Politically-based ideological systems often rely upon the philosophical doctrine of determinism in a belief that existing conditions of cause and effect can result in only one outcome. Such a theory gives determinists a philosophical reason to postulate that “the individual is not free to choose” because human behavior is completely resolved by “factors over which we have no control.”[2] Two variants of determinism in the twentieth century, based on ideological and totalitarian frameworks are “biological determinism” and “social determinism” (aka “sociological determinism”).

Biological determinism is a belief that a “racial biology” predisposes certain human behavioral traits that are solely determined by an individual’s “genetic make-up” or some other integral element of their physiology.[3] This ideological construct based on the racial determinism of biology can lead to widespread beliefs in eugenics, forced sterilization, racial inferiority, bioengineering, and racial superiority. According to historian R. J. Overy, the merger of Nazism’s political structure with Hitler anti-Semitism was responsible for “producing an ideological determinism that lead to the Holocaust and the pursuit of world power.”[4] This race-based determinism is also known as scientific racism, which is now considered as a pseudoscience that was used to justify racism.[5]

The other type, social determinism, is the theory that social interactions, customs, and constructs alone determine the behavior of individuals. This perspective contends that “human behavior is the outcome of social forces,” determined through culture, class, and education.[6] Under the Soviet Union’s policies, government force was applied to expunge undesirable social classes who were considered unchangeable due to their socio-economic class designation. Martin Latsis, a Bolshevik revolutionary, put forth a demand to achieve purity of class, writing: “We are no longer waging war against separate individuals. We are exterminating the Bourgeoisie as a class.”[7]

Politically designating the worthiness of one socio-economic class over another, Stalin’s dictatorship systematically liquidated classes deemed more affluent than others. The peasant farming class (kulaks) in Ukraine, were persecuted as “class enemies of the Soviet regime.”[8] By December of 1929, Stalin declared that the Kulaks must be “liquidate as a class.” Although Stalin’s definition of a wealthy kulak was "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors,”[9] Lenin had earlier characterized them as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine.[10]

The National Socialists were also committed to a form of social determinism, viewing and treating the Jewish population as a socioeconomic class of “selfish and profit-seeking exploiters” who symbolized the detested capitalist and bourgeoisie caste, a notion that complimented the Nazi’s advocacy for racial-biological determinism.[11]

Social Justice

Both the National Socialists of Germany and the Soviets in Russia, as well as Benito Mussolini, supported the concept of social justice. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they had an “ambitious programme of measures designed to ensure social justice and improve the lot of the poor.”[12] After the death of Vladimir Lenin, Stalin took his commitment to economic and social equality further, determined “to make Lenin’s social change even more radical,” which included the “Bolshevik policy of removing all social distinction and wage differentials.” But by the early 1930s he pulled back from some of his radicalism by renewing privileges, which were “conferred by the state as rewards for loyalty and service.”[13]

Following in the footsteps of Lenin and Stalin, Adolf Hitler, extolled his version of social justice in an August 15, 1920, speech in Munich. In an attempt to equate socialism with the “final concept of duty”, Hitler declared: “we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice.”[14] Hitler continued to speak on social justice issues throughout his regime, proclaiming to factory workers in 1940 that he sought “the creation of a socially just state, a model society that would continue to eradicate all social barriers.”[15] According to Andrei A. Znamenski, what made Hitler’s “National Socialism novel and different from earlier forms of socialism was an attempt to blend the ideas of social justice and revolutionary nationalism.[16] As for the results, National Socialist’s “policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes” in an attempt to soak the wealthy and “redistributing the burdens of wartime to the benefit of the underprivileged.”[17] In 1944, Joseph Goebbels touted the accomplishment of Hitler’s extensive welfare system in an editorial called “Our Socialism,” boasting that “We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation…”[18]

Classless Society

Both German National Socialism and Russian Stalinism sought the establishment of a classless society with equal social rights for all. The Soviet socialists under Stalin, following the basic Marxist tenets of equality, strived “towards the earlier objective of classlessness, by eliminating the ''kulaks'' as a class.”[19] One of the primary goals of communism has been a classless society in which nobody is born into a particular social class.

Hitler took a similar stand early in the Nazi movement, promoting the concept of classlessness in his Mein Kampf, writing that “The National Socialist State recognizes no ‘classes’. But, under the political aspect, it recognizes only citizens with absolutely equal rights and equal obligations corresponding thereto.”[20] Under the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft or "people's community,” Hitler sought to paint Nazi Germany as a “classless society with a shared ideology.”[21]

To show their commitment to a collective equality and a classless society, Nazi officials organized bonfires and instructed school children to toss their varying colored caps into the fire to signify their opposition to class differences.[22] Moreover, in the 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, Hitler declared during a massive Hitler Youth rally that: “We want a society with neither castes nor ranks and you must not allow these ideals to grow within you!”

Centralization

German federalism and its “low concentration of centralized powers” dates back to the Holy Roman Empire, and continued with the reforms of the Peace of Westphalia to the constitution of the German Empire from 1871.[23] Under the Weimar Republic, regional autonomy became more limited since the “Democrats and Social Democrats were ideologically opposed to federalism,” and “tended to prefer a centralized Reich.”[24] Within months of the National Socialist taking power, the autonomous statehood “(Eigenstaahichkeit)” of the “Länder” (federal states) “was brutally swept away.”[25] With the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 the Nazis were able to strip away the state-rights tenets of federalism and centralize Germany by liquidating state governments, which made the Reichstag impotent.[26] Local governments were also targeted in accordance with a January 30, 1934 “Law on Reconstruction of the Reich” that “abolishes all states’ rights.”[27] In many cases, armed stormtroopers and SS units would raid and occupy town halls, “terrorizing mayors and councils into resigning” and then install their own replacements.[28]

The Soviet Union, according to historian Richard Pipes was “a unitary, centralized, totalitarian state such as the Tsarist state had never been.”[29] Others viewed the Soviet Union’s superstate, with its almost complete power vested in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as unable to develop a fully centralized authority until after its prospect for world revolution had diminished. After that point, Soviet Russia’s “domestic policies turned towards centralization,” with a corresponding decrease in “cultural and administrative autonomy.”[30]

Education

The takeover of the institutions of education by the state was the hallmark of the National Socialist of Germany and the Soviets in Russia to indoctrinate the youth with a party-sponsored creed.

During the 12-year Nazi reign in Germany, most private schools were closed or taken over by the state. The National Socialist party mandated an educational system of public, government-operated schools where “no private schools were to be allowed, unless they followed the dictates of the state to the letter.”[31] Moreover, prior to 1933, German public schools were decentralized, operating “under the jurisdiction of local authorities,” while the universities were under the individual German States.[32] In short order, they were nationalized and Nazified under the Reich’s Ministry of Education.

In 1935 Joseph Goebbels suggested that the German youth is owned by the Nazi state, remarking: “The youth belongs to us and we will yield them to no one.”[33] Earlier, Hitler referred to his proposed educational system for Germany as “The whole education by a national state.”[34] When a skeptic refused to agree to the Nazi’s vision of state-operated education, Hitler confronted him and said:

Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.[35]

In Nazi Germany, textbooks were quickly rewritten and the curricula changed to reflect the “compulsory” education of pupils in the “spirit of National Socialism”[36] Teachers encouraged students to “inform” on their parents.[37] In other cases, students were promised money if they “denounced” parents or neighbors. The same treatment towards parents occurred in the Hitler Youth, which required children to write essays entitled, “What does your family talk about at home?”[38]

Due to the 1933 Concordat agreement with the Vatican, the Nazis had agreed to allow parochial schools, but within a short period, they too were being subjected to infringements, closures or seizures by the Nazi Ministry of Education. In 1936 Hitler issued a decree (Hitler Youth Law) to make membership in the Hitler Youth compulsory, thereby outlawing any religious or private youth organizations, a “flagrant violation of the Concordat.”[39] [40]

Under the Soviet People's Commissar of Education, the Soviet Union’s education was organized as a systematic structure of highly centralized government-operated schools, which during Stalin’s years was established with “rigid political indoctrination,” where the Communist Party achieved “total control of every facet of Soviet education and society.”[41] Similar to the National Socialist policies, Soviet “children were encouraged to inform on parents,” trained among a technocratic structure where it was common for “agencies” to “replace parents as the main socializers of youth.”[42]

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union established youth organizations to develop loyal party members, beginning with the Little Octobrists, ages 7-9, the Young Pioneers from the age of 10 to 14, and then the "Komsomol" (Young Communist League) with an age spanning from 15-27.[43] Indoctrination permeated every stage of Soviet education, where the “emphasis in education is not for the enrichment of the individual for the individual’s sake, but exclusively for the state’s sake.”[44] One American observer of the educational system in the Soviet Union remarked:

It is not the individual around whom the educational system is built, but the state, which, by identifying itself with the pursuits of the common good, attempts the ruthless subordination of the individual—his rights, tastes, choices, privileges, and his training—to its own needs.[45]

Schooling was compulsory, and the curriculum relied on “overemphasizing specialization” that appeared to be “almost ignorant of the sort of liberal arts education known in the West.”[46]

Lenin assured that education in the Soviet Republic should be beholden to a form of social determinism of class-based consciousness, writing that “all education work… should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of its dictatorship,…”[47][48]

Unionism

Like the National Socialists in Germany, the Bolsheviks in Russia courted workers to join their movement to help advance benefits and working conditions. Soon after the October Revolution, all independent trade unions and factory committees were made subservient to the new Soviet Union state, essentially nationalizing Russia’s labor movement. According to Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, not only were the state-controlled unions no longer autonomous, but workers “do not have the right to strike,” nor could they elect their own officials without government approval.[49] Gompers accused the Soviet government of “persecution of organized labor”, establishment of a workers’ “State-slavery”, obligatory “80 hour” work weeks, “compulsory labor”, and a Soviet legacy that “constitutes the gravest danger that has confronted labor for centuries.”[50] Compulsory labor was considered, according to Trotsky, “the backbone of Soviet communism.”[51] After the Bolsheviks banned all independent labor unions and closed down the Factory Committees, one unionist “described the unions as ‘living corpses.’”[52]

A number of foreign socialist parties have criticized Stalin’s union record. One, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, asserted that after Stalin’s government had brought “the unions under complete State control,” the Soviets were “not to try to improve wages and working conditions but rather to reduce cost, keep wages down and increase production. As a result wages began to fall and working conditions to deteriorate.”[53]

The National Socialists in Germany named their party after workers, labeling their political organization the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). During the 1920s the foreign international media simply referred to them as the “National Socialist Labor Party.”[54] Despite their differences, the Nazis and Germany’s communists occasionally worked together on labor issues. In1932, Hitler’s SA brownshirts and the Communist Party of Germany marched together in solidarity with Berlin’s transportation workers, destroying any buses that failed to join the workers’ strike.[55] Hitler often praised workers, once declaring in Völkischer Beobachter that “I only acknowledge one nobility—that of labour.”[56]

After Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, he declared May Day to be an official paid holiday and arranged celebrations that saw marches, fireworks, and music under the slogan of “Germany honors labor.” Most unions, including the German Free Trade Union, gave their approval and encouraged members to participate.[57] The very next day, Hitler nationalized all autonomous unions. Like the Soviet Union, the National Socialists outlawed strikes, walkouts, and lockouts, adopting the Marxist tenets of prohibiting independent or private institutions. Union membership became compulsory, as reported by Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini, who wrote: “In [Fascist] Italy and [Nazi] Germany the official unions have been made compulsory by law, while in the United States, the workers are not legally obligated to join the company unions but may even, if they so wish, oppose them.”[58]

Although referring to workers in the Third Reich as “industrial serf,” the American journalist and war correspondent William Shirer noted that “Hitler and his officials “were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist” in defense of the workers.[59] By June 22, 1938 a special decree established labor conscription, obligating “every German to work where the state assigned him.”[60] These workers could not be fired by business owners without approval by the government employment office, providing job security rarely known during the Weimar Republic.[61]

Hitler’s new union, the German Labor Front (DAF) pledged “to create a true social and productive community of all Germans.”[62] Considered an instrument of the Nazi party, the DAF enlarged and developed new social, educational, sports, health, and entertainment programs for German workers via Strength through Joy, which included factory libraries and gardens, periodic breaks, swimming pools, low-priced hot meals, adult education programs, periodic work breaks, physical education, sports facilities, gymnastic training, orchestral music during lunch breaks, free tickets to concerts and opera and subsidized vacations that saw over 10.3 million Germans signed up by 1938.[63] The DAF built two 25,000-ton ocean liners and chartered up to 10 other ships to handle increasing tourism, charging dirt-cheap prices for vacationers on sea or land.[64] For land-based vacations, the DAF built summer resort complexes, the largest located on Rügen Island with 20,000 beds.”[65]

Religion



All ideological dictatorships of the 20th century manifested a hostility towards the clergy and theology. The Soviet Union was famously and militantly antireligious, founding the League of Militant Atheists in 1924, which operated under the purview of the Soviet Communist Party from 1925 to 1947.[66] To the Russian Soviets, religion was to be vanquished through the power of “scientific explanation”, which represented a “single truth.”[67] Besides banning all religious instruction in schools, the state liquidated church-owned property, which was gradually accomplished in 20 years.[68]



When hundreds of clergy refused to recognize the Soviet Union as their “civil fatherland”, they were sent to the Solovki prison camp where up to one-fifth of the prisoners were clergymen.[69] By 1941, it has been estimated that “40,000 Christian churches and 25,000 Muslim mosques had been closed down,” and eventually turned into schools, cinemas, clubs, warehouses and grain stores, or Museums of Scientific Atheism.[70] During this period many “Muslim priests were imprisoned or executed,” Sharia courts outlawed and by 1935 Muslims were prohibited from taking pilgrimages to Mecca.[71] Even the holy day of Sunday was abolished from 1926-1940.

From the very start, Hitler regarded the nation-state as a deity, saying that “We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.”[72] According to British historian Michael Burleigh, the National Socialists hated “Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality.”[73] Most Nazi leaders were either atheistic or had a tendency toward paganism. Otto Strasser, an early Nazi Party member and German politician, wrote that Hitler “was profoundly imbued with German paganism.”[74] Strasser also asserted in his 1940 book, ''Hitler and I'', that “Hitler is an atheist.”[75]



The National Socialist, like the Russian Soviets, engaged children to disseminate their contempt for Christianity. Members of the Hitler Youth at the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally sang:

No evil priest can prevent us from feeling that we are the children of Hitler. We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel. Away with incense and holy water. The Church can go hang for all we care. The Swastika brings salvation on earth. I want to follow it step by step.[76]

Hundreds of monasteries in Austria and Germany were expropriated by the National Socialists, removing all of their occupants, clerics, laymen, and novices.[77] Beginning in the mid-1930s, at least 2,720 clerics were interned at Germany’s Dachau concentration camp culminating in over 1,000 deaths.[78] Hitler told insiders and confidants that he planned to abolish all religious institutions after he won the war, concerned that if he attempted to do it earlier, he would be subjected to serious political fallout.[79]

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received information confirming Hitler’s intentions to abolish all religions within his control. During an Oct. 27, 1941, speech, FDR declared:

Your Government has in its possession another document, made in Germany by Hitler’s Government… It is a plan to abolish all existing religions—Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever liquidated, silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.[80]

The Welfare State

Both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the National Socialist party in Germany appeared resolute to provide an array of social welfare services. From the very beginning of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks announced the “establishment of full social protection (for the inability to work, medical assistance, maternity, unemployment, death of the head of the family), financed by workers’ withholdings.”[81] Yet, the original plan “soon foundered upon financial problems,” due to Soviet Russia’s economic collapse in 1921.[82]

After the New Economic Policy (NEP) went into effect in 1921, social welfare insurance funds were established through payments provided by companies, not state agencies. But the financial burden was too great, resulting in a small minority of citizens being eligible for social insurance.[83] To remedy the situation, Stalin’s 1936 Constitution prescribed a host of welfare rights that were to be constitutionally protected. According to Mark B. Smith, those social rights included:

Work was a duty but it was also a right; citizens had the right to a job and to be paid in accordance with the amount and quality of the work they undertook. When they did not have to work, they enjoyed the right to leisure, based on a seven-hour working day,… annual paid leave, and access to ‘a widespread network of sanatoria, houses of rest, clubs.’ When they could not work, they enjoyed the right to “material provision in old age and also in the case of illness and loss of capacity.[84]

Despite the 1936 Soviet Constitution’s level of theory and presentation, such far-reaching provisions lead to an approach that “threatened further to undermine even the abstract coherence” of Soviet welfare rights.[85] Written out of the history books in Soviet Russia, Leon Trotsky was one of the first to doubt the integrity of Stalin’s social rights. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky chided Stalin for instructing local Soviet organizations not to provide work to “oppositionists,” to let them instead slowly starve to death, in an effort to use food as a political weapon. Trotsky’s response was that the old Soviet “principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”[86] Moreover, many of these social welfare guarantees were not practiced for many other Soviet citizens, especially during the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 and similar ones, where millions of Ukrainians perished due to the lack of adequate nutrition.[87]

Engaging in social policies to punish opponents and minorities was the hallmark of the National Socialists in Germany. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Germany was already considered the first modern welfare state, going back to Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s. According to American political scientist and historian American Robert Paxton, “All the modern twentieth-century European dictatorships of the right, both fascist and authoritarian, were welfare states.”[88]

But Hitler was determined to create a more elaborate, equal and generous welfare state but only under the condition that it was reserved solely for Germans of pure Aryan blood. He enlarged the German welfare state by creating the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) in May of 1933, and ordering its new chairman, Erich Hilgenfeldt, to “see to the disbanding of all private welfare institutions.”[89] By nationalizing charity, the National Socialists employed their social welfare system as a means to control society through social engineering, politically selecting who could and could not receive benefits.

On the local level, Nazi welfare bureaus would spend considerable effort into “cleansing of their cities of ‘asocials,’ labelling many of them “biologically degenerate.”[90] Jews, Gypsies and other racial minorities were denied access to welfare programs “where individuals could receive support only with the acceptable genetic certificate.”[91] Focusing on the socialism and racism of National Socialism, German historian Götz Aly characterized the Third Reich as a “racist-totalitarian welfare state.”[92]

Labeled by the regime as the "greatest social institution in the world," the NSV provided a long list of programs and sub-agencies that arranged everything from universal socialized healthcare to old age insurance, holiday homes for mothers, subsidized rent, extra food for large families, over 8,000 day-nurseries, old-age homes, unemployment and disability benefits and no-interest loans for married couples.[93] Other programs included aid for pregnant women, nutrition, and relief for poor families and welfare for children.[94] In an effort to help troubled youth, by 1941 the NSV had 30,000 branch offices of The Office of Youth Relief, which provided “corrective training, mediation assistance,” and was to avert juvenile delinquency.[95] Saddled with generous social benefits and large war armament expenditures, the Nazi regime “was just barely avoiding bankruptcy” by 1938, where Hitler’s “only hope was to go on the offense.”[96] Some argue that the threat of a financial crisis, lower standards of living, and worker unrest forced Hitler to engage in foreign adventurism in order to plunder neighboring nations and later minorities.[97]

Equality

Equality was one of the ideological themes that permeated the economic, political and social spheres of German National Socialists and the Russian Soviets. Under Nazi Germany, Völkisch equality was a legal practice which ascribed a racial equality of opportunity, and full rights only to those who carried the proper Aryan genetic makeup. This “equality of type” was based on the “homogeneity of race,” which exclusively allowed only those of a particular race to enjoy full legal rights and equality of treatment under the Nazi law.[98] The National Socialist’s principle of equality “was not guaranteed as an individual subjective right,” but as something “obtained merely as an impersonal constitutional principle.”[99]To the Nazis, equality meant “equality of national comrades (Volksgenosse)” that demanded “integration, duties and obligations,” a sort of collective equality where “rights of the individual metamorphosed into the “right” of the all “to the same obligation.”[100] In this sense, “Volkisch Equality was group justice over individual justice,” which placed the “value of the collective over the value of the individual.”[101]

According to Gotz Aly, the Nazi movement represented an effort to merge “social equality with national homogeneity,” and although their traditional form of socialism devalued individual freedom and autonomy, the Nazis “did not radically deviate from many other forms of equalitarianism.”[102]

Orthodox Marxist literature tended to be rather sketchy and vague about “a just society, where people would be equal in some way or another.”[103] Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks under Lenin treated equality as “an absolute virtue,” by reducing most social distinctions and wage differentials, along with undermining distinctions in army ranks.[104] But by the 1930s, the initial Bolshevik equalitarianism had been mostly abandoned when Stalin and other Soviet Union leaders abolished “wage equalization” and introduced a centralizing hierarchy in industry and the Communist party.[105] Determined to bring back privileges and rewards and even return to distinctions in army ranks, Stalin modified the old Marxist tenet “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to a new maxim: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”[106]

Other historians argue that Stalin had assaulted the collective nature of egalitarianism headlong by reintroducing a “structure of privileges and inequality” that was greatly amplified.[107] According to historian Richard Stites, Stalin had little respect for the deep Russian tradition of equalitarianism and launched a campaign “against the revolutionary utopianism of the previous decade.”[108]

Anti-Capitalism

Anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois sentiments were rampant among the leadership of both Stalin’s Soviet Russia and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany. Hitler described the forces opposed to Nazi Germany during World War II as the wealthy classes of the capitalist West. On April 6, 1941, Hitler issued an order extolling his past military victories, affirming that “German Armies [had] defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy.”[109] Goebbels favored the Bolsheviks over the capitalists, writing in his diary that “it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism.”[110] Goebbels was not hesitant to designate the economic battle lines between England and Germany, arguing in 1939 that “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state.”[111]

The Nazis distributed propaganda posters targeting working class districts, often focusing on anti-capitalism. One read: “The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism.”[112] British Historian Richard Overy asserted that National Socialists created a “command economy,” which rejected economic liberalism and made Hitler not only “an enemy of free market economics,” but forged a “reluctant dirigiste.”[113] Another reason for Nazism’s disapproval of capitalism was the alleged Jewish root of financial capital, speculation, banking, and usury. One Nazi poster in 1933 attacking the Jewish bourgeoisie in Germany read: “Because Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich wants social justice, big Jewish capitalism is the worst enemy of this Reich and its Führer.”[114]

Stalin is considered as one of the leading anti-capitalist revolutionary leaders, following in the footsteps of Marx and Lenin.[115] Others, such as Tony Cliff, described “Stalinism as state capitalism,” which he considered as “a form of capitalism where the state takes the role of capital.”[116]

Socialism

Hitler often expressed admiration for socialism both in private and public. In a 1920 speech in Munich, Hitler declared “Socialism” [is] the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good,…”[117] In private conversation, Hitler told his confidante and economic advisor Otto Wagener: “We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.”[118]Historian John Tolan, referred to “Hitler’s socialism” as “his own and subordinate to his secret aims” and that “his concept of organized economy was close to genuine socialism,” but he would change his policies to fit his greater goal.[119]

Those close similarities were also apparent in the early1930s when Nazis and Communist party members were repeatedly switching their party affiliation as political situations for either party improved or declined. An infamous joke in Germany identified the switchers as Nazi “Beefsteaks”—“brown on the outside and red on the inside.”[120] The public also dubbed the switchers as “Nazi brown outside, Moscow red inside.” Political ideologues, especially from the SA ranks, could see little difference between the National Socialists and the Communists. Even Joseph Goebbels once spoke about such minor differences, declaring in a 1925 speech that “Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight.”[121]

Anti-Semitism and Genocide

Not long after the 1917 October Revolution, the Soviet Union undertook practices to break up Jewish culture, religion and language. In the fall of 1918, the Soviet Communist Party set up the Jewish section Yevsektsiya with a stated mission of “destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.”[122][123] With their main emphasis on assaulting Jewish religion, the Yevsektsiya considered Judaism to be “bourgeois nationalism.”[124] By 1919, the Bolsheviks began to confiscate Jewish properties, Hebrew schools, libraries, books, and synagogues in accordance with newly imposed anti-religious laws, turning their buildings into “Communist centers, clubs or restaurants.”[125] If caught, any Jew practicing his or her religion in private would be met with severe punishment. There were cases where any Jew who defended Judaism in public was “arrested on the spot” and in mock trials, sentenced with a “death verdict.”[126] Soviet policy was to have Jews “removed from the category of ‘unsolid’, ‘floating’ people,” where they were to “disappear as soon as assimilation was intensified.”[127]

After Joseph Stalin rose to power, anti-Semitism continued to be endemic throughout Russia, although official Soviet policy condemned it. Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism came to light after his death when Khrushchev and other communist leaders disclosed that Stalin’s resentment against Jews existed long before the 1917 Revolution.[128] Stalin’s secretary, Boris Bazhanov, confirmed this prejudice, revealing that Stalin repeatedly uttered crude, derogatory comments against Jews prior to Lenin’s death in 1924.[129] On August 12, 1952, Stalin and his anti-Semitism became more visible, ordering the execution of the most prominent Yiddish authors in the Soviet Union, known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.”

Early in his political career, Hitler publically made known his anti-Semitic intentions in a 1920 speech called “Why We Are Anti-Semites,” declaring that “Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against… materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist!”[130] Attaching anti-Semitism to nationalism and socialism, Hitler’s drive to have the Jewish “racial trash” and undesirables consumed by a “Holocaust” (wind storm) echoed nearly the same verbiage written by Friedrich Engels in his 1849 essay “The Magyar Struggle.”[131] Such anti-Jew sentiments were common among early socialists in Europe who associated Jews with finance capital, unearned income and usury. According to British historian George Watson, “In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels’s article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advanced genocide called himself a socialist, and no exceptions has been found.”[132]

In an effort to create a classless and just society, policies of both the Nazis and Stalinists culminated in a campaign of ethical cleansing and persecution against reactionary races, unfit nationalities, undesirable classes and counter-revolutionaries, which lead to the killing of an estimated 7-10 million Ukrainians (Famine-Genocide or Holodomor) in 1932-1933 and the estimated 6 million Jews and other minorities from 1941 to 1945.

Since Nazi-Soviet collaboration started as early as 1937 to expel foreign Jews from Russia, the Stalin’s regime could be considered an accomplice in Hitler’s Holocaust. Under a secret agreement, Soviet Russia’s NKVD handed over to the Gestapo mostly German Jews, who had originally sought asylum. As revealed in the European Parliament (Union for Europe of the Nations) documentary film The Soviet Story, archival records were found that listed thousands of German Jews who were arrested by NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and handed over to Gestapo or SS officials from 1937 to 1941.[133] Most of the deported foreigners were sent to concentration camps that later lead to their deaths in the Holocaust. This Nazi-Soviet collaboration started two years before the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.