How left-wing were the German National Socialists? Was their name just a mischievous challenge to the Social Democrats? Or was there a real leftist element in this movement? In my old-left-wing days, we used to say that anti-Semitism was the ‘socialism of fools’. You can see why. It is an ideology of resentment, a belief in a class or group which exploits the masses and which has to be violently dispossessed. So is Bolshevism. The problem with the formula is that it can rather swiftly be turned against its user (by someone who is neither a Judophobe nor a Bolshevik). This is especially telling, when you take into account the Communist Left’s record of murderous Classocide (can anyone come up with a grand Latinised word for this, equivalent to ‘genocide’?). Consider the effect on the average left-wing revolutionary of being told ‘Communism is the Nazism of intellectuals’.

Discussions of this kind are more or less debarred under the Geneva Conventions, these days, thanks to the growing popularity of Godwin’s Law, which states ‘The first person to introduce Hitler into any argument is the loser of that argument’. In general, this is a good rule, because most such discussions are conducted at a level of profound ignorance, where bringing Hitler into it is a desperate ploy.

But I do feel the need, sometimes, to strike back at the incessant suggestion that the Nazis were really just a type of conservative, and that Hitler was some sort of Christian. This is usually linked with an unstated implication that any desire to control or limit immigration will lead ineluctably to death camps. These suggestions or implications do a lot of damage to conservative Christianity, are defamatory and unfair, yet don’t seem to be subject to Godwin’s Law.

My worries about this were suddenly revived by reading an interesting new book ‘Travellers in the Third Reich’, by Julia Boyd (Elliot and Thompson, £20). Interestingly, Ms Boyd’s subtitle is ‘The rise of Fascism through the eyes of everyday people’ . The use of ‘Fascism’ to describe German National Socialism is an odd quirk, given that the word ‘Nazism’ is available, is shorter and is much more accurate. ‘Fascism’, as I often point out, was very distinct from Nazism. It only really existed as a government in Italy, where it was greatly less Judophobic than its German cousin, and in my view much more like an old-fashioned European authoritarian despotism, being less interested than the Hitlerites in what people thought in private, or in who their grandmother was. I have heard it said, for example, that Jews who happened to be caught in the Italian occupied zone of France were a good deal safer than Jews in unoccupied Vichy France. Italians, as I understand it, are more free of the Jew-hating obsessive madness than most European peoples. Oswald Mosley, it is true, called his unsuccessful and over-hyped little movement ‘Fascist’. I believe it was its crude raucousness and violence (especially at the notorious Olympia rally) which led to the fairly rapid eclipse of this nasty party. Mosley was undoubtedly a serious Judophobe (though whether he would have resorted to mass murder had he achieved power seems doubtful to me). But it is worth mentioning that he began his political career on the Left, even so.

I have been told that the inaccurate and unhistorical use of the word ‘Fascism’ to describe the German Nazis results ( as do so many things) from that pivotal event, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. It was known at the time and afterwards as the ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’, and its memory was a constant irritation to Communists, especially once Hitler invaded the USSR and they were left looking very foolish indeed. As I understand it, things had reached the point where the word ‘Nazi’ would almost invariably summon up the reflex response ‘Soviet’ in many people’s minds. And I believe that as a result the Communist International sought to popularise the term ‘Fascist’ and ‘Fascism’ to describe the Third Reich and its armies, in the propaganda of the Left. And so whenever I hear the word ‘Fascist’ used to describe the German Nazis, I am a bit suspicious as to how the person using it arrived at this choice. Most people who do this have no idea why they have done it. But I still think it’s lazy of them not to have noticed the anomaly.

Now to the book. It opens with a truly astonishing story ( of an individual rescue) about which I should like to know a lot more. It contains many amazing and educational anecdotes The experiences of the Black American academic W.E.B. Dubois are especially surprising). And these come from a country which, while it was under the rule of a fanatical ideology, unusually did not discourage or prevent unrestricted travel by foreigners. Nor did it refuse to accredit media correspondents, though like all journalists in such countries, they were under severe surveillance and could expect to be driven out in various ways if they were considered too critical. It warns us that we, with our all-seeing hindsight, might ourselves have been fooled or beguiled or inclined to make excuses, had we been there at the time. I can thoroughly recommend it as a contribution to knowledge and an absorbing and stimulating book in itself.

But one part of it made me sit bolt-upright. This is the passage concerning a Swiss visitor (presumably a fluent German speaker), Denis De Rougemont (pp 194-196).

There are hints of the same thing in other accounts. Erika Mann’s book on Nazi education, ‘School for Barbarians’, still a highly readable and pertinent work, described a control of youth, and a destruction of parental and Christian authority, through school and youth movements almost identical to that in Communist regimes . (Frau Mann was , amazingly, Thomas Mann's daughter, and , legally at least, W.H. Auden's wife)



But De Rougemont, who originally thought that Hitler’s state was a regime of the Right, found himself, during a lengthy stay in Frankfurt as a visiting professor, involuntarily questioning this. ‘What unsettled him’, writes Julia Boyd, ‘was the fact that those who stood most naturally on the right – lawyers, doctors, industrialists and so on – were the very ones who most bitterly denounced National Socialism. Far from being a bulwark against Communism, they complained, it was itself Communism in disguise’ (My emphasis. Also NB: in this quotation I have capitalised the initial ‘C’ in the word ‘Communism’, which always used to be done when referring to the creed itself and the attached party, but which has now, for some mysterious reason, dropped out of use. One seldom, by contrast, sees the word ‘Nazi’ or ‘Fascist’ without its initial capital).

De Rougemont continued : ‘They pointed out that only workers and peasants benefited from Nazi reforms, while their own values were being systematically destroyed by devious methods. They were taxed disproportionately, their family life had been irreparably harmed, parental authority sapped, religion stripped and education eliminated’

‘Every evening my two children are taken over by the Party’ a lawyer’s wife complained to him.

This echoes Erika Mann’s view that the Nazis were prepared to pay quite a high price for taking over the minds of the young, all the young. The quality of education was gravely damaged under the Hitler regime, which promoted or protected bad but politically acceptable teachers, polluted the teaching of all arts and historical subjects, and prioritised teaching children what to think over how to think.

As Hitler himself once jeered to his opponents, , they might rage at him as much as they liked but ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side” I say calmly “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 but this new community”’.

De Rougemont in fact despised those who complained about this to him, saying they had ignored social problems during the Weimar Republic (I am not sure what they were supposed to have done, myself, but there) and were now supine in face of Hitler. Writing between 1935 and 1938, De Rougemont sneered that in practice, for all their moaning, the German professional classes preferred ‘Brown Bolshevism’ to the Red version, adding ‘There have been no massacres and everything takes place in a progressive well-organised manner’. This may be unfair. The ‘no massacres’ claim was already untrue, in my view. There were lawless Nazi mass murders of the Left in the night and fog of 1933, and of course the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in which both the leadership of the SA and the supporters of Franz von Papen were murdered in 1934. And soon after De Rougemont finally published his words in 1938, there was the Kristallnacht national pogrom against German Jews.

De Rougemont spoke to a renegade Communist who had switched sides and joined the Hitlerites, who said ‘Now that [Hitler] has won, he has only to implement his programme. It was almost the same as ours. But he has been more cunning, he reassured the bourgeois by not immediately (my emphasis) attacking religion…I will tell you one thing: if they abandon him, all these fat pigs who are around him…I will go and fight for him! He at least is a sincere man; he is the only one.’

What does all this mean? Does it mean that Nazis and Communists were the same, or that the Left has no real differences from the right? No, I wouldn’t offer anything so crude.

But it does seem to me to show that these idealist post-Christian movements, based upon leader-worship, power-worship and Utopian communities (whose solidarity depends on the deaths and/or expropriations of others) have quite a bit in common with each other despite the great differences which generally divide them. By contrast, they have virtually no point of contact with classical conservatism, liberalism or old-fashioned social democracy. If we are to understand them, and if we are to try to avoid repeating their disasters, we must learn to grasp this.