; Ernst Junger's "trench socialism" called upon the model community of soldiers as the basis of a new society by and for Germans; Oswald Spengler's 1919 Prussianism and Socialism rejected Marxist materialism in favor of a national community that would unify around traditional Prussian values. These writers offered spiritual utopias to oppose the materialist utopia of Marxism, and there is certainly a zeitgeisty insincerity about their use of the term: In 1918-1919, socialism was the future. These writers sensed that conservatism would have to to integrate "socialism" into its slogans if it wanted to survive in any form.
Many, in sum, had already thought of joining nationalism to socialism. Their goal was not to promote the egalitarian socialism of the Chartists, of Marx, or of the SPD, but to displace it. In this light Anton Drexler is little more than a political copycat. Without Hitler, his movement would have fizzled like so many others, including National Bolshevism. To give you an idea of how commonplace the idea of "German" or "National" socialism was, Hitler's party joined with Julius Streicher's in 1921. Streicher's Party? "German Socialist."
National Bolshevism, trench socialism, Prussian socialism, German socialism, National Socialism - these were mere crude slogans with no mass following, the fantasies of a few radical intellectuals, right up until the crisis days of the Republic starting in 1929, when Hitler hit upon a formula that could animate these conservative theories of the post war.
By 1929, faith in the Republic had been shattered by constant economic crisis, and the Communist movement, that perennial nightmare of the middle class, was gaining unprecedented strength. Hitler had by now perfected the pitch of National Socialism. In its spiritual nationalism it offered more excitement, more inspiration than the center and right wing parties ("Germany, Awake!"), while still accommodating the worker, who would be welcomed into a purified racial community free of class struggle. In all of this, the Jew stood in for the capitalist of Marxism as the nemesis of progress, so the propertied classes could rest easy. Though an eclectic ideology, Hitler's charisma brought its many strands together during the manic campaigns of 1929 - 1933.
But Nazism never truly won the allegiance of the working classes. Skilled workers and those involved in the labor movement cleaved to the SPD (Socialists) right until the end, while unskilled labor and the urban poor voted increasingly for the Communists right until 1933. Clearly the appeal of Nazism was not that it was truly "socialist" in the sense that we now understand that term, or even that anyone mistakenly believed it to be so, but rather that it offered the nervous middle of society a cure to the disease of socialism. Probably more by his political instincts than by any actual research or planning, Hitler had succeeded in extracting the political sap from the early theorists, leaving behind the intellectual pith. In doing so, he succeeded where they had failed in building a mass following.
Still, there were true believers in the socialism of National Socialism within the party. A number of its early activists supported an Ernst Niekisch-like revolutionary socialist vision before Hitler centralized party power in his own hands.
Hitler had always distanced himself publicly from this class warfare wing of his party. In retrospect, it is clear he was slowly rooting these elements out while trying to extract as much effort from them as possible. First, in 1926, he suppressed a revolt of the left-wing Nazis led by Otto Strasser, winning over the support of former Strasser-follower Joseph Goebbels in the process. Then, little more than a year after the 1933 seizure of power, he murdered the radical SA leader Ernst Rohm and dismantled the SA, whose fanatic members had been so instrumental in his rise to power.
After that, the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was little more than a label. Nevertheless, "National Socialism" remained consistent with those earlier reactionary theorists of the post-war like Junger or Spengler who had opposed the materialist international community of Marxism with a spiritual, exclusively German community. Similar ideas clothed the pure thuggery of 1933 in a garb of intellectual sophistication. Witness for instance philosopher Martin Heidegger's ecstatic pro-Nazi speeches as Rector of Freiburg University. There was a sense amongst these thinkers that Hitler and Nazism had found a solution to the crisis of industrial civilization. By 1934, and increasingly as the 30's wore on, such intellectuals tended to retire from public life, for Nazism was, at heart, anti-intellectual. With the war of ideas already won, Hitler turned his attention to fighting wars, and Nazism began to distill into the form it takes in our memories - practical, brutal, authoritarian, racist and militaristic, in the realm of ideas bizarre, inconsistent and Orwellian.
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