Not only did Hitler detest socialism, liberalism and communism, but he was appeased in Europe partly because powerful American industrialist and some of the European right saw him and Mussolini as valuable strong men against Stalin.
Henry Ford, perhaps this nation's leading antisemite AND right wing industrialist, was awarded the highest civilian honor Hitler could bestow upon him, in 1938.
In America for some, the appeasement continued apace.
Prescott Bush was indicted under the "Trading With the Enemy Act" of 1942.
"While Hitler's attitude towards liberalism was one of contempt, towards Marxism he showed an implacable hostility… Ignoring the profound differences between Communism and Social Democracy in practice and the bitter hostility between the rival working class parties, he saw in their common ideology the embodiment of all that he detested -- mass democracy and a leveling egalitarianism as opposed to the authoritarian state and the rule of an elite; equality and friendship among peoples as opposed to racial inequality and the domination of the strong; class solidarity versus national unity; internationalism versus nationalism".
--Alan Bullock, "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny", abridged edition, (New York: HarperCollins, 1971)
FACT:
The very last vestiges of socialism were viciously purged from the NSDAP on The Night of the Long Knives.
FACT:
An entire security apparatus, the Left wing SA (Sturmabteilung) was outright ELIMINATED and REPLACED by the SS (Schutzstaffel).
FACT:
Gregor Strasser was assassinated and his brother Otto, the leading light of the leftist faction of the party, was exiled, first to Austria, then to Prague, Switzerland and France.
And when it was clear to him that Hitler's SS still intended to quench their thirst for his blood as well, (to the tune of a $500 thousand dollar bounty on his head) he went to Bermuda by way of Portugal, leaving a wife and two children behind in Switzerland.
In 1941, he emigrated to Canada, where he was the famed "Prisoner of Ottawa".
He never stopped looking over his shoulder for agents of doom.
Right wing political philosophy follows a top-down hierarchy, and Socialism is all about egalitarian ideals, which are horizontal.
Fascism is a top-down hierarchy and in the case of the Nazis, the top people in these groups actually believed there are people beneath them - inferior to them. There is nothing egalitarian about fascism for the simple reason that fascists adhere to the ideology of ultranationalism, which places all others on Earth beneath them.
In the case of Hitler and the Nazis, it was the twin dragons of hypernationalism and white supremacism.
Hitler’s values: radical inequality, the fostering of a tiny elite, belief in ancestral notions of nationhood and racial purity – were values of the far right, not the egalitarian values of socialism or liberalism. Since when do leftists speak of racial purity?
Before attaining dictatorial power Hitler allied himself with political conservatives, he had a fan club of conservatives outside Germany, he was largely funded by union-hating big business (like Ford) that saw him as the man to smash the socialists, and he was appeased internationally in part because of misguided conservatives who thought him a worthwhile ally.
Himmler, well before the Wannsee Conference, and after the "Night of the Long Knives", which eventuated the disposal of any and all left-sympathizing party members, including Gregor Strasser and Ernst Roehm, about 1938, enunciated to a mass meeting of the SchutzStaffel (S.S.):
"We are of the right and of order. We shall sweep away Jews, Bolsheviks, and liberal democracies as one sweeps away flies."
I already beat two others to a rhetorical pulp last week on this whole "Hitler was a lefty" bit of nonsense, three if you count other forums.
It's someone else's turn.
