LOL! To say that Hitler was a mere opportunist is laughable. Hitler openly said he was a socialist and said so many times. He was recognized by others as being a socialist too.....until it became very inconvenient for the Left to admit that all the mass murderers from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot to Mao were their fellow Leftists.
This from well known Leftist source Time Magazine in 1938: Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National 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 others 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 foodstuffs 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.
“The NSDAP is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism.” – Josef Goebbels
“To put it quite clearly, we have an economic program. Point number thirteen in that program demands the nationalization of all public companies—in other words socialization, or what is known here as socialism.” – Adolf Hitler
"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
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical...... Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.
Nazism was the same old socialism just replacing class with race. "The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, Hitler claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd ties with a democratic order. ... Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings." Adolf Hitler
As I said the first time. The primary differences between the Nazis and the Commies were that the Nazis defined their enemies by race rather than class, and the Nazis were content to let business owners continue to run their businesses (instead of killing and replacing them with a party bureaucrat) but they insisted that the business had to do what the government told them to do rather than what the owner wanted to do with his business. Only embarrassed Leftists try to deny that the Nazis were socialists.
Only to the extent that it helped to build the war machine. Once the war was won, they'd go the way of the Jews, since their services would no longer be required.
That said, you don't believe Hitler was an opportunist?
Everyone who has studied Hitler knows full-well that he redefined "socialism" to fit his needs. It isn't socialism as you think it is.
Hitler had one plan...to establish a dictatorship with himself in charge (which for the most part, he accomplished). He had no plans--ZERO, ZIP, NADA--to create a socialist state with common ownership of property by the German people.
He was a tyrant, not an ideologue.