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Perhaps to emphasize this anti-capitalist focus, and to align itself with similar groups in Austria and Czechoslovakia, the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; hostile commentators soon abbreviated this to the word ‘Nazi”, just as the enemies of the Social Democrats had abbreviated the name of that party earlier on to ‘Sozi’. Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of or an outgrowth from, Socialism. True, as some have pointed out, its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. Famously, too, anti-Semitism was once declared to be ‘the socialism of fools’. But from the very beginning Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: after all, the ‘November traitors’ who had signed the Armistice and later the Treaty of Versailles were not Communists at all, but the Social Democrats and their allies.
The ‘National Socialists’ wanted to unite the two political camps of the left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity. The idea of ‘party’, suggested allegiance to parliamentary democracy, working steadily within a settled democratic polity. In speeches and propagandas however, Hitler and his followers preferred on the whole to talk of ‘National Socialist movement’, just as the Social Democrats had talked of “workers’ movement” or, come to that, the feminists of the ‘women’s movement’ and the apostles of prewar teenage rebellion of ‘youth movement’. The term not only suggested dynamism and unceasing forward motion, it also more than hinted at an ultimate goal, an absolute object to work towards that was grander and more final than the endless compromises of conventional politics. By presenting itself as a ‘movement’, National Socialism, like the labor movement, advertised is opposition to conventional politics and is intention to subvert and ultimately overthrow the system within which it was initially forced to work.
By replacing class with race, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader, Nazism reversed the usual terms of socialist ideology. The synthesis of right and left was neatly symbolized in the Party’s official flag, personally chosen by Hitler in the mid-1920’s: the field was bright red, the color of socialism, with the swastika, the emblem of racist nationalism, outlined in black in the middle of a white circle at the centre of the flag, so that the whole ensemble made a combination of black, white, and red, the colors of the official flag of the Bismarckian rejection of the Weimar Republic and all it stood for; but by changing the design and adding the swastika, a symbol already used by a variety of far-right racist movements and Free Corps units in the postwar period, the Nazis also announced that what they wanted to replace it with was a new, Pan-German racial state, not the old Wilhelmine status quo.
The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans pp. 173-74
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