Just because the Nazis called themselves National Socialists doesn't make them socialists. Communists and socialists were the first the Nazis sent to concentration camps.
Abolishing capital income, confiscation of war profits, nationalization of all trusts, a generous increase in old age pensions, communalization of large stores, nationalization and redistribution of farmland and nationalization of schools.
Whether this meets your definition of "socialism" is mainly a function of how narrowly you define the word. But they were certainly a very economically left wing party.
I think that argument is pretty weak. Many of the millions that the Soviets sent to the gulags were socialists and communists, but that action doesn't make the Soviets or those they imprisoned and murdered not-communist or not-socialist.
Communists and socialists have a long histories of bloody internecine conflicts.
You'd have to be somewhat detached from the historical record to seriously suggest that all of these, or even a majority, were the result of socialism.
So essentially Hitler considered himself to be/pretended in his speeches to be a socialist, although not a Marxist socialist, but one who rejects big banking (read: DEM JEWS!1!).
>Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production
Given that the Nazis privatized a lot of publicly owned companies such as the Deutsche Bank and the Deutsche Reichsbahn, I don't think the Nazis were socialists.
The socialist component in the Nazi ideology was almost entirely economical and not social. Nazis on social issues were as nationalistic and minorities-hating as any far-right group if not worse.
It's just that some RW people love to distort the reality to score cheap political points.
I used to like the Nolan chart too, but recently I've been thinking that even 2 axes is overfitting.
Politics is so complicated that only a very simple model has predictive value, even with huge variance. I think a single axis order-disorder is the best we can do to talk in general terms.
IIRC at the convention that wrote the constitution there were about 5 axis involved. I can't remember what they were though. Any insight on it would be appreciated.
Socialism kills [0]. Or a more eloquent and less extreme read would be "The Road to Serfdom" by F. A. Hayek
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[0]: http://jim.com/killingfields.html