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Nazism

fascist, antisemitic, nationalist, anti-communist, totalitarian ideology of the regime that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945
(Redirected from Wehrmacht)

Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ NA(H)T-siz-əm; German: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus, German: [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs], is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism (German: Hitlerfaschismus). The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War.

One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. ~ Adolf Hitler
My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel. ~ Joseph Goebbels
It was the spirit of the front that created National Socialism. In the face of looming death at the front, ideas of social standing and class collapsed. At the front, the sharing of common joys and common sorrows led to a previously unknown camaraderie between citizens. At the front, everyone could see that the common fate towered above the individual fate. ~ Rudolf Hess


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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DiMeglio, Germany 1933–1945 || Friedlander, The origins of Nazi genocide || Proctor, Racial Hygiene
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. ~ Martin Niemöller
Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent-including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force. These men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new. It is not order. ~ Franklin Roosevelt

Quotes by Nazi members

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  • So why did National Socialism take up the Jewish question in its programme already during the period of the party’s struggle? The Jewish population had in percentage terms relative to the rest of the population a disproportionately high share in the management of the economy, in the free professions, in the press, in the radio, in the theatre, etc. So the enmity between host people and guests, between the Jewish part and the non-Jewish part of the population grew to such an extent that this would have doubtless led at some point to an explosion. That was why the leadership was concerned to reduce the tension in an orderly, normal and legal way. This enmity had been present already for a long time in the German population, because the Jews had been able to enrich themselves with brutality and violence, and to let the German people starve. Especially during the period of hyperinflation dramatic events had arisen and the Jews themselves partially admit that they had enriched themselves at the expense of the German people, their host people.
  • Just so are idealistic National Socialists judged even today, ten, twelve years after the end of the war. Certainly, in a hundred or more years, laurels will be handed even to National Socialism.
  • To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.
    • Adolf Eichmann, While awaiting trial in Israel, as quoted in LIFE magazine (5 December 1960).
  • We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism! We are against Marxism, but for true socialism! We are for the first German national state of a socialist nature! We are for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party!
    • Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932). Translated as “Those Damned Nazis,” (propaganda pamphlet). [1]
  • The path to freedom leads through the nation. The more united this nation, the stronger and more fervent the will to freedom. To set in motion this passionate will for freedom in the nation, that is the task of National Socialism. We want freedom, as you do, but with other means, with the solidarity of the nation, the community of the people as ours. I noticed one thing yesterday with joy: You now believe me that our community of the people is not the pacifistic mush that Mr. Marx and Mr. Stresemann mean. The community of the people today is nothing but the struggle for the rights of the people for the sake of the nation. We want this struggle because it alone can bring freedom. There must be fighting for the future. You and I, we fight each other without really being enemies. In this way we splinter our forces, and we never reach our goal. Perhaps the most extreme need will bring us together. Perhaps! Do not shake your head! This question is a matter of Germany’s future, and more, of Europe’s future. The new state or the decline of the West, both lie in our hands.
  • We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation. . . .The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.
    • Joseph Goebbels, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, Victor Klemperer, Vol. 2 , Random House, Inc. (2001) p. 317. Goebbels’ “Our Socialism” editorial was written on April 30, 1944.
  • My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.
  • Our nation has the good fortune today to be led largely by front soldiers, by front soldiers who carried the virtues of the front to the leadership of the state. The rebuilding of the Reich was guided by the spirit of the front. It was the spirit of the front that created National Socialism. In the face of looming death at the front, ideas of social standing and class collapsed. At the front, the sharing of common joys and common sorrows led to a previously unknown camaraderie between citizens. At the front, everyone could see that the common fate towered above the individual fate.
  • One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.
    • Adolf Hitler, On the Passion Play at Oberammergau (5 July 1942)
  • Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic. We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.
  • The National Socialist State recognizes no ‘classes’. But, under the political aspect, it recognizes only citizens with absolutely equal rights and equal obligations corresponding thereto.
    • Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Volume Two: The National Socialist Movement, chapter 12 (1926).
  • The consequences of the activity of this regime were nothing but chaos, misery and starvation in all countries. I, on the other hand, have been striving for twenty years with a minimum of intervention and without destroying our production, to arrive at a new Socialist order in Germany which not only eliminates unemployment but also permits the worker to receive an ever greater share of the fruits of his labor.
  • The greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God's gift and God's handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation.
    • Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag (30 January 1937).
  • National Socialism is not a cult-movement—a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship. Therefore we have no rooms for worship, but only halls for the people — no open spaces for worship, but spaces for assemblies and parades. We have no religious retreats, but arenas for sports and playing-fields, and the characteristic feature of our places of assembly is not the mystical gloom of a cathedral, but the brightness and light of a room or hall which combines beauty with fitness for its purpose.
  • I was a young student of law and economics, a Left Wing student leader, and a leader of ex-soldier students.
    • Quote from Nazi party leader Otto Strasser in Hitler and I, Boston: MA, Houthton Miffin Company, (1940) p. 3.
  • Yes, from the Right we shall take nationalism, which has so disastrously allied itself with capitalism, and from the Left we shall take Socialism, which has made such an unhappy union with internationalism. Thus we shall form the National-Socialism which will be the motive force of a new Germany and a new Europe.
  • We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!
    • Gregor Strasser, “Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future,” June 15, 1926. One-page talking points memo sent to Nazi leaders.
  • The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.
    • Gregor Strasser, Tradition & Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate, editors: Patrick Boch, Jacob Christiansen and John B. Morgan, UK, Arktos Media (2010) p. 66

A

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  • The National Socialist-Labor Party, of which Adolf Hitler is patron and father, persists in believing Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting. Two weeks ago an attempted discussion of this subject left to one death, sixty injuries and $5,000 damages to beer glasses, tables, chairs, windows and chandeliers in Chemnitz. Last night DR. Göebells tried the experiment in Berlin and only police intervention prevented a repetition of the Chemnitz affair. On the speaker's assertion that Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight, a faction war opened with whizzing beer glasses. When this sort of ammunition was exhausted a free fight in which fists and knives played important roles was indulged in. Later a gang marched to the offices of the Socialist paper Vorärts and smashed plate-glass windows. Police made nineteen arrests.
  • By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler’s National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people.
    • Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, New York: NY, Metropolitan Books (2007) pp. 7-8
  • Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.
    • Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, New York: Metropolitan Books (2007) p. 16
  • In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised 'the creation of a socially just state,' a model society that would 'continue to eradicate all [social] barriers.'
    • Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, New York: NY, Metropolitan Books (2007) p. 13. Hitler’s speech to workers at the Berlin’s Rheinmetall-Borsig factory (Oct. 10, 1940)

B

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  • All dictators risk being overthrown by their opponents... [and] therefore need large police forces to protect them. ...The police force in Nazi Germany ...their job was to arrest people before they committed crimes. ...All local police units had to draw up lists of people who might be 'Enemies of the State'. They gave these lists to the Gestapo... a branch of the SS... [with] the power to do... as it liked. ...'Enemies of the State' ...are [likely] woken ...by a violent knocking at the door. ...[M]en in black uniforms ...[give] three minutes to pack a bag. ...[T]hey take you to the ...police station where you are shut in a cell. ...[D]ays, weeks or months ...[later] ...you are ...told to sign Form D-11, an 'Order for Protective Custody' ...agreeing to go to prison ...[Y]ou are too scared to refuse to sign ...Without ...a trial you are ...taken to a concentration camp where you ...stay for as long as the Gestapo pleases.
    ...A former prisoner ...described ...'In Buchenwald there were 8000 ...2000 Jews and 6000 non-Jews. ...first ..."politicals" ...many ...in concentration camps ...since 1933 ...many ...accused of having spoken abusively of the sacred ... Fuehrer ...After the "political", the ..."work-shy" is the largest. ...A business employee lost his position and applied for unemployment relief. ...he was informed by the Labour Exchange that he could obtain employment as a navvy on the ...roads. This man, who was looking for a commercial post, turned down the offer. ...[R]eported as "work-shy" ...he was ...arrested and taken to a concentration camp.
    The next group were the "Bibelforscher" a religious sect ...proscribed ...by the Gestapo since ...members refuse military service.
    The fourth... homosexuals... To charge this offense is a favorite tactic of the secret police. ...The last class ...professional criminals...'
    • Josh Brooman, Hitler's Germany: Germany 1933-45 (1985) p. 6.
  • Sipo and SD was a conglomerate, formed... when Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuehrer SS, became chief of the German Police. He fused the Criminal Investigative Police (Kripo) and the Gestapo (the political police) to form the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or Sipo) under the command of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. ...[T]he exchange of personnel ...produced an amalgam of party and state agencies that became central to the execution of most of the terror and mass murder of the Third Reich. ...Although no single organization carries full responsibility for the evils of the Third Reich, the SS-police system was the executor of terrorism and "population policy" in the same way that the military carried out the Reich’s imperialistic aggression. Within the police state, even the concentration camps could not rival the impact of Sipo and SD. It was the source not only of the "desk murderers" who administered terror and genocide by assigning victims to the camps, but also of the police executives for identification and arrest, and of the command and staff for a major instrument of execution, the Einsatzgruppen. ...Sipo and SD was ...central to many ...controversial developments in the Third Reich—the totalitarian efforts to achieve conformity and to end opposition, the race and resettlement programs, the development and implementation of imperialistic expansion ...The creation of the totalitarian police state as an essential step toward the Final Solution provides one ...perspective for this study. ...[H]ow [could] a modern industrial society of such cultural prestige as Germany... be twisted to Hitler's ends, how so many thousands of functionaries—more ordinary Germans than Nazi extremists or sadists—could be found to execute Hitler's will[?] When the Nazi experience becomes the will of the Fuehrer... the result is both an alabi... and a smoke screen that obscures insights into how similarly extreme developments might reoccur, perhaps without a Hitler or a German Sonderweg.
    • George C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD (1990) Introduction, pp. 1-4.
  • [T]he real key to power in the State—control of the Prussian police force and of the... State Administration—lay with Goering, as Prussian Minister of the Interior. ...In the critical period of 1933-1934, no man after Hitler played so important a role in the Nazi revolution ...His energy and ruthlessness together with his control ...were indispensable to Hitler's success. Goering showed no intention of being restrained ...he enforced his will, as if he already held absolute power.
    The moment Goering entered office he began a drastic purge of the Prussian State service, paying particular attention to the senior police officers, where he made a clean sweep in favour of his own appointments, many of them — S.A. or S.S. leaders. ...Goering issued an order to show no mercy to the activities of "organizations hostile to the State" ...Goering continued: "Police officers who make... use of fire-arms in the execution of their duties will... benefit by my protection; those who... fail in their duty will be punished..." In other words, when in doubt shoot. ...All they had to do was ...put a white arm-band over their brown ...or black shirts: they then represented the authority of the State. ...For the citizen to appeal to the police for protection became more dangerous than to suffer assault and robbery in silence. At best, the police... looked the other way; more often the auxiliaries helped ...S.A. comrades ..beat up their victims. This was “legality” in practice.
    • Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1990) pp. 111-112.
  • From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state … in its essentials not only is completed socialism the same as communism but it hardly differs from fascism.

C

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  • One fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

    People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it.

  • We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme; it leaps out upon us from the Dark Ages – racial persecution, religious intolerance, deprivation of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the State. To this has been added the cult of war. Children are to be taught in their earliest schooling the delights and profits of conquest and aggression. A whole mighty community has been drawn painfully, by severe privations, into a warlike frame. They are held in this condition, which they relish no more than we do, by a party organisation, several millions strong, who derive all kinds of profits, good and bad, from the upkeep of the regime. Like the Communists, the Nazis tolerate no opinion but their own. Like the Communists, they feed on hatred. Like the Communists, they must seek, from time to time, and always at shorter intervals, a new target, a new prize, a new victim. The Dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his Party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within. As Byron wrote a hundred years ago: “These Pagod things of Sabre sway, with fronts of brass and feet of clay.”
  • Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.
    • Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm, Mariner Books, 1985, pp. 13-14. First published in 1948
  • The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
  • Nazi leaders were noted for love of their pets and for certain animals, notably apex predators like the wolf and the lion. Hitler, a vegetarian and hater of hunting, adored dogs and spent some of his final hours in the company of Blondi, whom he would take for walks outside the bunker at some danger to himself. He had a particular enthusiasm for birds and most of all for wolves. [...] Goebbels said, famously, ‘The only real friend one has in the end is the dog. . . The more I get to know the human species, the more I care for my Benno.’ Goebbels also agreed with Hitler that ‘meat eating is a perversion in our human nature,’ and that Christianity was a ‘symptom of decay’, since it did not urge vegetarianism. [...] On the one hand, monsters of cruelty towards their fellow humans; on the other, kind to animals and zealous in their interest. In their very fine essay on such contradictions, Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax offer three observations. One, as just noted, many Nazi leaders harboured affection towards animals but antipathy to humans. Hitler was given films by a maharaja which displayed animals killing people. The Führer watched with equanimity. Another film showed humans killing animals. Hitler covered his eyes and begged to be told when the slaughter was over.
  • America had a fling at National Socialism. Roosevelt was for all administration purposes a dictator, but a benevolent one, and the country loved it.
    • Alistair Cooke, "Alistair Cooke's America", New York: NY, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (1973) p. 329.

D

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In view of the often acrimonious debates surrounding many discussions of abortion, and the occasional references to the Holocaust, it seems appropriate to review the abortion experience in Germany during the Hitler years (1933-45). Increasingly severe restrictions were placed on the availability of contraceptives and on access to legal abortion. During World War II special courts in Vichy France and Nazi Germany were authorized to impose the death penalty for the illegal termination of unwanted pregnancies, and carried out their mandate. ~ Henry P. David, Jochen Fleischhacker and Charlotte Hohn
  • In view of the often acrimonious debates surrounding many discussions of abortion, and the occasional references to the Holocaust, it seems appropriate to review the abortion experience in Germany during the Hitler years (1933-45). Increasingly severe restrictions were placed on the availability of contraceptives and on access to legal abortion. During World War II special courts in Vichy France and Nazi Germany were authorized to impose the death penalty for the illegal termination of unwanted pregnancies, and carried out their mandate.
    While “fifty thousand books and monographs” have been written about the Nazi period (Koonz, 1987, p.3), a search of numerous German and American archives, research libraries, and indexes of volumes especially oriented to the experiences of women produced few references specifically pertaining to abortion trends in the Hitler era.
    • Henry P. David, Jochen Fleischhacker and Charlotte Hohn, and Eugenics in Nazi Germany”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), p. 81
  • Revelations of sterilization abuse during that time exposed the complicity of the federal government. At firs the Department of Health, Education and Welfare claimed that approximately 16, 000 women and 8, 000 men had been sterilized in 1972 under the auspices of federal programs. Later, however, these figures underwent a drastic revision. Carl Shultz, director of HEW’s Population Affairs Office, estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 sterilizations had actually been funded that year by the federal government. During Hitler’s Germany, incidentally, 250,000 sterilization were carried out under the Nazi’s Hereditary Health Law. Is it possible that the record of the Nazis, through the years of their reign, may have been almost equaled by the U.S. government-funded sterilizations in the space of a single year?
  • As for the explanation that fascism is a last desperate attempt of capitalism to delay the socialist revolution, it simply is not true. It is not true that ‘big business’ promoted fascism. On the contrary, both in Italy and in Germany the proportion of fascist sympathizers and backers was smallest in the industrial and financial classes. It is equally untrue that ‘big business’ profits from fascism; of all the classes it probably suffers most from totalitarian economics and Wehrwirtschaft.
    • Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man, The John Day Company, The End of Economic Man (1939) p. 7
  • [T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a ‘Stalinist conspiracy,” but because there was no other possibility.
    • Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man, The John Day Company, The End of Economic Man (1939) pp. 245-246
  • Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.
    • Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man, The John Day Company, The End of Economic Man (1939) p. 246

E

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  • The full name of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, the political movement that brought him to power and supplied the infrastructure of the fascist dictatorship over which he would preside, was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to historians, the complicated moniker reveals more about the image the party wanted to project and the constituency it aimed to build than it did about the Nazis' true political goals, which were building a state based on racial superiority and brute-force governance.
    Given that Nazism is traditionally held to be an extreme right-wing ideology, the party's conspicuous use of the term "socialist" — which refers to a political system normally plotted on the far-left end of the ideological spectrum — has long been a source of confusion, not to mention heated debate among partisans seeking to distance themselves from the genocidal taint of Nazi Germany.
  • The debate has heated up to the point of critical mass in recent years, thanks to the rise of nationalist political movements reacting in part to stagnant economic conditions and the perceived threat of globalism, and also in part to a flood of immigrants and foreign refugees pouring into Europe and the United States because of war and economic crises abroad.
    A subset of these groups, identified as ethno-nationalists, hold racially-tinged views ranging from nativism (the belief that the interests of native-born people must be defended against encroachment by immigrants) to full-on, hate-mongering white supremacy. Some of the latter openly align themselves with historical Nazism, to the point of waving swastikas, spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric, and imitating the tactics of Adolf Hitler.
    Add to this mix the ascendancy of President Donald Trump, who won the 2016 election in part by courting a nativist, anti-immigrant constituency, and whose reticent condemnation of white nationalist protesters who held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that erupted in fatal violence in August 2017 drew howls of criticism from all but his most loyal supporters, and the urgency of sorting out these political associations begins to make sense.
  • However, the assumption that because the word "socialist" appeared in the party's name and socialist words and ideas popped up in the writings and speeches of top Nazis then the Nazis must have been actual socialists is naive and ahistorical. What the evidence shows, on the contrary, is that Nazi Party leaders paid mere lip service to socialist ideals on the way to achieving their one true goal: raw, totalitarian power.
  • Despite continuing certain Weimar-era social welfare programs, the Nazis proceeded to restrict their availability to "racially worthy" (non-Jewish) beneficiaries. In terms of labor, worker strikes were outlawed. Trade unions were replaced by the party-controlled German Labor Front, primarily tasked with increasing productivity, not protecting workers. In lieu of the socialist ideal of an egalitarian, worker-run state, the National Socialists erected a party-run police state whose governing structure was anti-democratic, rigidly hierarchical, and militaristic in nature. As to the redistribution of wealth, the socialist ideal "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was rejected in favor of a credo more on the order of "Take everything that belongs to non-Aryans and keep it for the master race."
    Above all, the Nazis were German white nationalists. What they stood for was the ascendancy of the "Aryan" race and the German nation, by any means necessary. Despite co-opting the name, some of the rhetoric, and even some of the precepts of socialism, Hitler and party did so with utter cynicism, and with vastly different goals. The claim that the Nazis actually were leftists or socialists in any generally accepted sense of those terms flies in the face of historical reality.

F

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  • It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk ('All my life I have played va banque'). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Bruning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty - a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler's aims were similar to those of Germany's leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia. Hitler's goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan's proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials. The German case was not quite the same, however, because there were already large numbers of Germans living in much of the space that Hitler coveted- When Hitler pressed for self-determination on behalf of ethnic Germans who were not living under German rule - first in the Saarland, then in the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and Danzig - he was not making a succession of quite reasonable demands, as British statesmen were inclined to assume. He was making a single unreasonable demand which implied territorial claims extending far beyond the River Vistula in Poland. Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler's ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 314-315
  • There are some good reasons why National Socialism belongs to the left rather than the right politically. In any case, [Hitler] had more in common with Stalin's totalitarianism than with Mussolini's fascism. In Italy in the twenties and thirties there were still the traditional class differences, while Hitler, unlike the socialists of all shades, promoted social equality. After the so-called seizure of power, contrary to what some members of the upper classes hoped, he did not restore the privileges lost in 1918. Instead, he simply replaced Marx's term of classless society with the vocabulary of the ‘people's community’ and sold the still terrifyingly socialist-sounding term as a kind of permanent fraternity celebration.
  • After the war, the army sent [Hitler] to investigate political movements in Munich. In the insignificant German Workers' Party he discovered the opportunity and latent talents that brought him success. He left the army, joined the party, and rapidly became its most skilled speaker and propagandist. Under the name National Socialist German Workers' Party, [NSDAP or Nazis], it held its first large public meeting in 1920, when Hitler denounced democracy, capitalism, and the Jews. The next year, facing a split within the party, he resigned and only returned when he was given complete control. He established the 'Fuhrer Principle' of unquestioning obedience that marked the rest of his career. As his following grew, he attempted to seize power in Bavaria in 1923. He failed and went to prison. There he wrote the autobiographical Mein Kampf [My Struggle] that blamed all the ills of society on the Jews and laid out plans for a future totalitarian state. After his release, he re-established his control of the NSDAP but made little progress until he redirected it away from the generally socialist workers to small towns and the lower middle class. His stress on traditional German values and denunciation of the Jews and Communists brought him increasing support, especially as the Depression struck Germany. The Nazis seemed the only party willing to take drastic action to save the economy. Hitler worked incessantly, giving vague but powerful speeches that played on the emotions of his audience. He also built practical support in the storm of Storm Troopers, thugs in brown shirts who spread party propaganda and disrupted meetings of its opponents. By 1933 the Nazis were the largest party in Germany.
    • Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965, pp. 140-141
  • Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation.
  • The discource of Nazism was vital force, power was its only end, and violence it only means. By camouflaging its means by its end through the use of Leninist language, it betrayed its origins, like vice paying hidden homage to virtue, as it continued to declare that reconciliation of humanity was its goal. .... To a society justifiably terrified by the threat of Communism, the Nazis offered protection and renewal, at the price of the same means used by Communism but in an ideological version that radically suppressed any idea of morality. ... Nazism was a German form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form. ... It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other.
    • François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press (1999) pp. 205-07

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  • [P]erpetrators of the Holocaust were ordinary Germans. Many were not particularly Nazified... not being in the SS or even in the Nazi Party. ...Many of the perpetrators, at least in the police battalions, were older. They were not particularly martial. ...It is not just that perpetrators were ordinary Germans, but that there were also vast numbers of them... The number... who took part in the extermination of the Jew... was greater than 100,000... probably far greater. ...Over 10,000 German camps of various sizes and kinds existed for incarcerating and destroying Jews and non-Jews. ...The German justice center ...catalogued over 333,000 people ...who served ...institutions used to kill Jews and others. ...Nazi authorities ...assigned ...virtually anyone who was available. The perpetrators were not coerced to kill. ...[I]n many units officers announced... they did not have to kill, and... at least nine police battalions... had been informed that they did not have to kill. There is similar evidence for the some... Einsatzkommandos. There is... evidence... Himmler... issue[d] orders allowing those... not up to the killing... excused... [O]rdinary Germans killed... [T]he... initiative... zeal, and... cruelty... all were found among the ordinary Germans who were the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
    • Daniel J. Goldhagen, presentation on Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) in the “Willing Executioners”/“Ordinary Men” Debate, Selections from the Symposium at the United States Holocaust Research Institute , April 8, 1996.

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Germany's economic policy is conducted exclusively in accordance with the interests of the German people. In this respect I am a fanatical socialist, one who has ever in mind the interests of all his people. ~ Adolf Hitler
  • When [Hitler] talked of National-Socialism what he really meant was military-Socialism, Socialism within a framework of military discipline or, in civilian terms, police-Socialism.
    • Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Memoir of a Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Führer, New York: NY, Arcade Publishing, 2011, pp. 70-71
  • Rooted in extreme nationalism, National Socialism is driven by ideas of Germanic supremacy. It promotes aggressive expansionism and a totalitarian state where the people are united under a leader with absolute power, the Führer.
  • De Rougemont began by thinking that Hitler’s state was a regime of the right. But during a lengthy stay in Frankfurt as a visiting professor, he found himself involuntarily questioning this. “What unsettled him,” writes Boyd, “was the fact that those who stood most naturally on the right—lawyers, doctors, industrialists and so on—were the very ones who most bitterly denounced National Socialism. Far from being a bulwark against Communism, they complained, it was itself communism in disguise”
  • Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.
    • Adolf Hitler "Why We Are Anti-Semites," August 15, 1920 speech in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus. Hitler gave this speech a number of times in August of 1920 to members of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (Oct., 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [2]
  • After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.
    • Adolf Hitler according to Otto Wagener in Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 288
  • We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
    • Adolf Hitler as quoted in Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, John Toland, New York: NY, Anchor Books, 1992, p. 224. Quote is from a speech at the Clou restaurant center on May 1, 1927. Hitler is paraphrasing Gregor Strasser’s one-page Nazi talking points memo from June 15, 1926.
  • For we [National Socialists] too are considered ‘upstarts’ and ‘leftists’ by those same reactionaries. They are only too eager to apply such terms as ‘enemies of the fatherland,’ ‘Bolsheviks,’ and ‘inferiors.’”
    • Adolf Hitler, according to Otto Wagener in "Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant", editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p 288.
  • Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against the very opposite: materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist!
    • Adolf Hitler, "Why We Are Anti-Semites," August 15, 1920 speech in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus. Translated from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (Oct., 1968), pp. 390-420. Edited by Carolyn Yeager. [3]
  • This German Volksgemeinschaft is truly practical socialism and therefore National Socialism in the best sense of the word. Here everyone is obligated to carry his load.
    • Adolf Hitler, as quoted in Stagnation and Renewal in Social Policy: The Rise and Fall of Policy Regimes, editors: Martin Rein, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, and Lee Rainwater (1987) p. 63.
  • Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.
    • Eric Hobsbawm, “A Question of Faith,” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (Sept. 14, 2002)
  • Had Hitler died in middle of the 1930's, Nazism would probably have shown, under the leadership of a Goering, a fundamental change in its course, and the Second World War might have been averted. Yet the sepulcher of Hitler, the founder of a Nazi religion, might perhaps have been a greater evil than all the atrocities, bloodshed and destruction of Hitler's war.
    • Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) Ch.18 Good and Bad Mass Movements, §122

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  • gentiles persecuted the Jews for thousands of years before the Nazis got efficient at it
  • The craziest of all political systems, the unique dictatorship, found its earned end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English and Russians was a necessary occurrence to disrupt the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination.
  • Most of the American laws defining race are not to be compared with those once enforced by Nazi Germany, the latter being relatively more liberal. In the view of the Nazis, persons having less than one fourth Jewish blood could qualify as Aryans, whereas many of the American laws specify that persons having one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or 'any ascertainable' Negro blood are Negroes in the eyes of the law and subject to all restrictions governing the conduct of Negroes.
    • Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way it Was (1955), Ch.4, "Who is Colored Where".
  • Much of the pot-pourri of ideas that went to make up Nazi ideology – an amalgam of prejudices, phobias, and utopian social expectations rather than a coherent set of intellectual propositions – was to be found in different forms and intensities before the First World War,…
    • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889- 1936: Hubris, New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company (1999) p. 134
  • Intensified anti-capitalist rhetoric, which Hitler was powerless to quell, worried the business community as much as ever. During the presidential campaign of spring 1932, most business leaders stayed firmly behind Hindenburg, and did not favour Hitler.
    • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889- 1936: Hubris, New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company (1999) p. 359
  • For Catholics--the other sub-culture which Nazism found greatest difficulty in penetrating, before and after 1933—Hitler was above all seen as the head of a 'godless', anti-Christian movement... On the nationalist-conservative Right, the relatively sympathetic treatment of Hitler at the time of the Young Plan Campaign [1929-30] had given way to hostility. Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the head of an extremist movement with menacing socialistic tendencies.
    • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, W.W. Norton & Company (1999) p. 412.
  • Sexual propaganda against the Jews as a race was a cornerstone of the Hitlerian attack on that group in Germany. Both Nazi and Japanese propaganda included attacks on the sexual behavior of Americans at home.
  • The National Socialist state will guarantee that every one of our people finds work.”
    • As quoted by Bernhard Köhler, head of the Nazi Party Commission for Economic Policy, in Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, Avraham Barkai, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 169. Source: Bernhard Köhler, Unser Wille and Weg 2, 1932, p. 132
  • For the German people the battle for work is the turning point from capitalism to socialism because its intention is to provide every member of the nation once again with a job…. When he [Adolf Hitler] said ‘We will liquidate unemployment by our own strength,’ capitalism received its death blow.”
    • As quoted by Bernhard Köhler, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, Avraham Barkai, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 169, A. Holtz, “Sozialistische Wirtschaft,” Der Aufbau 4, no. 17, 1936, pp. 6-7
  • The Nazi State is not a "bourgeois" but a "Socialist" State, on the strength of which it can afford to prevent workers from defending their own interests.
    • Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (1938) London, UK, p. 325.

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  • I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.
  • The ‘totalitarian’ label is part of ideological warfare in another way as well – in so far as it covers both Communist and Fascist regimes, and is thereby intended to suggest that they are very similar systems. More specifically, the suggestion is that Communism and Nazism are more or less identical. This may be good propaganda but it is very poor political analysis. There were similarities between Stalinism and Nazism in the use of mass terror and mass murder. But there were also enormous differences between them. Stalinism was a ‘revolution from above’, which was intended to modernise Russia from top to bottom, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (most of those ‘means of production’ being themselves produced as part of the ‘revolution from above’); and Russia was indeed transformed, at immense cost. Nazism, on the other hand, was, for all its transformative rhetoric, a counter-revolutionary movement and regime, which consolidated capitalist ownership and the economic and social structures which Hitler had inherited from Weimar. As has often been observed, twelve years of absolute Nazi rule did not fundamentally change, and never sought to change fundamentally, the social system which had existed when Hitler came to power. To assimilate Nazism and Stalinism, and equate them as similarly ‘totalitarian’ movements and regimes of the extreme right and the extreme left is to render impossible a proper understanding of their nature, content and purpose.
  • If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist."
    • Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, Michael Mann, Fascists, New York: NY, Cambridge University Press (2006} p. 7.
  • Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

    That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.

    They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?

  • Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus.
    • Benito Mussolini's early opinion of Nazism, as quoted in Hitler's Ten-year War on the Jews (1946), by Institute of Jewish Affairs

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  • The common good before the individual good. (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz)
    • The Nazi 25-point Program, Adolf Hitler proclaimed his party's program on February 24, 1920 in Munich, Germany. Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation, Barbara Miller Lane, ‎Leila J. Rupp, introduction and translation, Manchester University Press (1978) p. 43.
    • Konrad Heiden translated this line as “The good of the state before the good of the individual” in his A History of National Socialism, (1935) p. 17.
  • When the Nazis came for the communists,
    I remained silent;
    I was not a communist.

    When they locked up the social democrats,
    I remained silent;
    I was not a social democrat.

    When they came for the trade unionists,
    I did not speak out;
    I was not a trade unionist.

    When they came for the Jews,
    I remained silent;
    I wasn't a Jew.

    When they came for me,
    there was no one left to speak out.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer: You're talking about turning theory into a practical weapons system faster than the Nazis.
    Leslie Groves: Who have a twelve month head start.
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: Eighteen.
    Leslie Groves: How could you possibly know that?
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: Our fast neutron research took six months. The man they've undoubtedly put in charge will have made that leap instantly.
    Leslie Groves: Who do you think they put in charge?
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: Werner Heisenberg. He has the most intuitive understanding of atomic structure I've ever seen.
    Leslie Groves    : You know his work?
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: I know him. Just like I know Walter Bothe, von Weizsäcker, Diebner... In a straight race, the Germans win. We've got one hope.
    Leslie Groves: Which is?
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: Antisemitism.
    Leslie Groves: What?
    J. Robert Oppenheimer: Hitler called quantum physics "Jewish science", said it right to Einstein's face. Our one hope is that Hitler is so, so blinded by hate that he's denied Heisenberg proper resources, because it'll take vast resources.

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Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. ~ George Orwell
  • In fact, all over Germany the [Nazi] party seemed to pour propagandistic venom on the capitalists and decadent bourgeoisie.
    • Dietrich Orlow, The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Enigma Books (2010) p. 61, referring to the 1926-1927 time period
  • Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.
  • National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism. . . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.
    • George Orwell,Orwell: My Country Left or Right 1940 to 1943, Vol. 2, Essays, Journalism & Letters, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, edit., Boston, MA, Nonpareil Books (2000), p. 25, originally from “Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau,” Time and Tide (4 May 1940)
  • In the long run the Nazi movement was moving to a position in which the economic New Order would be controlled by the Party through a bureaucratic apparatus staffed by technical experts and dominated by political interests, not unlike the system that had already been built up in the Soviet Union.
    • Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich, Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 118
  • During the Third Reich state ownership expanded into the productive sectors, based on the strategic industries, aviation, aluminium, synthetic oil and rubber, chemicals, iron and steel, and army equipment. Government finances for state-owned enterprises rose from RM 4,000m in 1933 to RM 16,000m 10 years later; the capital assets of state-owned industry doubled during the same period; the number of state-owned firms topped 500.
    • Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich, Oxford: Clarendon, (1994) p.16

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  • Some of the similarities and parallels include: Frequent recognition by Hitler and various Nazi leaders (and also Mussolini) that their only revolutionary and ideological counterparts were to be found in the Soviet Union . . . [and the] espousal of the have-not, proletarian-nation theory, which Lenin adopted only after it had been introduce in Italy . . . Hitlerian National Socialism more nearly paralleled Russian communism than has any other non-Communist system.
    • Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, University of Wisconsin Press (1995) pp. 210-211
  • At the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923, Nikolai Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had ‘inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.’ On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany.
    • Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, p. 126

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  • Goebbels saw the ultimate enemy as international capitalism, and those who held power in Germany as its lackey, betraying their nation for personal gain. These were the traditional targets of the Communists, of course, so the Nazis and the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, were in direct competition for the same constituency, two rabid dogs fighting for one bone… And Goebbels, who has so recently been happy to describe himself as a ‘German Communist’ led the fight with all the intensity of a religious convert.
    • Anthony Read, The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle, New York: NY and London: UK,, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2004) pp. 141-142
  • The basis of National Socialism’s mass psychology differs from that of Wilhelmian imperialism in that the former had a pauperized middle class, whereas the German empire had a prosperous middle class as its mass basis. Thus, the Christianity of Wilhelmian imperialism had to be different from the Christianity of National Socialism. For all that, the ideological modifications did not undermine the fundamentals of the mystical world view in the least; rather they intensified its function.
    To begin with, National Socialism rejected the Old Testament as being ‘Jewish’ - that, at least, was the position of its well-known exponent, Rosenberg, who belonged to the right wing. In the same way the internationalism of the Roman Catholic Church was regarded as ‘Jewish’. The international church was to be replaced by the ‘German’.
  • We have already seen how the ideology of national honour derives from authoritarian ideology and the latter from the sex-negation regulation of sexuality. Neither Christianity nor National Socialism attacks the institution of compulsive marriage: for the former, apart from its function of procreation, marriage is a ‘complete, life-long union’; for the National Socialists it is a biologically rooted institution for the preservation of racial purity. Outside of compulsive marriage, there is no sexuality for either of them.
  • Italian and German National Socialism became international fascism. In the strict sense of the word it attracted masses on an international scale in the form of a perverse ‘nationalistic internationalism’. In this form it crushed genuine democratic revolts in Spain and in Austria.
  • Profits are so completely subordinated in [Nazi] Germany and [Fascist] Italy to requirements of a militarily conceived national interest and of full employment that the maintenance of the profit principle is purely theoretical.
    • Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, "The Dilemmas of Social Democracies: Overcoming Obstacles to a More Just World", Lexington Books, (2008) p. 192
  • Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent-including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force. These men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new. It is not order.
    • Franklin Roosevelt, Address to the Annual Dinner for White House Correspondents' Association, Washington, D.C. (15 March 1941). A similar (but misleading 'quote') is inscribed on the FDR memorial, in Washington D. C., which says "They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers... Call this a New Order. It is not new and it is not order"
  • A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities that I have in mind.

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He continued with a leer: “If some of you girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will be glad to assign you one of my adjutants for whose ancestry I can vouch I can promise you a thoroughly enjoyable experience.” Giesler’s performance inspired foot-shuffling, murmurs, heckling, whistles, women and men walking out, and, finally, a full-fledged protest. SS men at the doors could not control the demonstration, which spilled out into Ludwigstrasse. Arm in arm, the students sang and chanted slogans in the only open display of political defiance that ever occurred in Nazi Germany. A month later, three uncowed student distributors of the pamphlets, the leaders of the White Rose Resistance group, were beheaded by guillotine on Himmler’s explicit orders. ~ Roger Shattuck
  • I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more.
    • Oskar Schindler, Oskar Schindler speaking about his take on the final solution (refers to the German Nazis' plan to engage in systematic genocide against the European Jewish population during World War II)
  • He continued with a leer: “If some of you girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will be glad to assign you one of my adjutants for whose ancestry I can vouch I can promise you a thoroughly enjoyable experience” (quoted in Richard Hanser, “A Noble Treason, 220). Giesler’s performance inspired foot-shuffling, murmurs, heckling, whistles, women and men walking out, and, finally, a full-fledged protest. SS men at the doors could not control the demonstration, which spilled out into Ludwigstrasse. Arm in arm, the students sang and chanted slogans in the only open display of political defiance that ever occurred in Nazi Germany. A month later, three uncowed student distributors of the pamphlets, the leaders of the White Rose Resistance group, were beheaded by guillotine on Himmler’s explicit orders.
  • When the Nazis invaded and occupied other countries in Europe, particularly those considered Aryan, they began to claim for the Third Reich children fathered by German troops. A few Lebensborn homes were established outside Germany. In some cases, mothers were kidnapped with their children. As time went on, a vast operation of baby snatching to supply the foreseeable need for manpower was carried out under Himmler’s direction. The children were selected according to strict physiognomic rules and measurements based on race. The undesirables were sent to labor camps or simply eliminated-by allowing them to freeze to death, for example. Severe discipline, brandings, and injections to hasten maturity were common. The preferred children were separated from their mothers indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, adopted by German families, and repossessed at puberty by the state.
    By this large-scale breeding and resettlement project in positive eugenics, Himmler and his associates exploited scientific research for social purposes-to augment the German birthrate and to monitor the racial purity of the population. According to Hillel and Henry, these goals were never achieved, despite Himmler’s personal interest. Little wonder. Not only did this mad Faustian raid on scientific knowledge violate the sanctity of human life, it relied on erroneous science.
  • Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending 'special contributions' to the party, the businessmen, who had to welcome Hitler's regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned... Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party,... recognized that the 'Nazi regime has ruined German industry.'
    • William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, New York: NY, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 261.
  • Today people commonly use the word "fascism" instead of "national socialism." Presumably this is what you are asking. No. Hitlerism had racism as its essential dogmatic foundation. But in a multiethnic country, such an ideology has no chance of success. And Russia has never had such a movement. But if we speak about the rampage of militant chauvinism, then it exists--and in bloody form--in several republics of the former U.S.S.R., but certainly not in Russia. And if one were to count all the instances of violence perpetrated on nationalist grounds and in local wars, all of them took place outside of Russia and were not perpetrated by Russians.
  • In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.
    • Susan Sontag, in "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 93
  • Is it really true that German fascist troops are invincible, as is ceaselessly trumpeted by the boastful fascist propagandists? Of course not! History shows that there are no invincible armies and never have been. Napoleon's army was considered invincible but it was beaten successively by Russian, English and German armies. Kaiser Wilhelm's German Army in the period of the first imperialist war was also considered invincible, but it was beaten several times by the Russian and Anglo-French forces and was finally smashed by the Anglo-French forces. The same must be said of Hitler's German fascist army today. This army had not yet met with serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance. And if, as a result of this resistance, the finest divisions of Hitler's German fascist army have been defeated by our Red Army, it means that this army too can be smashed and will be smashed as were the armies of Napoleon and Wilhelm.

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  • Conscious of the hazards inherent in the use of interuterine devices, Dr Grafenberg took up the search for the serviceable IUD in the early 1920s. Whether he knew about Dr Richter's pessary remains an open question. Initially, he used star-shaped devices and coils of silkworm gut (1924). Because they were expelled too readily, he conceived the Ring IUD, made of helicoidal1y wound silver filaments, which still bears his name. He did not hesitate to publish clinical results (1928-30), thus making his invention known beyond the boundaries of his native Germany. Shortly thereafter, other European physicians added statistics, issuing an increasing number of damaging reports of pelvic inflammatory disease associated with IUD use. Gräfenberg's last presentation on the subject was in 1931 at the German Congress of Gynecology in Frankfurt. His report was denounced by virtually all leaders of German gynecology attending the congress, who branded intrauterine contraception as a medically unacceptable method of birth control. Shortly thereafter, the streamroller of the Nazi regime started poisoning the air of Germany. Jewish physicians were removed from the hospital posts and contraception was proclaimed to be a threat to the physical and mental health of Aryan women. Ultimately, the advertising of contraceptives and/or contraceptive advice became illegal in Germany and the other Axis States.
    • Thiery, M., "Pioneers of the Intrauterine Device", "Pioneers of the intrauterine device" (PDF). European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care. 2 (1): pp.16-17. (March 1997).
  • In no way was Hitler the tool of big business. He was its lenient master. So was Mussolini except that he was weaker.
    • Norman Thomas, A Socialist’s Faith, W. W. Norton, 1951, p. 53. Former presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
  • [B]oth the communists and fascists revolutions definitely abolished laissez-faire capitalism in favor of one or another kind and degree of state capitalism.
    • Norman Thomas, A Socialist’s Faith, W. W. Norton, 1951, p. 55. Former presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
  • And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, ‘the brown Bolshevism.’
    • Dorothy Thompson, "Let the Record Speak", Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1939) p. 295 (newspaper column: “Pius XII—the former Diplomat,” March, 6, 1939)
  • Having first robbed the Jews, the Nazis are beginning to rob the Church, and later will almost certainly expropriate what is left of the bourgeoisie property.
    • Dorothy Thompson, “On the Record”, Harrisburg Telegraph, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, March 6, 1939, p. 7.
  • Soon [Nazi] Germany will not be any different from Bolshevik Russia; the heads of enterprises who do not fulfill the conditions which the ‘Plan’ prescribes will be accused of treason against the German people, and shot.
    • Fritz Thyssen, as quoted in The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, R. J. Overy, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 392.
  • Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed Nation Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food-stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.

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  • Marxism would be a phenomenon of little more than historical interest, seeing that it has failed even in its principal stronghold, were it not so closely akin to National Socialism. National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism.
  • Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.

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For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German. ~ Wilhelm II of Germany‎‎
  • All this would change when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 because his deductions from the war differed in important respects from those of others. War had been an intended and even a preferred part of National Socialist policy from the beginning, not so much out of a preference for fighting for its own sake, but from the entirely accurate conviction that the aim of German expansion could be secured only by war. Germany was to seize the agricultural land needed to feed its population, a population that would grow further as it obtained such land, and which would accordingly expand its needs and its lands into the indefinite future. This crude Social Darwinism, in which racial groups fought for land which could provide the means of subsistence, expelling or exterminating but never assimilating other groups, was derived from a view of history as deterministic as that of Marx, but substituting race for class as the key to understanding.’ Its application had internal as well as external implications.
    • Gerald L. Weinberg, A World at Arms : A Global History of World War II (2005) Cambridge University Press.
  • For the Nazis, race conflict was the driving motor of history. Hard, vigorous, masculine struggle against degenerate races, and against the degenerate members of their own group, marked the synthesis of race-based history and anthropology, a particularly radical, Nazi version of Social Darwinism. Each group, in this view, had an inherent drive to flourish, which necessitated expanded living space and continual conflict with other races. Out of the harshness of struggle, a still more vital and creative race would emerge. Since nature is “aristocratic” in essence, it favors the victory of the strong while it demands the “annihilation or unconditional surrender of the weaker.” Indeed, Judaism is nature-destroying, because its ideology, Marxism, “rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.” History was fast approaching that cataclysmic moment of decision, a fateful clash worthy of Revelations.
    • Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide (2018), p. 107.
  • The total state led by the Fuhrer was, however, never simply a dictatorship of one man. The new politics advocated by the Nazis, the vast project of social and biological engineering that they instigated, required popular participation. Goebbels, as minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, made clear that the regime, the express “will” of the nation, also had to win to its side those elements of the national community that still resisted the siren song of National Socialism. They could not just be “terrorized” but had to be won over through hard work, including propaganda. But dissent could not be tolerated. The claims of the Nazi movement and state upon the individual were total. The National Socialist Revolution, asserted Goebbels, “does not stop for [the realm] of private life.” These totalizing ambitions required not just obedience but also participation. The state had to “set the masses in motion,” as Goebbels put it. If Hitler did not deign to intervene directly in every policy matter, Hitler’s followers believed that “working toward the Fuhrer,” pursuing his goals without his express orders, placed them in accord with the movement of history. Nazi views on the total state and popular mobilization concurred with strategic doctrine, Hitler’s as well as the Wehrmacht’s. In Nazi doctrine, war would allow the race to flourish; to pursue the war successfully, the race had to be purified. Since the coming conflict was never simply a campaign of territorial conquest but always a racial, ideological war, the links between domestic and foreign policy were particularly tight in Nazi Germany.
    • Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide (2018), pp. 112-113.
  • The gentlemen of the National Socialist party call the movement they have unleashed a national revolution, not a National Socialist one. So far, the relationship of their revolution to socialism has been limited to the attempt to destroy the social democratic movement, which for more than two generations has been the bearer of socialist ideas and will remain so. If the gentlemen of the National Socialist Party wanted to perform socialist acts, they would not need an Enabling Law. They would be assured of an overwhelming majority in this house. Every motion submitted by them in the interest of workers, farmers, white-collar employees, civil servants, or the middle class could expect to be approved, if not unanimously, then certainly with an enormous majority.
  • It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy, for if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. In actuality, however, we face a totally different situation. At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one's fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies.
  • Though we know that National Socialist power must be broken by military means, we are trying to achieve a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit. This rebirth must be preceded, however, by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions…
  • The tragedy is not that nonviolence did not work against the Nazis, but that it was so seldom utilized ...The churches as a whole were too docile or anti-semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the Gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis or act in solidarity with the Jews.
    • Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (1992), p. 254-256

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To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing. ~ Adolf Eichmann
  • Strictly speaking, the message of National Socialism was not radically different from that of other forms of egalitarianism and socialism: strong antibourgeois sentiments expressed through a radical empowerment of a selected group of people at the expense of other groups… What made National Socialism novel and different from earlier forms of socialism was an attempt to blend the ideas of social justice and revolutionary nationalism.
    • Andrei A. Znamenski, “From ‘National Socialists’ to ‘Nazi:’ History, Politics and the English Language,” The Independent Review, Oakland: CA, vol. 19, no. 4, Spring 2015, p. 545. [6]

DiMeglio, Peter M. (1999). "Germany 1933–1945 (National Socialism)". In Helen Tierney (ed.). Women's studies encyclopedia. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.

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  • From its inception, the Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP Nazi Party) had no place for women in its ranks. At its first general meeting in early 1921 a unanimous resolution passed that stated that women could never be accepted either into the leadership of the party or into any governing committee. National Socialism viewed German women as wives and mothers who did not wish to work in factories or offices or even represent themselves in the government. A cozy home, a beloved husband, and a multitude of happy children were their only aspirations. Hitler believed in suppressing the drive for women’s emancipation by emphasizing the differences between men and women and the woman’s role as the preserver of the biological inheritance, domestic virtue, and even eternal morality.
    • p.587
  • The Nazi definition of the role of women actually expanded and contracted with party needs. Prior to Hitler’s ascension to power, men and women worked together. Following 1933, Hitler made employed women give up jobs to return to the home and raise families. After 1936, however, when he needed them to work, he put them in factories. Because of Hitler’s war preparation, the Nazis moved to improve the employment of women in the workplace. Despite all of these changing roles, however, at no time did women have any demonstrable influence over policies that affected themselves, their families, or the Nazi Party. They were not placed in positions where they wielded political power or party and state responsibility.
    • p.588
  • The Nazis were strongly opposed to feminism and held that feminists were unduly influenced by both Jews and Marxists, had an unhealthy preoccupation with their sexuality, and were determined to destroy Christian-German life. The Nazis discouraged dieting, cosmetics, smoking, and foreign dress. German couples needed medical examinations to marry, and the fear of “hereditary defects” led to a black market in documents proving Aryan ancestry. Wives of SS men were forced to attend special bride schools. Almost 28,000 so-called undesirable women underwent forced sterilization by 1934. Aryan men were encouraged to divorce Jewish wives, and their children were taken from the mother. In 1939, it was announced that Jewish women could seek abortions, but non-Jewish women could not. Non-Jewish women who did not marry or have children were harassed.
    • pp.588-589.
  • The response of the Christian faithful to racism was not uniform. A population as enormous as that of Christian women could not be socially, politically, or temperamentally monolithic. Michael Phayer states that Protestants were more tolerant toward Nazi racism than Catholics. Protestant women were more nationalistic than Catholics, which made them more receptive to National Socialism. Some Protestant women, however, also fought National Socialist ideology and the paganism it espoused. Scholt-Klink promoted her own women’s organization by playing Catholic an Protestant’s women’s organizations against each other.
    The experiences of German women living under Nazi rule varied. As pointed out in “When Biology Became Destiny”, Nazism did not begin with overt attacks against the emancipation of women. It was cloaked in extreme nationalism calling for love of the country, reduction of the unemployment by keeping women out of the workforce, and reversion of women back to the role of motherhood.
    What can be said of the attitude of German women toward the racism of Hitler? A great deal of information has been derived from studying the most prominent organizations of women. Many Protestant and Catholic leaders were aware that if Germany were victorious, there would be a showdown between Christianity and the neopaganism of National Socialism. Some courageous women dared to challenge the establishment. For example, Agnes von Grone and Helene Weber both spoke out against anti-Christian elements in Nazism. Ultimately, faith, not feminism, made Nazi women reject Nazi neopaganism. Institutional and religious elements overwhelmed social factors.
    • p.589

Friedlander, Henry (1995). “The origins of Nazi genocide: from euthanasia to the final solution”. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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  • The Nazi regime issued numerous laws and regulations during the 1930s to implement its eugenic and racial program, and, as we shall see, the practitioners of race hygiene-anthropologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and physicians-were involved in drafting and applying them. Of course, their role had changed. They profited from being governed by a regime that favored race hygiene, but they also had to accommodate themselves to the regime’s political needs. They continued to consider the Nazis “vulgar and ordinary” and Nazi anti-Semitism somewhat extreme, but they accepted, even applauded, Nazi policies because they reflected an ideology they as individuals and as scientists had long supported. But even though they may have tried to maintain a certain scientific detachment, their assistants and students enthusiastically embraced all aspects of Nazi ideology.
    At times, however, Nazi ideology made life inconvenient for the race scientists. Fritz Lenz discovered the futility of objecting to one of Heinrich Himmler’s pet projects. At a committee meeting attended by Himmler, Lenz opposed equality for illegitimate children because he believed it would have a negative impact on the quality of the transmitted germ plasm. Himmler disagreed. The powerful Reich leader SS argued that illegitimacy was not a disgrace in the “real world” and that equality was needed to assure a high birthrate and to prevent the spread of homosexuality and abortion.
    German science was rapidly synchronized (“gleichgeschaltet”) with Nazi ideology after 1933, especially after scientists opposed to the new regime, as well as those with the wrong ethnic background, were fired. There was no effective resistance. Still, not all science was dominated by Nazi ideology in disregard of the German scientific tradition. For example, the attempt to establish an Aryan physics failed as older traditions reasserted themselves.
    Such restraints did not apply in the biological sciences concerned with the questions of race and heredity. There Nazi ideology and German scientific tradition complemented each other. Without hesitation, the race scientists fired their Jewish colleagues.
    • Ch.1 “The Origins of Nazi Genocide”, p.19
  • As the Nazi regime moved toward war, Hitler authorized state and party planners to proceed form the exclusionary policies of emigration, incarceration, and sterilization to the most radical exclusionary solution of killings. The first group targeted were the handicapped. They were excluded by being institutionalized, but this was not enough. Hostile to their existence, institutions reduced services and sought to cut the costs of caring for mental and disabled patients. Excluded, incarcerated, sterilized, and neglected, the handicapped were viewed as expendable, and thus a logical progression led to the killing of the handicapped in the so-called euthanasia program. The other group of undesirables-the “Asozialen” were treated similarly: those committed to institutions by the courts were among the first killed; others were later selected for killing when euthanasia was applied within the concentration camps.
    • Ch.1 “The Origins of Nazi Genocide”, p.21
  • Against the handicapped, the regime enacted into law the program long advocated by race scientists to control a population considered degenerate and inferior. The so-called sterilization law, promulgated in July 1933, served throughout the Nazi period as the model for all eugenic legalisation. It introduced compulsory sterilization for persons suffering from a variety of mental and physical disorders and in the process defined the groups to be excluded from the national community. This legislation was followed in October 1935 by the Marriage Health Law, which mandated screening the entire population to prevent marriages of persons considered carriers of hereditary degeneracy, particularly those covered by the sterilization law. Numerous ordinances defining and enlarging these two laws followed. As race hygiene had always linked the handicapped to criminal and antisocial behavior, the bureaucrats drafting this legislation believed that their eugenic laws should also cover “inherited criminal traits.” To accomplish this, the regime enacted in November 1933 the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and the Law on Measures of Security and Reform. The new provisions- articles 220a and 42a-m of the penal code-gave the courts substantial new powers to confine and punish persons considered habitual criminals. In addition to the penalties already provisioned by the penal code, the court were authorized to commit the ”Asozaielen” to state hospitals, to impose protective custody or longer prison terms on habitual criminals, to mandate castration for sexual offenders, and to prohibit defendants from practicing their professions or occupations.
    • Ch.2 Excluding the Handicapped, pp.23-24

Proctor, Robert (1988). “Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis”. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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  • The Nazi medical experiments and even the program for the destruction of “lives not worth living” represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg. In fact, the ideological structure we associate with National Socialism was deeply embedded in the philosophy and institutional structure of German biomedical science long before the beginning of the euthanasia program in 1939-and to a certain extent, even before 1933. The published record of the German medical profession makes it clear that many intellectuals cooperated fully in Nazi racial programs, and that many of the social and intellectual foundations for these programs were laid long before the rise of Hitler to power. What I want to argue in addition to this, however (and here I shall be drawing upon a growing body of recent German scholarship on this question) is that biomedical scientists played an active, even leading role in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs. In this sense the case can be made that science (especially biomedical science) under the Nazis cannot simply be seen in terms of a fundamentally “passive” or “apolitical” scientific community responding to purely external political forces; on the contrary, there is strong evidence that scientists actively designed and administered central aspects of National Socialist racial policy.
    • p.6
  • We should not allow our judgment of the ethical character of Nazi medical practice to hinge entirely on whether we consider it to have been based on “genuine science”. One cannot (or at least should not) radically divide the practice of science from its product science is, among other things, a social activity, and the politics of those who practice it is part of that science. Furthermore, we miss something if we assume at the outset a fundamental hostility between science and a form of political practice such as National Socialism. This was not how scientists themselves viewed the matter[..]
    • Introduction, p.9
  • American eugenicists rejected the entire concept of birth control because it was associated, in their view, with an “antibaby strike” on the part of emancipated women.
    Curiously, at the same time that racial hygienists warned of a declining population, conservative apologists for the Pan-German League argued that overseas colonies were needed to relieve the “overcrowding” caused by Germany’s rapidly growing population. Similar contradictions would persist in the Nazi period. Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in 1933 thus found it possible to warn of “race suicide” (caused by the declining birthrate) in one breath and then to call for the need to acquire “Lebenstraum” for Germany’s growth, in the next. Such pronouncements make one suspect that population concerns were (then as now) more the product of political interests than of incontrovertible facts.
    • p.20
  • Hereditary theory remained a point of political contention throughout the period of Nazi rule (and indeed, for some time after). In 1939 the Moscow Anthropological Museum sponsored an exhibit on “Race and Race Theory” attacking the Nazi ideal of Nordic supremacy as part of an “effort by the German ruling class to justify its domination over subjugated classes as ‘natural’.” Nazi physicians reporting on the exhibit claimed that by virtue of their support for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Soviet biologists had abandoned the goal of “pure science”; Nazi physicians also suggested that the Soviets hoped, with the help of the Lamarckian doctrine, to “disprove the existence of racial boundaries” and thereby “facilitate the assimilation of Jews into the country.” By this time, however, Russia was not the only country issuing official proclamations on the nature of heredity. In 1937 the Nazi party published its official “Handbook for the Hitler Youth”, issued as required reading for the 7 million members of this organization. The “Handbook” presented a chapter titled “Race Formation: heredity and Environment,” including discussions of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection, and the Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
    • p.37
  • One of the leading research efforts of Germany’s racial hygiene institutes was twin studies (for example, studies of identical twins raised apart) designed to determine the relative importance of heredity an environment. Suggestions that the study of twins might be used for this purpose date back at least as far as Francis Galton’s 1875 “History of Twins as a Criterion of the Realtive Powers of Nature and Nurture.” In the Third Reich, twin studies were lavisihly funded as part of an effort to prove that heredity was the key to many human talents and imperfections. Twin studies purportedly demonstrated the heritability of everything from epilepsy, criminality, memory, and hernias to tuberculosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and divorce. In 1933 Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer published a book purporting to provide exact ratios of the relative influence of heredity and environment in a wide range of bodily traits; he derived his data from the study of several thousand identical and nonidentical twins. (see Figure 8). Verschuer’s studies were followed by hundreds of others. By 1936 Otto Reche’s Institute for the Study of Race and Volk had examined 12,50 pairs of twins, recording forty-two separate physical or physiognomic traits for each pair. Eugen Fischer called twin studies “the” single most important research tool in the field of racial hygiene; Verschuer called twin research the “sovereign method for genetic research in humans” Racial hygienists were able to convince Nazi authorities that twin studies warranted substantial government support: in 1939 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick ordered the registration of all twins, triplets, or quadruplets born in the Reich, for the express purpose of research to isolate the effects of nature and nurture in the formation of the human racial constitution.
    • pp.42-43
  • The Nazis found biology and medicine a suitable language in which to articulate their goals; scientists found the Nazis willing to support many of their endeavors. Furthermore, racial hygiene was not “imposed on” the German medical community; physicians eagerly embraced the racial ideal and the racial state. This in fact was perceived by observers at the time. In 1933 Fritz Lenz noted:
    Whatever resistance the idea of racial hygiene may have encountered in previous times among German doctors, this resistance exists no longer. The German core [Kern] within the medical community has recognized the demands of German racial hygiene as its own; the medical profession has become the leading force in making these demands.
    Lenz than cited the words of Gerhard Wagner, leader of the German medical profession:
    Knowledge of racial hygiene and genetics has become, by a purely scientific path, the knowledge of an extraordinary number of German doctors. It has influenced to a substantial degree the basic world view of the State, and indeed may even be said to embody the very foundations of the present state [“Staatsraison”].
    • Ch.1 “The Origins of Racial Hygiene”, p.45
  • Why did physicians join the Nazi party in such numbers? Professional opportunism certainly played a role: many reasoned that by driving out the Jews, jobs could be created for non-Jewish physicians-an important motive, given the overcrowding and financial stress suffered by the profession in the years before the rise of the Nazis (see Chapter 6). The traditionally conservative character of the medical profession was another factor. Prior to 1933, many German physicians identified with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, a conservative and nationalistic party that eventually threw its support to Hitler. Most physicians shared a strong sense of national pride: in the spring of 1933, for example, the “Deutsches Arzteblatt” noted that most German physicians had taken part in World War I and that 1,000 had died “on the field of honor.”
    In the years preceding the triumph of the Nazis, physicians were faced with a series of economic shocks that moved many to realign their politics. Impoverishment after the war and economic collapse during the final years of the Weimar Republic polarized the profession politically. At the same time, physicians warned of a “crisis in medicine,” a crisis variously construed as the bureaucratization specialization, or scientization of medicine-problems blamed on the socialists, the Jews, or the numerous quacks that eternally plague the profession. Physicians expressed a desire to win back “the confidence of the people.”
    • p.69
  • The single most important classes of journals that, generally speaking did “not” survive the Nazi seizure of power were those publishing in the field of social hygiene (“Sozialhygiene”). These were journals concerned primarily with broader social or public health aspects of medicine, often from a socialist or communist point of view. The journal “Soziale Medizin”, for example, folded in the first year of Nazi rule, as did “Der Sozialistische Arzt”, the official journal of the Association of Socialist Physicians.
    • p.77
  • The Nazi medical community also published special journals designed either to popularize the new racial ideal or to keep Nazi physicians abreast of social and racial policy. “Ziel und Weg” was the primary journal responsible for articulating Nazi philosophy in the sphere of medicine. In 1931 it began publishing in editions of 3,000 copies; by 1934 this number had grown to 16,000; and by 1939 the journal was publishing 40,000 copies twice a month. The Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) published the popular health magazine “Neues Volk” (New people), issued as the successor to the pre-Nazi journal “Das Horrohr”, in editions that ran as high as 360,000 copies (in 1939); the office also published an in-house journal called the “Informationsdienst” (Information service) to keep its members informed on issues of racial policy. Circulation of the “Informationsdienst” was deliberately limited to 5,000 copies in order to be able to include confidential information; readers were asked not to repeat information published in the journal unless they withheld the source. Published from 1934 to 1944 the “Informationsdienst” today serves as one of the most revealing sources of information on Nazi racial policy.
    • pp.77-78
  • Socialist physicians wanted to legalize abortion; Nazi physicians saw abortion as a feminist plot designed to sap the strength of the nation.
    • p.269

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