Historian Brendan Simms:
Anyone who claims that the Nazis were socialists can lose their job in the German-speaking world. Adolf Hitler himself considered himself primarily to be an anti-capitalist, says the historian Brendan Simms. However, the regime did not pursue a socialist policy.
Mr Simms, in the German-speaking world, the case of a journalist recently caused a certain excitement. On Twitter, she had written that the Nazis were not only murderers, but also "through and through socialists". She was then dismissed by her employer, an Austrian online portal. Is the outrage against its statement entitled?
The statement is certainly all too simple. Of course, the Nazis were not socialists in the sense that Willy Brandt was a socialist. But they understood themselves as such: they believed that true nationalism always means socialism – and the other way around. One can doubt that they were actually socialists, but for me as a historian who deals with Hitler's world of thought, the decisive factor is how the Nazis saw themselves.
In your 2019 Hitler biography, you represent the thesis that Hitler's hatred of Bolshevism played a subordinate role in comparison with his fear of America and Great Britain, as well as his rejection of capitalism.
Although it is important to stress that his hatred was directed above all against international capitalism as he understood it. Hitler's main focus was on what he himself called "Plutocracy." He associated this with the so-called world Jewry, but also with the Anglo-Saxon powers, which he considered much stronger and more dangerous in comparison with the Soviet Union. Of course, he was also afraid of Bolshevism, but it played a minor role. He saw Bolshevism as one of the instruments of international capital to leave Germany and other countries willless.
So a classic conspiracy theory: the capitalists used Bolshevism to subdue Germany.
Hitler said mutatis mutishly to the socialists: you thought that now we are undermining the empire and then we have the international fraternity of people. Instead, you have only weakened Germany, so that it is now a pure object of the international capitalist powers. It is interesting that the German Reich had actually used this tactic in the First World War, namely by bringing it to Russia by bringing it to Russia. Hitler was also aware of that. He claimed that the Russian Revolution had been fuelled by the Jews and the Allies, even though he knew that the German high command had made the revolution possible in the first place.
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Brendan Simms
Hitler's anti-capitalism stands by the starting point for his thinking: you also see his hatred of the Jews as a consequence of it.
Yes, and that can also be proven, because he says this several times: You cannot be an anti-Semite without being an anti-capitalist – and vice versa. His first provable appearance against the Jews, in the so-called Gemlich Letter of September 1919, is clearly in the context of anti-capitalism: Hitler states quite clearly there that his anti-Semitism is related to the power of money. Although he wrote the letter almost two years after the Russian Revolution, he does not mention it at all. This clearly shows that anti-capitalism was more important to it than anti-Bolshevism.
They also see Hitler as a "tactical anti-Semitism": that he believed that the hatred of Jews was easier to mediate than anti-capitalism and anti-Bolshevism.
He said this himself in this way, but I would not overemphasize this aspect: the fact that Hitler was a convinced anti-Semite is the question. But it is equally clear that he also saw the tactical possibilities that lay in anti-Semitism.
Like many historians, you consider the First World War as the central experience that shaped Hitler's thinking. He was facing the Americans and the British in the field.
He had brought his central insight, namely that "Anglo-Americans" is located economically, militarily, but above all demographically on the longer lever, he had brought with him from the First World War. In his opinion, the German Reich had been weakened by immigration over the decades and centuries. The strong and healthy elements of Germany would have acted as fertilizer for the British Empire and the USA.
He believed the best left the country. . .
. . . and saw them return as enemy soldiers in World War I. His opinion about the existing German people was ambivalent: for him, the German man-humanity was a project, not a fact. Hitler attached a revolutionary theory: Germans emigrated to America and were replaced by Jews.
You also describe Hitler's picture of the USA as ambivalent. Could it be said that he regarded America as a kind of apartheid state and not as the melting pot that it was later described as it later liked?
He mainly saw the USA as the goal of the healthy elements from Europe. Black America almost didn't interest him at all, even if he left his way across jazz. He was more interested in Eastern European and Jewish immigration. He found the fact that the Americans had limited them in 1924. In his opinion, the Germans should do the same.
On the one hand, Hitler regarded England and America as strong, on the other hand, he said that these countries were dominated by Jews, whom he considered inferior. Roosevelt was an agent of financial Jewry for him. Did Hitler try to explain this contradiction, or did he simply ignore it?
He explained it so that England and America had enormous potential and had developed very well for a long time, but then had been infiltrating and now no longer behaved according to their own interests. He also saw the reason why the relations between the German Reich and the United Kingdom and the USA deteriorated after 1936. He threatened to attack the Jews because he believed that he could use it to give him back.
When Hitler talked about England and America, he spoke of countries that he did not even know. What is his picture of the West fed from?
This is difficult to say, because he rarely revealed his sources. All the more striking is that he explicitly mentioned having read Madison Grant, a notorious American breed theorist. Its 1916 book "The Passing of the Great Race" was translated into German in the early 1920s. It is interesting that although Grant considered the Germans to be higher than the Eastern Europeans, the Anglo-Saxons or the Celts of the British Isles were even more higher than they are. With this he aroused in Germany in right-wing districts, but Hitler said that Grant was right: The Germans are not Nordic enough, so a new policy is needed.
Hitler's image of England reminds us of that of the empire: Germany, the belated nation that the British wanted to catch up and would basically have been like this.
These complexes were in fact also in the empire, especially in Wilhelm II. One would have liked to have been equal to the English. In 1944, Hitler spoke in secret speeches to officer candidates of the English as the real race of the master. It was a kind of love-hate relationship. Towards the Anglo-Saxons, he had an inferiority complex, which was also demonstrated by the fact that he occasionally claimed that he had no such complex. This is usually the surest proof that someone has a complex.
Were the British also a model for Hitler when it came to colonizing conquered regions?
Yes, although for him the settlement of America was more of a model than the conquest of India: Hitler wanted to colonize an area that was directly adjacent to its own country. He criticized Wilhelminism for his efforts to acquire a colonial empire overseas. As a result, they only unnecessarily lay down with the English and run the risk of being cut off from his possessions by the Royal Navy. Hitler read that a German dominance over mainland Europe would never have been acceptable to the British.
Returning to our initial question: How socialist was the politics of the Nazis really?
One cannot say that their policies after 1933 were really socialist, but it contained socialist elements, such as the introduction of new taxes and an expansion of the welfare state and workers' rights. Hitler made a distinction between international capitalism and what he called national capitalism, if they wanted between Wall Street and Krupp. He accepted national capitalism. For him, socialism meant that the employers had to work primarily for the nation and not for their profit.
But was it always clear that the means of production would remain privately?
Yes, although in a sense they were under state control. It was no longer a private sector. Even if there was no leveling of income, the state always had the last word. He also took on a greater role in what was concerned with the application, not only in the war, but in the mid-1930s.
With your theses you caused a stir in 2019. In some cases, serious charges were made against you. In the "Guardian", your collection of historians Richard Evans wrote that you are a keyword provider of the far-right "Alt-Right" movement. How do you see the debate in retrospect?
I was surprised by the violence of some of the allegations. What Evans wrote was out of the way, even almost defamatory. But on the whole the book was well received, and I have the impression that it is read and understood by more and more people.
Has your book in Germany been fundamentally received differently than in England and the USA?
The response was somewhat stronger in the Anglo-Saxon space, but there were no big differences. There were also strong voices against in Germany, for example Ulrich Herbert questioned my scientific characters in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung". But I do not want to complain: a book is written, and there are accusations, so is life. Maybe it was also a question of generations: I had the impression that younger historians took my work more positively.
I found a review by Alan Posener, which appeared in the "world" at that time. Already his German history teacher in the 1960s was convinced that Hitler was particularly motivated by his hatred of the West, and in England it was seen for a long time. Accordingly, you would have uncovered only a buried thesis.
In part, that is the case. The antagonism between Great Britain and the German Reich was of course very highly estimated in England. Only later was there a distance from this and thought that the war had been won primarily on the Eastern Front. In this respect, my theses meant a return to the old model. Others had already dealt with Hitler's anti-capitalism. Above all, my theses about the importance that Germany's alleged racial weakness and demographics were new in Hitler's thinking. These theses have not been refuted until now.
Why was the importance of the West for Hitler's thinking as less important over time?
Probably because of the course of the war. The events were considered telelogical in retrospect, thought of the Battle of Stalingrad and the invasion of the Red Army in Berlin, although the main part of the German war economy was also directed against the West after 1941. Hitler believed he would quickly subdue the Soviet Union and then the real confrontation with the USA and Great Britain would come. If this had been successful for him, one would hardly talk about the Eastern Front today.