The National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi) was seen as a like-minded socialist party by the Socialist Party of Germany which offered to merge with the NSWP, an offer that was turned down by the NSWP by only 1 vote. Party line Marxists always maintain that NWSP was not socialist at all but was instead secretly capitalist.
Shirer was a long time on air commentator with CBS News.
Shirer “in the view of many was Marxist or at least socialist.” Hmm. And I should reject the man’s extraordinary and well-documented, not to mention highly-critiques, work because ... “many,” whom I do not know and have never heard of, said so?
He was a “commentator for CBS News”. So what? You are disputing his scholarship because he worked for CBS News during WWII, smuggling his first-hand accounts out of Nazi Germany at great personal danger to himself? Because he covered the Nuremberg Trials for CBS? He left CBS after his argument with Paley in 1947!
It’s not only “party-line Marxists” that maintain the Nazis were not “socialists.” It’s the great majority of historians all over the world for the past 70 years. There was never a “dictatorship of the proletariat” under Nazism. The workers never controlled the means of production.
The Nazis were statist, corporatist, and totalitarian. They maintained a police state like Stalin did.
But the state and the corporation were *never* controlled by the working class. The Nazis were much more similar to the Fascists state of Mussolini than they ever were to Stalinist Russia. That’s why the Fascists remained part of the Axis until they were defeated. That’s why the Nazis sent Socialists to the death camps, and marched on Moscow.
Do you let your political beliefs and your own ideology determine what histories you read? Or do you read history and use your own faculties to build your opinions? Because even writers and sites that are Leftist have valuable factual information if you sort it out from the political spin. (But then, it’s the same with arguments produced by Conservatives.)