Nazi opinions on Social Democrats?

[The Man]

What was the National Socialist view on Social Democracy? Because it seems to me that the National Socialists believed in someone sort of economic Social Democracy.

[Manic Impressive]

Social Democrats are somewhat socially liberal so they would hate them and describe them as liberal or bourgeois

[Dumb]

Fascists in general were all over the map economically. The Nazis supported a command economy with full employment, which social democrats would love; on the other hand, Nazis also banned trade unions and made employer approval a prerequisite for a worker to leave their job.

[Rafiq]

Oh, you're not a Maoist anymore

[Tommy4ever]

The Nazi view of social democrats:

Quasi-communist, liberal scum.

The first groups to face imprisonment and oppression from the Nazis were the communists, the trade unionists and the social democrats.

[RedSunRising]

Social Democrats are somewhat socially liberal so they would hate them and describe them as liberal or bourgeois

Mosley was the greatest leader of the Labour Party who never made it to the leadership position according to many, George Bernard Shaw said that the only problem with Hitler was the anti-semitism, fascism certainly fitted in with such technocratic currents in social-democracy such as Fabianism.

[Red Future]

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=986246

Scroll down this thread there is a Nazi election poster showing the SDP as Communists in the pay of Jewish Capitalists??!!:confused:

[thesadmafioso]

Well seeing as they spared no effort in literally crushing them as a political entity, I'm going to propose that they were not the biggest fans of the German SDP.

[redhotpoker]

Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that social democracy was created by the Jews to corrupt the German peoples and Encourage them to embrace the Slavic people.

[∞]

They obviously have a strong distaste for democracy. Fascism doesn't care for the rights of the individual nor the majority, add anti-semiticism and a vague doctrine of why "the man" is more important, viola! You have Nazism in a nutshell.

[Manic Impressive]

Mosley was the greatest leader of the Labour Party who never made it to the leadership position according to many
Many who? Many fascists maybe.

George Bernard Shaw said that the only problem with Hitler was the anti-semitism, fascism certainly fitted in with such technocratic currents in social-democracy such as Fabianism.
Didn't know that about Shaw but kind of makes sense what with his love for eugenics. Mosley and his first wife were in the Fabian society and Independent Labour party. But by the time he was a fascist, an ideology which suited him perfectly he would have thought that soc dems were too liberal.

[Le Socialiste]

From what I can gather, they viewed Social Democrats as no better than the trade unions and communists. In short, unfavorably.

[NewSocialist]

Apparently they viewed them as the Marxist "guardian angels of capitalism" -http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/schutzengel.jpg

[Tim Finnegan]

Fascists in general were all over the map economically. The Nazis supported a command economy with full employment, which social democrats would love...
You're massively over-simplifying the fascist's corporatist program. There's a significant difference between a state-managed command economy and one in which the existing bourgeoisie is formally incorporated into the state apparatus. Do remember, Hitler undertook a massive scheme of privatisation- a Thatcherite before his time!- and only bothered to start exercising serious control over the bourgeoisie a good decade after his rise to power, when the war began to turn sour.

[Rss]

Historically, Finnish social democrats were the only social democrats who were not targeted by german fascists. Quite the contrary, these ratfucks were ready and willing brothers-in-arms of Nazi Germany.

Rafael Haarla, who was one of the most prominent capitalists in Finland during early 20th century (He was stabbed somewhere around 1917-1918 but unfortunately it wasn't lethal.) actually asked prime minister Väinö Tanner to become dictatorial leader of Finland. This was in 1929.

I despise these guys even more than True Finns or National Coalition.

[El Chuncho]

They often call them ''Communists'' because they are too stupid to see the difference...;)

[A.J.]

Historically, Finnish social democrats were the only social democrats who were not targeted by german fascists. Quite the contrary, these ratfucks were ready and willing brothers-in-arms of Nazi Germany.

Rafael Haarla, who was one of the most prominent capitalists in Finland during early 20th century (He was stabbed somewhere around 1917-1918 but unfortunately it wasn't lethal.) actually asked prime minister Väinö Tanner to become dictatorial leader of Finland. This was in 1929.

I despise these guys even more than True Finns or National Coalition.

I think I read somewhere that Hitler once praised the Finnish social democratic party for their militant anti-communism.

[Red Commissar]

Yeah, it depends on which SD party they were dealing with. The Nazi's were willing to make overtures to those who were militantly anti-Communist, but all in all they viewed them as having taken the worst parts of the liberal and socialist tradition.

Mussolini in Italy had tried to co-opt reformists and trade unionists in to the nascent Fascist movement, and during his early time in the 'unity' government had tried to work with socialists, to liquidate them into the state.

It seems the Nazis however didn't make such overtures to SDP in their country, or as far as I'm aware. They viewed them with the same discontent they gave to the Communists (of any affiliation) or the liberals.

[Feodor Augustus]

From what I can gather, they viewed Social Democrats as no better than the trade unions and communists. In short, unfavorably.

Indeed: (one of) the defining features of fascism was that it made no differentiation between the forces of the labour movement (and in Germany this included the Catholic socialist bodies).

As for the other part of the original question: to argue that 'the National Socialists believed in someone (sic.) sort of economic Social Democracy' is a gross oversimplification of the economics of both. Nazi state spending programmes were largely tied up with rearmament; they opposed female participation in the workplace; instituted schemes of compulsory and forced (slave) labour; did away with many of the practices of liberal legal norms (collective bargaining, property rights, - namely of the Jewish populations, etc.) This was not the economic programme of the SPD, whatever their faults.

The 'twins' of 'fascism' and 'social fascism', like the 'twins' of 'totalitarianism' - 'Nazism' and 'Stalinism' - are both complete nonsense that have always rested on superficial comparison and poor theory. The former is the product of Third Period Realpolitik, the latter Cold War ideology, and both should be rejected on account of their cosmetically driven simplifications.

[Rusty Shackleford]

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vv3wKAOJN3g/THS_xpw2-SI/AAAAAAAAAkI/XwfRSWpl_nQ/s1600/spd_poster_1932.jpg

"Against the Pope, Hitler, and Thaelmann"
2nd List Social Democrats

[CHEtheLIBERATOR]

NAZI'S WERE FASCIST, THEY HATED EVERYTHING ELSE. The only reason it's called the national socialist party is because that's the party just happened to infiltrate. Once in power they killed social democrats.

NO SOCIALISM IN NAZISM

[Tim Finnegan]

NAZI'S WERE FASCIST, THEY HATED EVERYTHING ELSE. The only reason it's called the national socialist party is because that's the party just happened to infiltrate. Once in power they killed social democrats.

NO SOCIALISM IN NAZISM
No, that's the "German Workers" bit, and they didn't "infiltrate it" so much as an already right-populist petty bourgeois party happened to become the centre of the German fascist movement. "Nationalism Socialism" was added by the Nazis themselves, a bit of hollow anti-capitalist posturing intended to sap working class votes from the Social Democrats- not that it was ever all that successful, of course.

[gorillafuck]

The only reason it's called the national socialist party is because that's the party just happened to infiltrate.They didn't infiltrate a party. The NSDAP was founded as a fascist party.

[Dr Mindbender]

The social democrats were held in the same regard as communists by the nazis- as political opponents. That is why they were also forced to wear a red triangle in the concentration camps.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/German_concentration_camp_chart_of_prisoner_markin gs.jpg/420px-German_concentration_camp_chart_of_prisoner_markin gs.jpg

[Tavarisch_Mike]

I think it is a common missunderstanding that the nazis really did anything good. Yes they did take out Germany frome the, current, economical crise but that was solved by increasing the production in the military industry. And if you want to avoid an other inflation (caused by overproduction) you must use this 'things' by, fore example, starting a world war. And as said the unions where outlawed which simply meant that working conditions went to crap, not to forget the thing that people where inslaved, inprisioned and exterminated.

[cb9's_unity]

The existence of the word socialism in National Socialism is essentially the largest remnant of Nazi thinking before all power in the party was concentrated in Hitler. Its hard to imagine that Hitler would have used the word socialism if he had started the party. However even before Hitler the Nazi's were using socialism in a way totally different than any of the other socialist party's at the time. They never wanted workers democracy, they simply disliked what they viewed as 'Jewish dominated' finance capital.

Proof that socialism was never a large part of Nazi ideology is that from early on the Nazi's were getting very significant support from capitalist financiers. By the time the Strasser brothers had lost power in the party it was clear that even anti-capitalist rhetoric had lost any importance for Nazism.

And only the most cursory look social democracy and Nazism would view the two as similar in any important way (well... besides that they were pro-capitalist). Basically both parties accepted that the government could intervene in the economy, but both differed greatly in motivation and implementation. The Nazi's viewed the world in the terms of struggle and race, and thus believed government could work with capitalists on the grounds that they were helping the German race in the struggle of WWII. Social Democrats admit that there are immoral aspects of capitalism and remedy that social programs. So essentially the Nazi's mix the economy with the government to increase struggle while social democrats do so to apologize for it.

[Commissar Rykov]

No, that's the "German Workers" bit, and they didn't "infiltrate it" so much as an already right-populist petty bourgeois party happened to become the centre of the German fascist movement. "Nationalism Socialism" was added by the Nazis themselves, a bit of hollow anti-capitalist posturing intended to sap working class votes from the Social Democrats- not that it was ever all that successful, of course.

In fact Hitler discusses some of this in Mein Kampf where he goes on about adopting a red flag with white field and swastika as well as adopting the National Socialists Moniker. The whole point was to divide the workers' movements in Bavaria at the time. It didn't do much and ironically worked against the party latter when they had to liquidate the SA for having a few too many people who took the National Socialist line seriously.

Though really they didn't have that much success the local communists were rather militant and disrupted their meetings all the time this is what lead to the creation of the SA in the first place because Hitler was having a hard time screaming his race baiting. Though that didn't help the Nazis much either as they were shot at plenty.

[Impulse97]

The social democrats were held in the same regard as communists by the nazis- as political opponents. That is why they were also forced to wear a red triangle in the concentration camps.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/German_concentration_camp_chart_of_prisoner_markin gs.jpg/420px-German_concentration_camp_chart_of_prisoner_markin gs.jpg

Any translations for the annotations of the symbols? My German is nowhere near good enough.

[A.J.]

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vv3wKAOJN3g/THS_xpw2-SI/AAAAAAAAAkI/XwfRSWpl_nQ/s1600/spd_poster_1932.jpg

"Against the Pope, Hitler, and Thaelmann"
2nd List Social Democrats

That's not "Againist the Pope" but reference to Franz von Papen leading figure of the conservative wing of the Catholic Centre Party(Zentrum) and briefly Chancellor of the Weimar Republic for a few months in 1932.
The Crown either symbolises the fact that von Papen was an aristocrat or a monarchist. Or perhaps a bit of both.


But anyway, back to the original topic, I think the above election poster clearly illustrates that the SPD hated the KPD just as much, if not more, than they did the fascists. Therefore, talk of there ever being anti-fascist "united front" between the two parties was quite simply divorced from reality. The suff of fantasy.

[Dr Mindbender]

Any translations for the annotations of the symbols? My German is nowhere near good enough.

From wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badges

Red triangles are for Political Enemies.

Green Triangles are for Career criminals.

Blue Triangles are for immigrants.

Purple Triangles are for gentile theists (usually jehovah's witnesses).

Pink Triangles are for homosexuals and/or sex offenders.

Black Triangles are for the workshy, associal or anarchists.

When they are combined with a bar of the same colour, it means they are repeat offenders. If they are combined with the yellow star underneath it means the prisoner is jewish. The other combinations with yellow triangles are for 'race defilers'. I think the spot underneath means the prisoner has criminal persuasions or is an attempted escapee.

[Feodor Augustus]

But anyway, back to the original topic, I think the above election poster clearly illustrates that the SPD hated the KPD just as much, if not more, than they did the fascists. Therefore, talk of there ever being anti-fascist "united front" between the two parties was quite simply divorced from reality. The suff of fantasy.

The ‘suff of fantasy’, maybe; the ‘stuff of fantasy’, not at all. ;)

There was plenty of rank and file approval for a united front (e.g. conflicts between RFB and Reichsbanner members became far less common as the Weimar Republic wore on, and some joint action was undertaken without the authorisation of the leaderships), and past 1930 even the leaderships of both parties favoured it, - to a degree at least. This was the basis on which the KPD formed the ‘proletarian hundreds’, and the SPD too had their own formulation (something like Iron Front for a United Front, if memory serves me correctly). In France, despite some reservations, there was anti-fascist unity between revolutionaries and reformists; as was the case in Britain. In Germany the animosity of the past few decades made unity harder, but only the most reckless of operators could suggest that unity was impossible and/or division preferable.

In the postwar world, both Communists and Social Democrats realised that what had made unity the ‘stuff of fantasy’, was in fact the programme of, one the one hand, ultra-leftist nonsense, and on the other, right-wing capitulation. Postwar anti-fascist unity was what enabled the formation of the Warsaw Pact states, and Social Democrats aligned themselves with Communist governments in face of further nationalist threats (see Poland for a good example). Furthermore, most who had witnessed the fascist rise noted that it was compounded by three big failures on the part of the Left: (1) the lack of unity between reformist and revolutionary elements; (2) the lack of influence held amongst agricultural labourers; and (3), the inability of their programme to attract a substantial amount of middle-class elements.

There were larger, structural factors that brought fascism to power; and the Italian socialists seem to have been particularly hard on themselves when assessing their failures. (They noted these three failures, repeated by the German Left, well before Hitler had come to power; but still, they had very high expectations of themselves, and would always have fallen short.) However the split of the labour movement made it far more susceptible to attack, and in Germany this was exacerbated by sectional divisions: the KPD (after 1929) was the ‘party of the unemployed’; the SPD, the employed. However disunity was in effect as much a product of the bankruptcy of both approaches, as it was structural concerns that couldn’t be transcended.

In face of fascism, the Left got it badly, badly wrong. Thankfully, as of yet, fascism has remained in ‘its epoch’: because at present, the Left cannot even create unity against the closure of a school. Fascism looks to attack the whole of the labour movement, which in Germany included the Catholic socialist traditions; and unity is the only effective response.

[Feodor Augustus]

Just to be clear, most of the interwar socialist leaders, with the benefit of hindsight, came to realise that they had mistaken the collapse of the financial situation (i.e. the years after the Great Depression) for an offensive, revolutionary situation. When in fact it was the complete opposite; and the rise of fascism, when combined with the attacks on wages and conditions (due to the crises in profitability), required that the Left adopt a strategy of broad defensive unity in face of these threats.

[Commissar Rykov]

Just to be clear, most of the interwar socialist leaders, with the benefit of hindsight, came to realise that they had mistaken the collapse of the financial situation (i.e. the years after the Great Depression) for an offensive, revolutionary situation. When in fact it was the complete opposite; and the rise of fascism, when combined with the attacks on wages and conditions (due to the crises in profitability), required that the Left adopt a strategy of broad defensive unity in face of these threats.

I think a lot of German Socialists underestimated the panic of the German Bourgeoisie and Aristocracy. If it wasn't for people like Goering the NSDAP would have not expanded much further than Bavaria as it was solely created as a regional party and only had dreams of a National Audience. Then you combine this with von Papen siding with the Nazis in fears of the Left and thus making Hitler Chancellor and then include people like von Blomberg who sided the military with the Nazis it was just a cascade effect of the Right uniting under one banner while the Left was still bickering over who would be the leader of a possible revolution.

[Feodor Augustus]

I think a lot of German Socialists underestimated the panic of the German Bourgeoisie and Aristocracy.

I agree with you here, but imo it was the dislocation of the economic crisis, alongside the development of German history from 1848 onwards (the 'special path'), that primarily brought the Nazi Party into power. The skills of the leadership were secondary in this sense, and I think it is fairly well accepted that whether Hitler had come to power or not, some form of right-wing white dictatorship and/or fascism would have arose in Germany post-1933. Unless of course the forces of the Left could have managed to provide some kind of resistance to this, but as you correctly point out: while the right united under one banner, the Left bickered... endlessly.

Austria's interesting, in that there was no real division of the Austrian labour movement, but they still failed. Or perhaps better put: whilst Austrian labour was not divided between 'reformists' and 'revolutionaries', it was divided between the Vienna based leadership and the (often younger) leadership in the western territories. Situations between the two areas were very different, and the Vienna centre failed to react to the changes of the periphery (dictatorship came to Vienna later than it did elsewhere). The Linz Programme existed, but wasn't put into motion. The Left again underestimated right-wing terror.

Although as Otto Bauer quite fairly suggested, the forces of the right may have been so strong, and those of the Left so weak (particularly after the financial crisis), that a defeat of this magnitude was pretty much inevitable. (Bauer did accept both personal and collective responsibility for tactical mistakes, however he also drew attention to these larger structural factors. IMO, he is one of the most honest and sincere interwar Marxist leaders, and his writings reflect this.)

[A.J.]

There was plenty of rank and file approval for a united front (e.g. conflicts between RFB and Reichsbanner members became far less common as the Weimar Republic wore on, and some joint action was undertaken without the authorisation of the leaderships), and past 1930 even the leaderships of both parties favoured it, - to a degree at least.

What evidence do you have to support these assertions?(primary source required) Especially the last part of the sentance. I haven't come across anything whatsoever to suggest the right wing leadership would have ever contemplated entering into a front with KPD, so rabidly anti-communist were they.

To visually re-inforce my point....

http://www.spd-net-sh.de/dith/jusos/images/user_pages/W_hlt_Sozialdemokraten.jpg

1932 SPD election poster

[Rafiq]

Social Democrats are somewhat socially liberal so they would hate them and describe them as liberal or bourgeois

no

[Tim Finnegan]

http://www.spd-net-sh.de/dith/jusos/images/user_pages/W_hlt_Sozialdemokraten.jpg

1932 SPD election poster
SPD posters are always surprisingly bombastic, given that the party was dominated by bureaucratic weasels. :confused:

[Revolutionary_Marxist]

Well knowing Nazis, they generally hate other ideologies, but their own, including Social Democrats.