zappoloco

No. And the reason this argument keeps coming back isn't that it's clever. It's that it's useful. Start with what you left out. On 1 May 1933 the Nazis threw a festival for the German worker. On 2 May the SA went through the door of every trade union building in the country. Funds seized, organisations dissolved, leadership arrested. Most of them went to Dachau, where the first inmates were communists and social democrats, because that is who the camps were built for before they were built for anyone else. SPD banned in June. KPD broken in February. When the Enabling Act came to a vote, the Social Democrats were the only party that voted against it, and the Communists couldn't vote because they were already in cells. Four months. That's how long it took your socialist regime to physically destroy every organisation of the German working class. Now the money. There were no nationalisations. Almost none in the entire Third Reich, hardly any new state firms, private companies keeping real discretion over what they produced and where they invested, no central planning of investment, and the state negotiating war contracts rather than dictating them. Their explanation for why is the part that should stop you. The regime believed private ownership produced better incentives. It thought capitalists worked harder when they owned the thing. Nazi Germany was the only country in the Western world running a systematic reprivatisation programme in the 1930s, while every other capitalist state was moving toward more public ownership. Weimar had taken the big banks and a major industrial concern in the crash of 1931. The Nazis handed them back. Steel, shipping, banking. They also pioneered contracting out public services to private firms. The English word privatisation comes from the German Reprivatisierung, and it comes from them. And you forgot the biggest property transfer in Europe before the war. Aryanisation. A hundred thousand Jewish businesses, plus the homes, the accounts, the paintings. Handed to whom? Not the state. To private German owners, with Deutsche Bank and Dresdner taking a broker's cut. Find me the socialism in that. Then read the Law for the Ordering of National Labour, January 1934, which wrote the Führerprinzip into the factory. The employer is designated the leader of the plant. The workers are designated his followers. In law. Hold that sentence next to the word socialism and see which one survives. Schacht, a conservative banker, ran the economy. Feder, the only man who meant the anti-capitalist rhetoric, was squeezed out by the end of 1934. Gregor Strasser, who led the party's left, was shot on 30 June 1934. The anti-capitalist wing of Nazism was real. Hitler killed it in year two, to reassure the army and heavy industry, and it worked. Because of course they paid for him. Düsseldorf, January 1932: Hitler in front of the Ruhr, telling them property and unequal reward are natural and will be defended. Göring's residence, February 1933: Krupp and IG Farben putting up three million marks. They weren't confused about what they were buying. They were buying the end of the unions. They kept getting it until 1944, when millions of forced labourers and camp prisoners were working inside Krupp, IG Farben, Siemens and Volkswagen, and the profits stayed with the shareholders. Slave labour captured privately. There is no socialism in any language that looks like that. And the axis you think was rigged comes from a seating plan in 1789. Right side, the king and the order of ranks. Left side, equality. It has never measured the size of the state. If it did, Colbert is a Marxist, and so is Franco with his INI, and so is Mussolini, whose IRI gave Italy the largest state-owned sector in Europe outside the USSR. Nobody moves Franco leftward for it. The axis measures whether you think human inequality is natural in the blood. Nazism said yes, loudly, in print, for twenty years.