One of the more surprising myths that has sprung up on the Internet in recent years is the premise that National Socialism was a leftist rather than a right-wing political movement. It’s a form of historical revisionism, rooted in cultural illiteracy, that’s been spreading like a rash through the worldwide web, popping up in comments pages, surfacing in the occasional blogger essay, and triumphantly being presented as an argument on online forums. Following the pattern of many such myths, it seems to be on the verge of breaking into the print media. Jonah Goldberg has a book coming out this December, LIBERAL FASCISM, that apparently offers a similar argument.

Anyone familiar with the history of Hitler’s National Socialist Party knows that the word “Socialism” in the party name was less an honest reflection of Nazi policies than a cynical attempt by party leadership to lure working class Germans into its ranks. As William Shirer points out in THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH:

The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels, and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it. (“Triumph and Consolidation,” THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, William Shirer)

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-hitler.htm [2]

Among these suppliers were Emil Kirdorf, an industrialist “so reactionary that he called the policies of the Imperial government ‘dangerously radical’” because it “had allowed Bismarck’s antisocialist law to lapse.” (WHO FINANCED HITLER, James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Dial Press, First paperback edition, Pg 139) Fritz Thyssen, a fabulously wealthy steel heir whose experiences as a prisoner of the revolutionaries during the uprisings of 1918-19 had left him a firm anti-Communist, and, of course, Henry Ford, the American auto-maker who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as a leftist. The faith these men put in Hitler as a firm opponent of socialism was vindicated shortly after Hitler took power when, on May 2, 1933, trade union headquarters throughout Germany were occupied, the unions dissolved and their leaders arrested.

For an educated and rational conservative, these facts should not present a serious problem. They simply indicate the complexity of the political landscape, particularly in the early 20th century, and the dangers of aligning oneself with a political leader simply because of his anti-communism.

For many on the far right, however, Hitler’s right-wing affiliation is a direct challenge to their left-wing/socialist/bad, right-wing/free-market/good dichotomy. Not only has Hitler’s right-wing Third Reich gone down in history as the embodiment of state-sponsored evil, but a detailed and factual discussion of it involves describing communists, socialists, feminists and liberals as victims, something that might confuse the home-schooled kids being taught this right-wing/good, left-wing/bad dichotomy.

The answer the right has hit on is not to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis. It’s to rebrand them.

Significant Omissions

Conservapedia corrections to “vandalism” of entries about the Nazis:

In Conservapedia articles, this rebranding campaign rarely takes the form of stating outright in an actual article, “The Nazis were leftists.” Conservapedia editors simply refuse to allow the term “right wing” to be associated with the Nazis and carefully avoid any mention of Communists, or leftists, or even liberals as victims of Nazism. “Jewish Communists” and “Jewish liberal intellectuals” are mentioned in the article on National Socialism, and there’s a reference or two of Hitler rounding up his “political opponents,” but few direct acknowledgements that leftists were targeted by the Nazis, simply for being leftists, are allowed to remain.

One exception to this can be found in the article on the Third Reich (the original version of which I wrote), which describes the round up of Communists in the wake of the fire of the Reichstag – an act of arson that Conservapedia is intent on blaming, not just on the man who confessed to it, Marinus van der Lubbe (a half-blind Dutch Communist who had a history of setting fires, but also a history of confessing to crimes he’d probably not committed), but on the international Communist conspiracy, as the following edits in the Adolf Hitler article show:

While the exact events surrounding this event (The Reichstag fire) are still contended, it was blamed on a communist comintern conspiracy. Georgi Dimitrov, who later became General Secretary of the Comintern, was one of those arrested in the plot.

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title... [5]

A Conservapedia editor objected to these changes, complaining on the talk page that “Saying something like ‘Comintern activists’ seems to suggest that there was some sort of international Communist participation.” The response from the editor who had made the changes was:

Well, that is exactly what it was. Note, according to this article, the guy who burned down the Riechstag was not a German Communist, rather a Dutch Communists. Both KPD and the Dutch Commie Party (whatever it was) were Comintern organizations.

Thus the hapless Marinus van der Lubbe is elevated by virtue of his Dutch citizenship from a rather low level and inexperienced communist whom few took very seriously, to an international conspirator. The fact that Dimitrov was acquitted by the German court, along with all the other communists who didn’t confess, is not included.

These deceptively minor edits, substituting the word “comintern” for “communist,” leaving out a fact here, erasing the word “right wing” there, seem intended to support a drastic revision of history, one that would require rewriting the Niemoller Statement, which opens with “First they came for the Communists …”. The Nazis, according to Conservapedia, were right about the Reichstag fire being an example of international communist terrorism, and were therefore, it’s implied, also right to round up Communists (and socialists and liberals) afterwards. The Nazis were therefore not “persecuting” Communists, but reacting to a genuine threat.

A Conspiracy of Historians

“Hitler was seeking in MEIN KAMPF to establish sole and undisputed claim to the leadership of the volkisch Right.” -- Ian Kershaw, [8] HITLER, (1999)

“In little more than a year the party had become a respected force in Bavarian right-wing politics, largely because of Hitler’s magnetic personality and obsessive drive.” -- John Toland [9], ADOLF HITLER, (1976)

“But the heaviest responsibility of all rests on the German Right, who not only failed to combine with the other parties in defense of the Republic, but made Hitler their partner in a coalition government.” -- Alan Bullock [10], HITLER, A STUDY IN TYRANNY, 1952.

To support the premise that Nazis were leftists, an even more dramatic rejection of history is required than accepting as truth the unsupported Nazi claims about an impending Communist revolution in Germany. A serious hurdle faced by right-wing Third Reich revisionists is the modern vintage of their claims. During the Nazi era and through the five decades that followed it, the consensus among observers, journalists, diarists, historians, biographers and writers of memoirs, whether conservative or liberal, sympathetic or unsympathetic to the Nazis, was and is that the Nazis were on the right side of the political spectrum -- not the left.

So how to explain this? On the talk page of the Conservapedia article “Political Spectrum,” one editor makes the attempt:

This renders pretty much every journalist, historian, diarist, letter writer, every contemporary observer of Nazi Germany, and every respected historian who’s written about it since, part of “the left.” Pointing this out to the editor on that same talk page got the following reaction:

In short, believing that the Nazis were leftists requires you to also believe that the entire body of work written on the Nazis before, during, and after they took power, is a massive, left-wing conspiracy to make the right wing look bad.

An illustration of just how silly and how blithely unconnected to reality this conspiracy theory is can be found on that same talk page when, confronted with the fact that this “contrivance of the left” would include writers for TIME magazine, that same editor declares that “Henry Luce would have fired most of 'em.”

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk:Political_spec... [13]

The problem, of course, is that it was under conservative Henry Luce’s tenure that passages like this were written:

"There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." -- From Time Magazine (August 8, 1932)

Impossible Things

Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one can't believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. -- From THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, by Lewis Carroll

Another problem faced by Conservapedia revisionists is the embarrassing fact that the rise of Nazism was, to a great extent, a reaction to the liberal policies of the Weimar Republic. The emancipation of women, the shedding of the last legal restrictions on Jews, the rise of avant-garde art, literature and theater, all of these were an anathema to Hitler. Including this information interferes with Conservapedia’s mission of teaching its students that Hitler was a leftist. Therefore, all references to Hitler’s hatred of such liberal policies must be excised from Conservapedia.

The Weimar Republic that preceded the Third Reich was a remarkable and exciting time for the arts, with painters like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Max Beckman, writers like Berthold Breacht and Kurt Weil, filmmakers like F.W. Murnau working and becoming established in their fields. The rise of such avant-garde artists, especially in the visual arts, was an anathema to the Hitler and therefore to the Nazis, who regarded such art as “degenerate” and a symptom of the “degrading” influence of Jews and Marxists on German culture. When the Nazis came into power, they immediately took steps..

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title... [14]

Removed from the article on The Third Reich and dismissed as “vandalism” are such well-known landmarks in the history of the Third Reich as the notorious 1937 degenerate art exhibit, the May 10, 1933 book burnings, the purging of “pacifist literature” and “Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writing supporting the Weimar Republic” from Third Reich libraries, and the exclusion of women from professions, higher education, and government, areas in which women had made significant gains in the years before Hitler took over.

But leaving out this information is plainly not enough. Students reading other sources may still stumble upon references to the Weimar Republic at odds with the picture of the Third Reich that Conservapedia wishes to paint. Once again, a discussion page, this time the discussion page for the article on Nazism, provides a look at the “impossible things” one is required to believe to justify the “Hitler was no right-winger” claim. According to a Conservapedia editor:

There is a large divergence between American historians and Germans in discussing Wiemar Germany. Germans regard what is called "Wiemar Germany", or "the Wiemar period" as extending from 1919 to 1939. Americans assume Wiemar Germany ended in 1933 with the rise of Hitler & Nazism. This is what I call "the Hollywood view" while popular and prevelent, nonetheless over fictionalized.

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title... [15]

The sheer ambition of the above lie is almost breathtaking. The writer is not just trying to convince readers that the Weimar Republic ended in 1939 instead of 1933. He’s trying to depict this claim as widely accepted among Germans and himself as a knowledgeable scholar too wise and well-informed to accept the American, leftist-Hollywood promoted myth that the Weimar Republic ended in 1933. The editor is blurring the difference between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, evidently so that the liberal policies of the Republic can be ascribed to the Nazis, as the following passage from that same talk page indicates:

hmmm...let's see....which country, the US or Germany, displayed it's social progressivity by electing a Catholic to it's highest office? Was it the US & JFK, or Wiemar Republic and Hitler? Then, which country introduced affirmative action into the military after the Treaty of Versailles which allowed poor common scum, like Rommel, to rise to the position of General based upon merit rather than Social class? Which country displayed its social progressivity by allowing gays in the military first, the US or Nazi Germany?

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php... [16]

Not only are the verities of history altered in the effort to associate the horrors of the Third Reich with the left -- space and time must actually be spindled and bent to that end. The Conservapedia entry on “Concentration Camp,” written by the same editor begins:

Concentration camps were camps the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany set up for persons deemed to be opponents or threats to the regime. The term concentration camp was coined by Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Vladimir Lenin in a letter of 9 August 1918 ... http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title... [18]

Most people who have bothered to check the etymology of the term “concentration camp” are aware that its origins are in the Second Boer War -- not the Communist revolution in Russia. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a March, 1901 passage that refers to “the policy of placing the women and children confined in the concentration camps of South Africa.”

Why It Matters

Liberals and moderates often react to right-wing attempts to paint Hitler as a leftist with an amused shrug and the question, “so what?” After all, does it really matter whether or not the Nazis were leftist? Isn’t what matters the inhuman brutality of the Nazis, their genocidal policies, their deliberate destruction of peoples and cultures? Wouldn’t those things be just as terrible under a leftist regime?

Of course they would. But the truth about the Nazis and their place on the political spectrum still matters. The truth always matters.

One of the important lessons we were supposed to have derived from the twentieth century is that the right and the left, the godly and the godless, are all capable of murderous crimes. The right has Adolf Hitler to look back on. The left has Stalin.

Pinochet’s Chile, Montt’s Guatemala, Red China, the “dirty war” in Argentina, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the death squads in El Salvador, the Red Brigade in Europe, the Klan in the United States, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin laden, Deir Yassin, the Munich Olympics, Sabra and Shatila -- all of these and many others have shown that being neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Moslem, nor atheist, nor Communist, nor free-market capitalist are guarantees against the commission of atrocities.

In recent years some on the right have grown restive about this lesson and eager to discard it. The demise of the Soviet Union coupled with the fact that the Third Reich is rapidly falling from living memory has provided an opportunity for the far right to discard the notion that brutality is unacceptable no matter who commits it and who is victimized by it. Reframe the Third Reich as a leftist rather than a right-wing regime and the resulting body count ascribed to the left can then be used as justification for brutal tactics against Communists or anyone perceived as Communist sympathizers. Repression can be rationalized as a necessary and just response to an exceptional danger.

Which brings us to the subject of two figures who, not coincidentally, are currently being extolled by many on the right as anti-Communist heroes -- Joseph McCarthy and General Augusto Pinochet.

Pamela Troy

Pamela Troy is a freelance writer who lives in San Francisco. The first article in her series about Conservapedia is here. [20]

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