1) For all the MF’ers out there who keep saying the NAZIS were socialists, here’s a response from the experts at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The NAZIS were fascists.

2) We’re getting this question more frequently these days, and currently don't have a clear place on our website where we address this question. The closest one is a Holocaust Encyclopedia article on fascism which makes it clear that Nazi Germany was a fascist state,

3) and that fascism is a far-right political philosophy that opposes left-wing economic ideologies like communism or socialism. There is a link on the "fascism" article to another article, about Martin Niemoller's famous quote "First they came for..."

4) He wrote multiple versions of this quote, but the most commonly cited one (and the one we post on the wall at the conclusion of our main exhibit) begins "First they came for the socialists."

5) Socialists and communists (and other left-wing politicians and journalists) were the first prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp system, as political opponents of the fascist regime.

6) Historians identify National Socialism (or Nazism) as a far Right-wing political system. The "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nazis) was anti-Marxist, anti-liberal, and antisemitic.

7) The Party saw itself as part of the revolutionary Right--as opposed to the conservative, traditional, Right. It was clearly divorced from the Marxist direction of European socialism and communism.

8) The "socialist" part of the party's title came from Voelkish (a German ethnic and nationalist movement) writer and theorist Oswald Spengler, who was most famous for his book The Decline of the West (1918 and 1922).

9) In Prussiandom and Socialism, Spengler argued that there was a particular "German socialism," imbued with "Prussian" values like hard work, self-sacrifice, and emphasis on the community over the individual.

10) This "German socialism," he argued, was separate from European/Marxist socialism, and was more compatible with the political Right than the Left. (After 1933, Spenger rejected Nazi ideology. He thought Hitler's racial antisemitism was "idiotic.")

11) But it's clear that "German socialism" was meant to evoke a mythical earlier, "better" time when Germans were supposedly united by ethnicity and a strong work-ethic.

12) Early Nazi supporters believed that "national socialism"--meaning, Spengler's "German socialism"--could draw the support of the working class in Germany, but also contend with the international communist and socialist movements they believed were threatening Germany.

13) In a 1920 speech, Hitler said that the creation of a "greater Germany" necessitated a return "to genuine, German socialism in contrast to the class warfare socialism preached by Jewish leaders."

14) By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazi party denounced any anti-capitalist rhetoric (in order to win the support of the German business community) but the name stuck.

15) In short, the "socialism" of "National Socialism" stemmed from a belief in a specifically German form of right-wing populism, not from a leftist economic ideology. Nazi Germany was a fascist, authoritarian state, not a socialist one.