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56 posted on 4/8/2013 1:25:50 AM by dfwgator: “Hitler only tolerated private enterprise to the point where it would help him build his war machine. A lot of Nazi rhetoric was as anti-capitalistic as the Soviet rhetoric was....Once the war was won, there is no question that the Nazis’ next target for liquidation was to be the business class.”

I'd like to see links to documentation. That could be helpful in rebutting those who consider Nazis to be “right wing” ultraconservatives.

I'm quite aware of the Nazi party's roots in socialism — after all, it was the National **SOCIALIST** Workers Party.

However, it does seem as if the purge of the SA (brownshirts) by the SS (blackshirts) reflected an underlying move by Hitler toward corporate “crony capitalism” on an Italian Fascist model, rather than the stronger socialist theme of the SA, or of Mussolini in his younger days. My impression is that Hitler himself changed his views on the role of businessmen as his Nazi Party became more successful, and especially after the German Communists and the Social Democrats were eliminated as political competitors for the loyalty of working-class Germans.

"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 all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

~ Adolph Hitler, May 1, 1927

You should be able to find the full text in the online Propaganda Archive of Calvin College.

However, it does seem as if the purge of the SA (brownshirts) by the SS (blackshirts) reflected an underlying move by Hitler toward corporate “crony capitalism” on an Italian Fascist model,

The relative health and global competitiveness of German industries leads me to think that this was out and out capitalism rather Latin American-style crony capitalism. There's a tendency to believe that because Hitler was a mass murderer, he also did everything else in ways diametrically opposite from ours. I think it's a mistake to assume that.