It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, sometimes thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources...
His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. ‘I have learnt a great deal from Marxism’, he once remarked, ‘as I do not hesitate to admit’. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the first world war and later in a Bavarian prison in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that ‘they had never even read Marx’, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been ‘a private Russian affair’, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history...
‘I [Hitler] have put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers [communist intellectuals] have timidly begun’, adding revealingly that ‘the whole of National Socialism’ was based on Marx. That is a devastating remark, and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race – implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he goes on, National Socialism ‘would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground’. Perhaps that remark is as near as he gets, in any public statement, to acknowledging his Marxian debt. And at all such moments an inner logic and consistency can be perceived through the untidy prose of an untrained mind. He was not arguing to Rauschning or in Mein Kampf that he was, or had ever been, a Marxist. He was arguing that National Socialism was based on Marx.
As for communists, he [Hitler] opposed them because ‘basically they are not socialistic’; they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was ‘the socialism of nations’ rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital...
These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew how unorthodoxly he handled them. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. ‘What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish’, he told Wagener, ‘we shall be in a position to achieve’.
That was the National Socialist vision of history. It was an exciting vision, at once traditional and new. Like all socialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, however, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.
The Lost Literature of Socialism (2nd ed.), George Watson, 2010.