I believe National Socialism was just another flavour of socialism as we know it today, even fascism was as Mussolini was a member of an Italian Socialist Party. Classical liberlism and capitalism can't operate as intended under big government, especially totalitarian government. It's like saying it's communism with private enterprise.
National Socialism centralized economic policy, started five year plans, reduced the number of stock exchanges from 21 to 9, they introduced stronger import controls, foreign trade was essentially monopolised by the State, currency controls were introduced, they socialised business that acted contrary to the national interest and their economic controls and regulations constricted economic freedom immensely while having the largest government department in Europe with 600,000 workers under the control of Hermann Göring.
Private Enterprise was still both expected to remain, and Hitler hoped to encourage it after the War. It undoubtedly had elements of Socialism, but it was still at its core a Populist & Race-based movement. Again, it sprang out of the Volkische parties, not the Socialist ones(though it did manage to steal members from them).
Hitler himself stated shortly after taking power:
“There is no license any more, no private sphere where the individual belongs to himself. That is socialism, not such trivial matters as the possibility of privately owning the means of production. Such things mean nothing if I subject people to a kind of discipline they can’t escape… What need have we to socialise banks and factories? We socialise human beings.”
Another quote from a speech given by Hitler in 1927:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
Hitler also stated on 27th July 1941:
“It goes without saying that only a planned economy can make intelligent use of all a people’s strength.”
If there is anything I've learned regarding Hitler it is that he knew how to talk to people. And he said what he had to say to get power. Also, again, I stress what the Nazi system actually
did. It would not have gained power without the help of the Industrialists. If anything, Nazism is almost Mercantalist.
George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Hitler in 1923 and it was published in Liberty Magazine in 1932. An extract from this interview is:
""Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic."
I bolded the important parts. That is the 'real Hitler'. The Volkische who sees worth in something only insofar as it meets his standard of "Deutsche".
The great economist Ludwig von Mises, from the Austrian school of economics, noted about National Socialism:
What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.”
Ivor Thomas was a British left wing labor minister who resigned from the Atlee government giving his reason as:
“From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism and National Socialism. They are all examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state… in its essentials not only is completed socialism the same as communism but it hardly differs from fascism.”
Lots of similarities between the Stalinist system and the Nazi system, no doubt. But when you study their aims & ideology they are radically different beasts. There is a great injustice done to people who suffered under either system to say that they're somehow not any different. No one in their right mind would say that the Social Democratic party of Germany
has anything to do with either the Nazis or the Bolsheviks except in their preferred colour(red).
That is the problem with things like that. It obscures the truth of the matter and it gives mouth-breathing retards like Glenn Beck a far too generous air of even coming close to having a point. It glosses over the real differences and the unique, abject
horror of the Nazi system. It is the most uniformly terrible thing ever constructed. Communism at least can claim they are working towards some kind of equality for all people, regardless of birth or race. Fascism, even, makes a claim towards making all people willing to conform to the Will of the State equal in the Eyes of the State.
But
Nationalsozialismus? The aim is to make a country into a mausoleum, a people into a grave-yard. To build from the bones & sinew of the beaten, enslaved, slaughtered & raped a
Tausendjähriges Reich. It was a notion built by
wholly and entirely from extremely bitter, defeated people. It wanted to bring that pain to everyone else. And in the end, it brought that to itself.
"We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us - a world in flames."
Out of a scale of 1 to 10 where would you put National Socialism (1 being extreme left and 10 being extreme right)?
I can't do it like that. I'll separate it into a Social and Economic scale. 1 is still extreme left, 10 is still extreme right.
Social; 7-10 depending on what year it is
Economic; 4-6. The Reich economic policy wasn't a policy. There was no unified structure. It was a hodge-podge of poorly thought-out decrees and attempts to both control and stimulate economic growth. It was a
mess and in that regard it's quite centrist, employing both extreme free-market and extreme planned-economy actions depending on what the goal was.