Origin
Back in January 2016, conservative web site Louder with Crowder dipped its toes into the world of fact-checking with an article (“MYTH BUSTED: Actually, Yes, Hitler Was a Socialist Liberal”) that makes the claim that “leftists” have unfairly rewritten history to paint Hitler as right wing, based in part on the fact that the Nazi party had the word “socialist” in its name.
Perhaps ironically, that article opens with a tidbit of literally rewritten history, misattributing a quote by Nazi party member Gregor Strasser to Adolf Hitler:
While Hitler may have co-opted elements of this language when it was politically expedient, they are not his words. Instead, these are the words of early Nazi party official Gregor Strasser, printed in a 1926 pamphlet titled Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future. That pamphlet, as we will discuss in detail below, attempted to appeal to ultranationalist movements on both the left and the right at a time when the Nazis were a fringe political party seeking to carve out as big a part of the German electorate as possible.
Strasser’s pamphlet went on to make these decidedly non-socialist sounding statements as well:
The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals. violating the deepest levels of our being!
We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!
Gregor Strasser was a prominent Nazi propagandist in the formative days of the Nazi party. A World War I veteran active in post-war anti-Soviet paramilitary activities, he — along with Adolf Hitler — became one of the two most prominent voices for the party as it attempted to build a cohesive ideology and broad support across the various factions within a deeply divided Germany.
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As it happens, Hitler was not a fan of Strasser’s ideas. While his efforts helped the Nazi’s with early electoral victories in the elections of 1928, his views became dangerously discordant with Hitler’s, and he was assassinated on Hitler’s orders in 1934:
By the early 1930s Strasser was head of the Nazi political organization and second only to Hitler in power and popularity.
As leader of the party’s left wing, however, he opposed Hitler’s courting of big business as well as his anti-Semitism and instead favoured radical social reforms along socialist lines. He finally resigned his party offices in 1932. Hitler was able to avert large-scale losses in membership after Strasser’s defection, and, after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship, Strasser lost almost all of his influence. He was murdered on Hitler’s orders during the [Ernst] Röhm purge of 1934.
The fact that Hitler disagreed with Strasser’s view of “National Socialism” so much that he was killed in part for holding those views makes it all the more absurd to attribute this quote to Hitler, as Louder with Crowder has done.
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