Commies were correct to place nazis as rightists because they were: they were the right wing of socialism. That is to say, they were socialists who concerned themselves chiefly with their own country and the surrounding territory. They weren’t out to conquer the world like Marxists. They also let various traditional institutions survive, for instance the family, private business, unions, etc., though under severe regulation. They weren’t quite as leftwing as the leftiest of leftists.
Why the should matter to us anymore than the difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks isn’t clear to me. Except commies have exerted undue influence on the contemporary mind, and though it wasn’t always the case since WWII no one wants to be confused for fascist. So not only was the infighting between rival socialist factions expanded to the general consciousness, and not only did they trick us into thinking it was of vital meaning, but somehow nazism was twisted into representing not only the right wing of socialism but the right wing of everything! They got to be ancient slavery, feudalism, 19th century laissez-faire, and everything else, or everything else supposedly bad, in the wayback. Leftwing leftists, meanwhile, got to be the future, progress, etc. In which they were aided by no one ever being told what, exactly, that future was going to look like.
This Big Lie was made plausible, slightly, by Big German Business having partly funded the nazi party, which allowed them to get away with the pitiful “last gasp of capitalism” argument (if it was that, it was capitalists trying to hold on by becoming less capitalistic, not more, which incidentally involves them becoming socialists; of course to commies anything non-Marxist is evil and retrograde even if it is lurching to the left). Also, they talked about Frederick Barbarossa and restoring the Holy Roman Empire, plastered pictures of milkmaids and sheaves of wheat everywhere, and invoked the old Norse Gods. They were so oldfashioned that they jumped back a couple of millenia.
Which makes it hard to tell whether it was oldfashioned or futuristic. I run into the same dilemma with communists, too, maybe even moreso. Read the communist manifesto and tell me it doesn’t sound like a romantic aristocrat looking down on upstart burghers. Hard to say whether they’re attacking industrial society compared to the better past or the brighter future. Except that when you ponder what comes after the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat all that comes to mind is primitive tribalism. There’s a great book on this called “The Lost Literature of Socialism” by George Watson. He went back and read what they actually wrote, rather than what defenders and attackers have been les to believe or deliberately led others to believe they were on about. I can’t even summarize it here, really, because it’s that far away from how I’ve been accustomed to think.
That is actually true and insightful. The confusion about whether fascism -- and Nazism in particular -- was backward-looking or forward-looking is similar. Was Nazism about Norse gods and earthy, simple peasants or about new technologies and the latest racial pseudo-science? The answer is it was about both and many other things besides.
I guess people need the "right-left" dichotomy to make sense of politics, but we ought to recognize its limitations. The European and the American ideas of what constitutes leftism and (especially) rightism are very different. Old feudal ideas that counted as conservative or right-wing in Europe would be regarded by many here as left-wing statism, while free market, quasi-libertarian American conservatism counts as liberalism or radicalism to some Europeans.
Any kind of political schema is going to be simplistic from some point of view. I guess the answer is that people continue to discuss the topic and not accept simplistic answers that pretend to neatly classify everything.
Europe is still in the after-throes of an age when its left-wingers and right-wingers were shooting and throwing bombs at each other. There was something of that still going on in the 70s and 80s and even later, so for Europeans "right wing" is going to refer to Nazi or fascist groups as they still need a score card to see which set of political thugs is trying to kill which other political groups, even though such groups have much in common.