In the twentieth century, however, the forces that are generally seen as furthest to the Right are not

those of monarchism but those of fascism or nazism. In many ways such movements are the furthest removed from the democratic Centre since they deny the legitimacy of the idea of democracy and of universal human rights. National Socialism (common short form Nazism) was the ideology practiced by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, derivatives of it in other countries. It is a unique variety of fascism that incorporates biological racism and antisemitism. Nazism was founded out of elements of the far-right racist vlkisch German nationalist movement (volk-people; populist movement) and the violent anti-communist Freikorps (Free corps-are German volunteer military or paramilitary units) paramilitary culture that fought against the uprisings of communist revolutionaries in post-World War I Germany. The ideology was developed first by Anton Drexler and then Adolf Hitler as a means to draw workers away from communism and into vlkisch nationalism. Initially Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anticapitalist rhetoric, though such aspects were later downplayed in the 1930s to gain the support from industrial owners for the Nazis; the focus shifting to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes. Nazism promoted political violence, militarism, and war, it conceived of politics as being a "battle", and the Nazis utilized their paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung ((SA) Stormtroopers) for violent attacks upon their opponents, particularly communists, Jews, and social democrats. Hitler and the Nazis openly promoted German territorial expansionism into Eastern Europe to be Lebensraum ("living space") for German settlers and assimilation of Germanic peoples into Germans that would result in the creation of a "Greater Germanic Realm of the German Nation". Nazism advocated the supremacy of the claimed Aryan master race over all other races. Nazis viewed the progress of humanity as depending on the Aryans and believed that it could maintain its dominance only if it retained its purity and instinct for self-preservation. They claimed that Jews were the greatest threat to the Aryan race. They considered Jews a parasitic race that attached itself to various ideologies and movements to secure its self-preservation, such as capitalism, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, liberalism, Marxism, democracy, and trade unionism. To maintain the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani(Gypsies), and the physically and mentally disabled. Other groups deemed

"degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included: homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents. Nazism promoted an economic system that supported a stratified economy with classes based on merit and talent while rejecting universal egalitarianism, retaining private property, freedom of contract, and promoted the creation of national solidarity that would transcend class distinction. Hitler claimed that unconditional equality of opportunity for all able racially-sound Aryan German males in Germany was the essence of the socialism of German National Socialism. This was known as vlkisch equality that officially ascribed collective racial equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and full legal rights to able people of Aryan blood but deliberately excluded people outside of this definition who were regarded as inferior and rejected the conception of universal human equality. The Nazis criminalized strikes by employees and lockouts by employers for being contrary to national unity and the state took over the approval process of setting wage and salary levels. The Nazis were presented by Hitler and other proponents and viewed by some scholars as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but politically syncretic. Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, he accused the political left of committing treason against Germany when left-wing politicians signed the Treaty of Versailles, he accused the political right as deserving equal reproach as the left, for being cowards in allowing the disarmament of Germany as stipulated by Versailles. However major elements of Nazism have been deemed as clearly far-right, such as its goals of the right of claimed superior people to dominate while purging society of claimed inferior elements. The full title of Adolf Hitler's party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The term Nazi was an "acronym formed from the first syllable of NAtional and the second syllable of SoZIalist. Such terms, usually formed from the initial letters or syllables of successive parts of compound names, were popular in the Third Reich. A majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far right form of politics. Far right themes exist in Nazism, including the goal of both Nazism as well fascism in general, to promote the right of superior people to dominate while purging society of

claimed inferior elements; and particularly in the case of Nazism, genocide of people deemed to be inferior. However Nazism was officially presented by Hitler and other proponents as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but syncretic. Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying: "Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their cravenhearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms." There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical. The conservative Nazi Hermann Gring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries. Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler, who was more conservative than Gring; and Reinhard Heydrich. The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels hated capitalism, viewing it has having Jews at its core and stressed the need for the party to emphasize both a proletarian and national character, these views were shared by Otto Strasser who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism. Large segments of the Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the Party gaining power in Germany in 1933. Of the million members of the SA, many were committed to the Party's official socialist program. The leader of the Party's paramilitary organization the SA, Ernst Rhm, supported a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the Party's official socialist program and demanded the replacement of the nonpolitical German army with a Nazi-led army. Prior to becoming an anti-Semite and a Nazi, Adolf Hitler had previously served the Bavarian Soviet Republic from 1918 to 1919 where Hitler was elected Deputy Battalion Representative of his communist-led battalion and attended the funeral of communist Kurt Eisner - who was a German Jew - where Hitler wore a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on his other arm. Hitler's later political beliefs had not yet solidified, then he was a supporter of the idea of a classless society and was an anti-monarchist. Hitler concealed his association with the communist regime in Bavaria and that he was not then an anti-Semite, in

Mein Kampf Hitler never mentioned his service with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and claimed that he became an anti-Semite in 1913 in Vienna when in fact he was not an anti-Semite at that time. Hitler's political views massively altered in response to the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, and it was then that he became an anti-Semitic German nationalist. As a Nazi, Hitler both in public and in private, opposed capitalism, Hitler regarded capitalism as having Jewish origins and accused capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class. However Hitler tactically took a pragmatic in-between position between the conservative and radical factions, in that he accepted private property and allowed capitalist private enterprises to exist as long as they obeyed the goals of the Nazi state but if a capitalist private enterprise resisted Nazi goals, he sought to destroy it. Upon the Nazis achieving power, Rhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction, without Hitler's authorization to do so. Hitler saw Rhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German army. This resulted in Hitler purging Rhm and other radical members of the SA. Though opposed to communism as an ideology, Hitler admired the Soviet Union's leader I. Stalin and Stalinism. Hitler on numerous occasions publicly praised Stalin and he positively reviewed Stalinism as seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting the purging of Jewish communists such as Lev Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek. Hitler believed that Soviet Bolshevism under Stalin was transforming into a form of Nazism and said in 1934: It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuinely revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will. Adolf Hitler, 1934 While Hitler always intended to eventually bring Germany into territorial

expansionist conflict against the Soviet Union to gain Lebensraum ("living space"), Hitler supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front to crush liberal democraciesparticularly France.

German nationalism and antisemitism Phillip Wayne Powell writes that "in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a powerful surge of German patriotism was stimulated by the disdain of Italians for German cultural inferiority and barbarism, which led to a counter-attempt, by German humanists, to laud German qualities." M.W. Fodor wrote in The Nation in 1936, "No race has suffered so much from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Cou method (Emile Coue was a French psychologist and pharmacist who introduced a method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion) of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority".

One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis came from the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works Hitler read, and who was recognized by other Nazi members including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck. In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French, and stressing the need of action by the German nation to free itself. Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, and spoke of the need of a "People's War" (Volkskrieg), putting forward concepts much like those the Nazis adopted. Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to be purified. This priority included purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon rising to power. Fichte was anti-Semitic and accused Jews in Germany of having been, and inevitably continuing to be a "state within a state" in Germany that was a threat to German national unity.

Fichte promoted two options to address this: the first was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine to impel the Jews to leave Europe. The other option was violence against Jews, saying that the goal would be "To cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea". Prominent historical figures of such vlkisch nationalism include Eugen Diederichs, and Julius Langbehn. Radical anti-Semitism was promoted by these figures. Langbehn called for a war of annihilation of the Jews and Langbehn's genocidal policies were published by the Nazis and given to soldiers on the front during World War II. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic forgery created by police of the Russian Empire. Anti-Semites believed it was real and the Protocol surged in popularity after World War I. The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected and that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology. Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic. The Nazis claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire. The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve. The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German national unification because of Jewish infiltration of the German parliament, and that their abolition of parliament ended the obstacle to unification. While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck's creation of the German Empire, he was critical of Bismarck's moderate domestic policies. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a "second Bismarck".

Aryan superiority The concept of the Aryan race that the Nazis used stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia. Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages. Johann

Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science. Contemporaries of Herder utilized the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture. Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the nineteenth century, with white supremacists maintaining that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" that is superior to all other races, and particularly superior to the Semitic race, which they associated with "cultural sterility".Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien rgime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan and Jewish cultures. Nazism's racial policy positions were also developed from the views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the father of genetics, German botanist Gregor Mendel. Lamarckism was an important influence on Nazism. In particular the variant developed by Ernst Haeckel, was utilized by the Nazis. Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or lower evolution from apes, simply categorizing humans as a whole of all as having progressed in evolution from apes. Many Lamarckians viewed "lower" races as having been exposed to debilitating conditions for too long for any significant "improvement" of their condition in the near future. Haeckel utilized Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging from being wholly human to subhuman. Mendelism was supported by the Nazis and also mainstream eugenics proponents at the time were Mendelian. Mendelian theory of inheritance declared that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to another. Proponents of eugenics used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children, including mental disability; others also

utilized Mendelian theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists claiming a racial nature of certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behaviour. Nazi militarism was based upon the belief that great nations grow from military power which maintains their position in the world pecking-order. The Nazi Party exploited irredentist and revanchist sentiments, and cultural aversions to aspects of Modernism, (despite the Reich embracing many elements of modernism in the shape of modern technology). The regime combined nationalism and militarism as necessary ingredients for establishing Grodeutschland (Greater Germany).

Social class In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower- and working-class young people: The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically nave men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour. Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party to the working class was neither true nor effective, because its politics mostly appealed to the middle class, as a stabilizing, pro-business political party, not a revolutionary workers' party. Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis. In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA Storm Detachment).

Women in the Third Reich

Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "Kinder, Kche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church). Many women voted in favour of the Nazi Party, but once in power, the party introduced legislation that limited women's legal rights. Women's organizations and associations that had been permitted before the Nazi regime were banned, and the Nazi Party set up its own women's organizations. Some women participated in Nazi war crimes, including the operation of concentration camps, and were convicted after World War II. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink had much influence as the head of the NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the Nazi Party. Magda Goebbels, the wife of Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels, was on friendly terms with Adolf Hitler and was known as "the First Lady of the Reich". She often attended Nazi Party events, providing a feminine face to the regime.

Nazis and Racial policy of Nazi Germany Hitler viewed race as being in a hierarchy, and spoke of the "aristocratic idea of nature" in which there existed an inequality of races where the superior and higher values of the Aryan race was the basis of all civilization. Through struggle and proper "breeding", the "strong" would subdue the "weak" and rise to dominance. Nazi policy since 1920 emphasized that only people of "German blood" could be considered German citizens while no one of Jewish descent could be a German citizen. To maintain the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled. Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included: homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents. The number of German blacks was low, but there were some instances of them being enlisted within Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and later the Wehrmacht. The racist subject of Nazism is Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism, who must unite under Nazi Party leadership, and, per the spartan nationalist tenets of Nazism: be stoic, self-disciplined and selfsacrificing until victory. Adolf Hitler's political biography, Mein Kampf formulates the Weltanschauung of Nazism with the ideologic trinity of: history as a struggle for

world supremacy among the human races, conquered only by a master race, the Herrenvolk; the decisive, autocratic Fhrerprinzip (leader principle); and antiSemitism targeting the Jews as the universal source of socio-cultural and economic discord. The JewishBolshevism conspiracy theory derives from anti-Semitism and anticommunism; Adolf Hitler claimed to have first developed his worldview from living and observing Viennese life from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; per his interpretations, atop were the "Aryans", the ultimate, white master race, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom. However, recent research strongly suggests that Hitler's virulent antisemitism was mostly a post war development, product of influences from the Russian civil war and that in his Vienna years it played little part in his thinking. The idea of the Russian roots of Nazism has been explored by Walter Laqueurand more recently filled out in much more detail by Michael Kelloggfrom archive material only available since the fall of communism. Aufbau Vereinigung was a organisation of White Russian migrs and early National Socialists which exerted a critical influence upon Hitler and Nazi ideology in the years before the Hitler Ludendorff putsch in 1923. Fundamental to Nazism is the unification of every German tribe that was "unjustly" divided among different nation states The racialist philosophy of Nazism derived from the seminal white supremacist works of: the French Arthur de Gobineau (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races); the Briton Houston Stewart Chamberlain (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century); and of the American Madison Grant (The Passing of The Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History). Their ideas were synthesized by the Reichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a pseudoscientific treatise proposing that: "From a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape".According to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf.

In establishing Nazi German racial superiority, Adolf Hitler defined "the Nation" as the highest creation of a race, and that that great nations were the creations of homogeneous populations of great races working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from races with "natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits". Whereas the weakest nations were those of "impure" or "mongrel races", because they were disunited. Hitler claimed that lowest races were the parasitic Untermenschen (subhumans), principally the Jews, who were living lebensunwertes Leben ("life-unworthy life") owing to racial inferiority, and their wandering, nationless invasions of greater nations, such as Germany thus, either permitting or encouraging national plurality is an obvious mistake. Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering under them and dispensed concerns about such conflict being inhumane or an injustice, saying: We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality. During World War II, when faced with occupying too much territory with too-few German soldiers, Nazism expanded the Master Race definition to include Dutch and Scandinavian men as superior, German-stock Herrenvolk, in order to recruit them into the Schutzstaffel (SS).

Hitler argued that nations who could not defend their territories did not deserve a country. He said that "slave races", such as the Slavic peoples, had less of a right to life than did the master races especially concerning Lebensraum. He claimed that the Herrenvolk had the right to vanquish inferior indigenous races from their countries. Hitler argued that "races without homelands" were "parasitic races", and that the richer the parasite race, the more virulent their parasitism. A master race could, therefore, easily strengthen themselves by killing the parasite races in the Heimat. The Herrenvolk philosophic tenet of Nazism rationalized Die Endlsung (the Final Solution), extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Poles and other Slavs

(Generalplan Ost), the mentally retarded, the crippled, the handicapped, homosexuals and others deemed undesirable. During the Holocaust, the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht soldiers, and right-wing paramilitary civilian militias killed some 11 million people in Nazi-occupied lands via concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, and death camps, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Treblinka extermination camp.

In Germany, the master-race populace was realised by purifying the Deutsches Volk via (see: eugenics; the culmination was involuntary euthanasia of disabled people, and the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded. The ideologic justification was Adolf Hitler's consideration of Sparta(11th c.195 BC) as the original Vlkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity: "Sparta must be regarded as the first Vlkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent, and, in truth, a thousand times more humane, than the wretched insanity of our day, which preserves the most pathological subject." Nazi cultural perception of the Jews, based upon the anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, emphasized that Jews throve on fomenting division among Germans, and among nation-states. Yet Nazi anti-Semitism was also physical and racial. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods." Nazi Germany was ideologically based upon the racially defined Deutsche Volk (German People), which denied the limitations of nationalism. The Nazi Party and the German people were consolidated in the Volksgemeinschaft (People's Community), a late-nineteenth-century neologism defining the citizens' communal duty is to the Reich, rather than to civil society, the citizen-nation basis of Nazism; the socialism would be realized via common duty to the volk, by service to the Third Reich in establishing Grodeutschland, the embodying locus of the peoples' will. Hence, Nazism encouraged ultra-nationalism, to establish a world-dominating, Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. The prcis of this central tenet of Mein Kampf is the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fhrer (One People, One Empire, One Leader)

Economics Anti-capitalism The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences. Nazi propaganda posters in working-class districts emphasized anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism." Hitler, both in public and in private, expressed strong disdain for capitalism, accusing modern capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class. He opposed free-market capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld. He distrusted capitalism for being unreliable, due to its egotistic nature, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk. Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews." Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that "Capitalism had run its course".Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them." Hitler admired Napoleon as a role model for his anti-conservative, anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois attitudes. However, Hitler had little tolerance for Goebbels insistence upon adherence to socialist ideas and alliance with leftist and socialist parties as Hitler had abandoned them by the time the party rose to power. In correspondence Goebbels tried to convince Hitler the Nazis and the left share a common enemy in capitalists, however, Hitler disagreed and adamantly stated that capitalists are not the enemy of Nazis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism, in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories. He believed that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade. He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system. A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently Ernst Rhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA). Rhm claimed

that the Nazis' rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist "second revolution" was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled. Rhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction. Hitler saw Rhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German army. This resulted in Hitler purging Rhm and other radical members of the SA. Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels adamantly stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary that if he were to pick between Bolshevism and capitalism, he said "in final analysis", "it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism."

Economy of Nazi Germany

Nazi economic practice first concerned the immediate domestic economy of Germany, then international trade. To eliminate Germany's poverty, domestic policy was narrowly concerned with four major goals: (I) elimination of unemployment, (II) rapid and substantial re-armament, (III) fiscal protection against resurgent hyperinflation, and (IV) expansion of consumer-goods production, to raise middle- and lower-class living standards. The intent was correcting the Nazi-perceived shortcomings of the Weimar Republic, and to solidify domestic support for the Nazi Party; between 1933 and 1936, the German gross national product increased annually by 9.5 percent, and the industrial rate increased by 17.2 percent. The expansion propelled the German economy from depression to full employment in less than four years. Public consumption increased 18.7 per cent, and private consumption increased 3.6 per cent annually. Historian Richard Evans reports that before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German economy "had recovered from the Depression faster than its counterparts in other countries. Germany's foreign debt had been stabilized, interest rates had fallen to half their 1932 level, the stock exchange had recovered from the Depression, the gross national product had risen by 81 per cent over the same period ... Inflation and unemployment had been conquered."

Politology

The radical Right: Nazism and fascism

Ciobanu Dumitru Gr. D11

Fascism ( /fzm/) is an alleged radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology which encompasses both Italian Fascism and other groups which do not describe themselves as fascist.[1][2] Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and eugenics.[3][4] Fascism seeks to purify the nation of foreign influences that are deemed to be causing degeneration of the nation or of not fitting into the national culture.[5] Fascists have commonly presented themselves as politically syncreticopposing firm association with any section of the left-right spectrum, considering it inadequate to describe their beliefs, and being critical of the left, right, and centre.[6][7] However fascism's goal to promote the rule of people deemed innately superior while seeking to purge society of people deemed innately inferior is a prominent far-right stance.[8] Fascism promotes political violence and war, as forms of direct action that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.[3][9] Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violence against opponents or to overthrow a political system.[10] Fascism opposes multiple ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, and two major forms of socialismcommunism and social democracy.[11] Fascism claims to represent a synthesis of cohesive ideas previously divided between traditional political ideologies.[12] To achieve its goals, the fascist state purges forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration.[13] The fascist party is a vanguard party designed to initiate a revolution from above and to organize the nation upon fascist principles.[14] The fascist party and state is led by a supreme leader who exercises a

dictatorship over the party, the government and other state institutions.[15] Fascism rejects liberal democracy based upon majority rule and the parliamentary system but fascists deny that they are against democracy as a whole.[16] Fascism condemns liberal democracy for basing government legitimacy on quantity rather than quality, and for causing quarreling partisan politics.[17] Fascists claim that their ideology is a trans-class movement, advocating resolution to domestic class conflict within a nation to secure national solidarity.[18] It claims that its goal of cultural nationalization of society emancipates the nation's proletariat, and promotes the assimilation of all classes into proletarian national culture.[18] While fascism opposes domestic class conflict, fascism believes that bourgeois-proletarian conflict primarily exists in national conflict between proletarian nations versus bourgeois nations; fascism declares its opposition to bourgeois nations and declares its support for the victory of proletarian nations.[19] Fascists advocate a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation, the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient, and autarky. It supports criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers because it deems these acts as prejudicial to the national community.[20]