[dfwgator]

The SA boys were pretty much socialists.

Which is precisely why Hitler killed them off, they scared the industrialists, and Hitler needed them to build his war machine.

[Eurotwit]

Exactly.

Which is a bit simplistic, an many FReepers do, to call Hitler a socialist.

He was power mad, and would use any means to get his ways. Appealing to the socialist sentiment of many German voters was of course a no brainer.

He was a pragmatic madman before he was a Kucinich.

imho that is :-)

[Ohioan]

Hitler had found that he could persuade much of the old line military leadership that he was a German patriot, before he decided to kill off his close buddy Rohm and the SA leadership. (Rohm had, indeed, been in favor of going after the German Junker class, a la Bolshevik examples, in addition to being a flaming homosexual.)

But note, at the Party rally in Nuremberg after the purge, Hitler was still ranting about a "Classless, Cassteless Germany". He also, like FDR was putting unemployed workers into military uniforms. There is a priceless split second in the propaganda film, "Triumph of The Will," where an old line Military officer's facial expression shows what he actually thought of the shovel carrying labor battalions, marching by.

The difference between a Nuremberg rally and Red Square antics in Moscow, was simply the better pageantry. Both celebrated monolithic uniformity.