“No, he’s NOT a Nazi!” — Who the Nazis really were, and why that matters
If there’s one political artifact that annoys me more than any other right now, it’s the tendency towards declaring that people are Nazis. It’s a slur that is particularly common in American politics. Donald Trump has been called a Nazi, as has Elon Musk. But this is nothing new — American political figures have been declared to be Nazis for decades now.
But, as anybody who has studied the Nazis will know, people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t Nazis — they’re not even close. For that matter, neither are most groups using Nazi iconography, or declaring themselves Neo-Nazis. The Nazis were a particular political party and movement of the 1920s-1940s, responsible for horrors the likes of which nobody had seen before (or arguably, since). This matters, and the longer that the word “Nazi” is misused (all too often to refer to anything right of the American political centre), the less meaning it will have.
To understand why (and why even Neo-Nazi groups are little more than pale imitations of the real thing), we need to look at who the historical Nazis really were and what they stood for. And to do that, we first need to look at who they weren’t.
“Not a Nazi”
The Nazis were many things, but what they were not is important:
1. White Supremacists
As strange as it sounds, the Nazis were not white supremacists — they were, in fact, far worse.
The disconnect between the two comes from perceptions of “race.” While white supremacists will freely co-opt Nazi iconography and talking points, their vision of race is broad and based mainly on skin colour. The Nazis, however, had a vision of race that was based on ethnicity and birthright. Many of the ethnic groups that are accepted as “white” by white supremacists were seen by the Nazis as subhuman.
This extended to Americans as a whole. Hitler saw the American people as a mongrel race, weakened by interbreeding (notably, he was talking about things like marriages between Italians and Poles, etc.). It’s one of the reasons he didn’t take an American intervention seriously.
So, to declare a white supremacist to be a Nazi is, in fact, a mis-characterization. The racial ideology of white supremacists and the Nazis are in reality mutually exclusive.
2. American/Ukrainian/Polish/British/South African/etc.
The Nazis were a German nationalist party. This cannot be overstated. It also cannot be removed from the Nazi identity.
Germany and German dominance of the world was a central tenet of the Nazi ideology. There were Nazi parties outside of Germany (such as the German-American Bund in the United States). However, these were not dedicated to bringing Nazi racial ideology to the masses in the context of the country they were in — they were dedicated to ensuring German racial purity and bringing the country they were in under German control. This is what happened in Austria, with the Austrian Nazis helping Germany annex their country.
Fascist parties certainly existed in other countries (and, indeed, they do in many nations to this day), but they were not, and are not, dedicated to bringing their country under German control. A Neo-Nazi militia in the Ukraine may have violent racist views and Nazi-inspired iconography, but their end goal is not the Ukraine being governed from Berlin, which would be the goal of an actual Nazi militia.
3. A Gang
It is very important to note that while the Nazis certainly engaged in thuggish behaviour prior to 1933 (and after), they were from the onset a political party. They had a party leadership, they ran in elections, and they had foreign and domestic policy. They also had a paramilitary arm, the SA, which was used in street brawls, among other things.
This level of organization is generally lacking in modern Neo-Nazi movements, which are often characterized by public displays of Nazi iconography in the form of tattoos and the like. The real Nazis were intent on projecting respectability to the establishment they intended to overturn. The SA might be the party thugs, but the leaders would be in suits and networking with businessmen, military officers, and political leaders.
Or, to put it another way, the real Nazis were putting swastikas on public buildings they had taken control of, not themselves. In comparison, the modern Neo-Nazi or white supremacist would be a useful idiot like the SA, to be discarded and/or liquidated once they no longer served a purpose (which is indeed what happened to the SA leadership on the Night of the Long Knives).
“Definitely a Nazi”
The Rise of National Socialism
Having looked at who the Nazis were not, we can now define who they were. And, to do that, we need to first define fascism.
Fascism was a political ideology (if it can really be called that) that came originally out of Italy with Mussolini’s fascists. It was an attractive movement to those who were disenchanted with the post-war world order (which, among other things, many blamed for starting the Great War in the first place, and not without cause), offering the promise of progress to a better future through strong leaders.
The problem with defining fascism is that once you get past this point, there’s a lot of variation. The British fascists under Mosley were different from the Italians under Mussolini, the Germans under Hitler, or the Spanish under Franco. We can, however, identify three key attributes to define fascism. Fascism is:
- Revolutionary. Regardless of how fascists gained control of a political system, they would then replace part or all of it with their own.
- Authoritarian. Power was concentrated in a single individual, and dissent was suppressed, often by violent means.
- Nationalist. This is a big differentiating factor from Communism — fascist parties are focused on their own country, rather than an international community.
None of these fascist movements went down in history as a benefit to the world. They were all evil in some manner or another (authoritarianism tends to be that way). But, the evil of the Nazis stood out in a way that shocked other fascists (particularly the Italians, who could not understand why their allies seemed so intent on murder). So, why was this?
Much of it comes down to Adolf Hitler himself.
Although he was born in Austria, Hitler was a corporal fighting for Germany during the Great War. The people who served with him noted that he had no lack of courage…but the experience of being around him was quite unpleasant. He was highly racist and conspiratorially minded. Had Germany won the war, or the Treaty of Versailles been less contentious, he probably would have faded into obscurity. But, neither of these happened.
The National Socialists (shortened to “Nazis”) were one of many German fringe political parties when Hitler joined it and made it his own. It tended to attract a certain type of soldier — men who bought into the “stabbed in the back” conspiracy theory and felt that not only could they have kept fighting, but that the peace that had been imposed had been a travesty. They were fuelled by a sense of betrayal — betrayal by their government, betrayal by their military leaders, and betrayal by the German establishment.
The early Weimar Republic was an odd beast when it came to fringe politics. One cannot imagine modern American Republicans and Democrats taking to the streets with baseball bats to lay in to each other, but this sort of thing was a feature of Weimar Germany. This is one of the things that helps explain why the Nazis had a paramilitary wing (actually, they had two, but what became the SS was still party security at this time) — it was the SA that fought in the streets.
Into the Nazis Hitler brought his racial ideology, and fused it to the sense of frustration and betrayal of the other National Socialist members. Then, in November 1923, he and the Nazis tried to overthrow the government of Munich. The coup failed, and Hitler was arrested, charged with treason, tried, and sentenced to five years imprisonment.
The coup, known as the “Beer Hall Putsch,” had unintended consequences. Hitler had been on the political margins before, but his trial was national news. It provided the nation with an introduction to him and his ideology. So, when Hitler was released nine months later, the book outlining his ideology and political plans, Mein Kampf, was able to debut with proper name recognition.
The failure of the coup also made Hitler realize that if he was to take control of the government, he needed to do so through the political system itself. This was the realization that ultimately opened the gates of power to the Nazis. They still had their thuggish side and the SA, but the political core of the party became dedicated to the Weimar republic’s democratic process (to the point that Hitler gained the nickname “Legality Hitler” for his dedication to doing things by the book).
Once he gained power, the Weimar Republic had served its purpose, and the Nazi state was born out of its ashes. What followed after was a level of horror the likes of which nobody had ever seen.
The Horror
It bears noting that the Nazis didn’t invent the foundations of the horrors they inflicted upon the world. They were violently antisemitic, but antisemitism and pogroms had been around for over a thousand years. They were racist towards non-Germans, but that wasn’t uncommon among ethnic groups either, anywhere (numerous job ads in the early 20th century in America were marked with “NINA” — “No Irish Need Apply”). They endorsed eugenics, but so did many serious scientists around the world at that time, and thousands of forced sterilizations happened in countries like Canada and the United States. They exercised ruthless oppression against their political opponents, but so did other fascists, as well as the Soviets. Even genocide wasn’t unique to them — the Ottoman Turks had committed one against the Armenians in World War I.
For somebody watching at the time, it would be easy to think that prior to coming to power, Hitler’s Nazis weren’t any worse than any other fascist or nationalist group. But that was before the Nazis began to implement their racial politics as policies, and the horrors began.
One of the first things the Nazis did upon taking control was work towards the purification of their own “Aryan” race (in quotation marks because the Nazi concept of Aryanism had absolutely no resemblance to the actual Aryan ethnicity) by removing any perceived weaknesses. This was done through various forms of murder. The professional murderers that would come to typify Nazi Germany got their start at hospitals and medical clinics, killing the disabled, invalids, and neurodivergent. This policy extended across the medical field, with family doctors being encouraged to euthanize children who were too sickly or far from the norm — and many did. Many parents came to avoid taking their child to a doctor for fear that they would never see their son or daughter alive again.
Those children murdered by their family doctor were sometimes the lucky ones — their deaths would at least be quick. For neurodivergent children in clinics in Germany and Austria, their odd nature marked them as subhuman, and therefore fair game for experimentation prior to being terminated, sometimes through being dissected while still alive.
(I’m not going to go into greater detail, in large part because I personally don’t have the stomach for it. But, the horrors carried out by the Nazis did get worse.)
As horrifying and sickening as these efforts to remove weaknesses from the German “race” were, they were only compounded by the complicity of the German people. The Nazis found willing supporters among the medical profession, academia, and the law. Through education and propaganda, they extended this support to the populace at large. Murdering maimed and disabled soldiers was a step too far for the German public, but forced sterilizations and murdering neurodivergents were not, and neither was forced labour. Children would be inducted into the Hitler Youth, where they would be indoctrinated into to being good Nazis. In fact, public opinion in Germany only turned against Hitler when Germany was losing the war and the Allies were approaching the German border.
Having taken the steps needed to remove weakness from the “German race,” the Nazis then turned this murderous approach towards the rest of the world. It needs to be remembered that Hitler’s goal was world domination. He did plan to conquer the United States, and Canada, and even Switzerland. He just initially planned to do it one country at a time.
The Nazi war was one of genocide. One cannot remove the Holocaust from the European war — it was a literal Nazi war aim. Those Jews who were not exterminated at death camps like Auschwitz Berkinau were used as slave labour, worked to death to keep German industry running as it conquered the world. But, the fate of many Slavs was death by starvation — after all, this was determined to be the easiest and cheapest way to clear the land in the East for German settlement. There was no room in the long term plan of “the Thousand Year Reich” for any “mongrels” or “lesser races.” Once they had ceased to be useful as slave labour, they were to be liquidated.
It speaks volumes of the evil of the Third Reich that when it was all crashing down, they scrambled to finish what they had started. Concentration camp inmates were machine gunned in place or led on death marches to prevent them from being taken alive by Allied forces. When the Allies discovered the true horror of the Nazi regime, a new legal term had to be created to encompass it: “Crimes against humanity.”
“Nazi? I’m not a Nazi!”
Studying Nazi Germany requires a strong stomach for horror. The Nazis were an evil the likes of which the world had never seen before, and hopefully will never see again. And yet, the term is all too often used with the weight of a comic book villain. It is used to denote somebody who is too pedantic about a subject (“Grammar Nazi,” etc.), or a general political slur in American politics against any person or party considered too far right of the political centre.
But why is this? A few reasons come to mind:
- For all the horrors they inflicted on the world, the Nazis lost the war. They were the big losers, and as such it is very easy for the winners to belittle them.
- Americans experienced the horrors of the Nazis second-hand. They did not have their cities terror bombed by the Luftwaffe, or have to live under Nazi occupation. Instead, they discovered the concentration camps, and the remnants of the horrors that had been inflicted on others. Those countries who did have a more direct experience with the Nazis seem to be far more careful in how they use the term.
- Creatives like Mel Brooks engaged in deliberate character assassination of the Nazis. In the case of Mel Brooks, he wanted to ensure that the Nazi ideology could never be taken seriously again, and he arguably succeeded.
- With the Cold War against the Soviets beginning as the War in Europe ended, the German Generals — who were the only people with experience fighting the Red Army — were given the opportunity to write their own history. They used this to whitewash their own involvement, creating the “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” and placing the Nazi atrocities firmly on the shoulders of Hitler and the SS.
So, why does it matter?
The reality is that while there is no shortage of racist and fascist movements who have laid claim to the mantle, ideology, and iconography of the Nazis, the Nazis were a product of their time and place, and in a lot of ways cannot be removed from it. You cannot separate them from fascism, antisemitism, racism, racial purity through sterilization and murder, German nationalism, genocide, or world domination. Plenty of racist and fascist groups do have elements that existed in Nazi Germany, but never all of it. The Nazis cast a long shadow, and there are no shortage of racists and bigots happy to stand under it.
But, the Nazis were something else. They got political power, and they used it. They corrupted German society from top to bottom, enabling horrific acts that are almost unimaginable today. In no other society would a family need to worry about taking a sick child to a doctor for fear that the doctor would kill that child on the spot, but the Nazis created a society where this was a real phenomenon. This too is part of who the Nazis were and the horror they encompass. The modern pretenders are racists on the fringe — the real Nazis were inextricably linked to the exercise of political power.
And the risk of forgetting this can be seen in the rise of a 21st century successor to Nazi Germany — not a fringe group of racists in the West, but Ali Khamenei and the IRGC in Iran.
The IRGC has a number of commonalities with Hitler’s Nazis. It is a fascist party (revolutionary, authoritarian, and nationalist). It is dedicated to world domination and the creation of a worldwide Islamist caliphate. It has a genocidal agenda towards Jews, particularly when it comes to Israel. And despite the acts of terror committed by its proxies, their dedication to the extermination of Jews (and in the case of Hamas, all other non-Arab ethnicities in Israel), and the atrocities they have committed in countries like Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, many of the very people who would accuse people of being Nazis have turned a blind eye or even given their moral support to the IRGC and its proxies.
Is the IRGC the equivalent of Hitler’s Nazis? No. The horrors they have inflicted do not even come close to what the Nazis did. But, they are on the road to getting there, and if they are not stopped, particularly in their race for nuclear weapons, they will be. History will repeat.
What the Nazis were must never be forgotten. They are the ultimate cautionary tale of the heights of evil to which humanity is capable. Fascists exist, as do racists and white supremacists. Some even call themselves Neo-Nazis, or National Socialists. But there was only one Nazi Germany, and what it was must be remembered so that there can never be another.
