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Socialism

Were the Nazis Socialist? Only in Part

The Nazis were similar to socialists supporting economic statism, but different in other key aspects of their ideology.

Ilya Somin | 9.29.2026 1:00 PM

National Socialist German Student League poster. (NA)

Periodically, debate rages over the question of whether the Nazis were socialists. As a general rule, conservatives (and some libertarians) make this accusation, while left-wingers indignantly deny it. This question has returned to prominence in recent months, and it remains worth addressing. The right answer is that the Nazis were similar to socialists in backing sweeping government control over the economy, yet different from them in rejecting racial and ethnic equality. But the difference is greater in theory than in practice.When socialists come to power, they often engage in persecution of minority groups, even though this is inimical to their ideology. There are systematic reasons for this pattern, which go beyond the idiosyncracies of individual leaders.

All of this has significant implications for current political debates, at a time when "democratic socialism" is a growing movement and much of the right has embraced statist nationalist economics.

It is difficult to deny that the Nazis (and other similar right-wing nationalist movements) embraced sweeping economic statism, including socialist-style central planning. The movement wasn't called the National Socialist Party for nothing. I summarized some of the evidence in a 2007 post, relying on then-recent academic research (later research has not changed these conclusions):

The idea that Nazism was an extreme form of "capitalism" and Hitler primarily a tool serving the interests of "big business" is a longstanding myth that even now retains a measure of popularity in some quarters. This, despite the fact that the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and that Nazi political strategy was explicitly based on combining the appeal of socialism with that of nationalism (thus the choice of name). Once in power, the Nazis even went so far as to institute a Four Year Plan for running the German economy, modeled in large part on the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans….

Two recent books further explain the socialist elements of Nazi economic policy, and will hopefully put the final nails in the coffin of the myth that the Nazis were "capitalists" or free marketeers. In The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, historian Adam Tooze describes the statist nature of Nazi economic policy in great detail, and concludes that the Nazis imposed greater government control over the economy than any other noncommunist regime in modern history. (pp. 658-60). Tooze notes that, even before the outbreak of World War II, government military spending accounted for some 20%........

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