Every so often, some prominent figure on the political Right will assert that the Nazis were left-wing, prompting predictable outrage from the Left. A recent example comes from Alice Weidel, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s candidate for chancellor in the 2025 general elections. In a conversation with Elon Musk, she described Adolf Hitler as a “communist, socialist guy.” But is there any validity to this claim?

First, we shouldn’t place too much weight on the name. A party called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” could well have been no more socialist than the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea is democratic. Similarly, the fact that Benito Mussolini, a major influence on Hitler, began as a socialist before embracing fascism doesn’t provide sufficient evidence of inherent leftism. People can, after all, change their minds. Likewise, left-wing intellectual George Bernard Shaw’s admiration for fascism may simply have been a lapse in judgement. And while today’s progressives often fixate on race or even engage in antisemitism—paralleling aspects of Nazism—this does not in itself prove that Nazism originated in leftist thought.

Hitler himself, however, did consider Nazism a form of socialism. In a 1923 interview, he stated,

Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us, state and race are one.

In other words, Hitler considered Marxian communism a socialist heresy. Yet his description of National Socialism as “socialism in evolution, a socialism in everlasting change” echoes the Marxist view of history as a process of dialectical change.