Twenty-first-century commentators like to attack left leaning policies by calling them socialist, and occasionally follow this up by explaining how Hitler, the mass murdering dictator around whom the twentieth century pivoted, was a socialist himself. There’s no way anyone can, or ever should, defend Hitler, and so things like health-care reform are equated with something terrible, a Nazi regime .. https://www.thoughtco.com/early-development-of-the-nazi-party-1221360 .. which sought to conquer an empire and commit several genocides. The problem is, this is a distortion of history.
Hitler as the Scourge of Socialism
Richard Evans, in his magisterial three volume history of Nazi Germany .. https://www.thoughtco.com/who-supported-hitler-and-why-1221371 , is quite clear on whether Hitler was a socialist: “…it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth of, socialism.” (The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans, p. 173). Not only was Hitler not a socialist himself, nor a communist, but he actually hated these ideologies and did his utmost to eradicate them. At first this involved organizing bands of thugs to attack socialists in the street, but grew into invading Russia, in part to enslave the population and earn ‘living ‘ room for Germans, and in part to wipe out communism and ‘Bolshevism’.
The key element here is what Hitler did, believed and tried to create. Nazism, confused as it was, was fundamentally an ideology built around race, while socialism was entirely different: built around class. Hitler aimed to unite the right and left, including workers and their bosses, into a new German nation based on the racial identity of those in it. Socialism, in contrast, was a class struggle, aiming to build a workers state, whatever race the worker was from. Nazism drew on a range of pan-German theories, which wanted to blend Aryan workers and Aryan magnates into a super Aryan state, which would involve the eradication of class focused socialism, as well as Judaism .. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-nuremberg-laws-of-1935-1779277 .. and other ideas deemed non-German.
When Hitler came to power he attempted to dismantle trade unions and the shell that remained loyal to him; he supported the actions of leading industrialists, actions far removed from socialism which tends to want the opposite. Hitler used the fear of socialism and communism as a way of terrifying middle and upper-class Germans into supporting him. Workers were targeted with slightly different propaganda, but these were promises simply to earn support, to get into power, and then to remake the workers along with everyone else into a racial state. There was to be no dictatorship of the proletariat as in socialism; there was just to be the dictatorship of the Fuhrer.
The belief that Hitler was a socialist seems to have emerged from two sources: the name of his political party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or Nazi Party .. https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-nazi-party-1779888 , and the early presence of socialists in it.
Adolf Hitler [...] 1937 This is probably the first time and this is the first country in which people are being taught to realize that, of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it... https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104487509