If you believe that Hitler was a socialist because his party was called National Socialist, then you believe that the People's DEMOCRATIC Republic of North Korea is a democracy, or that the German Democratic Republic (Old East Germany) was a democracy.

They were the National Socialists because you couldn't get elected dog catch in Weimar Germany unless you were thought to be some kind of socialist.

The Nazis never held a majority in the Reichstag until after the Dictatorship was in place. They took power by being the largest party in a coalition of right wing parties and were opposed by the left wing parties, most notably the Socialist Party. It was that same socialist party that was subject to mass arrests and were the first to populate the concentration camps.

If Hitler was a socialist then the entire war in Russia is inexplicable. Why would Hitler wage war on the Soviet Union if he was a Socialist fellow believer? The nuts answer that it was a turf war. But that makes no sense. If he was a socialist then the real turf war would be with the capitalist countries. The problem is that Hitler himself was very explicit that the war was to destroy Bolshevism/Marxism, which he equated with an international Jewish conspiracy.

William L. Shirer was an American journalist who covered Hitler's rise to power and stayed on in Germany after the Nazi takeover. He covered Nazi Germany from inside of the country until the war started. After the war ended he returned to Germany completed his research and published his magnum opus "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." For those of you who don't know, it is that massive 1300 page tone with the swastika on the spine that was ubiquitous in book stores, back when there were book stores. Shirer is THE authority, all subsequent research is based on his research, and Shirer consistently described Hiotler and his Nazi movement as a right wing phenomenon.