Bofferbrauer2 said:
That's fascism, not socialism. They just called themselves socialist to get the rather large vote share from socialist while they were hunting down the members |
Sorry, that's just not true. Nowadays we think very different about them, but the Nazis did indeed consider themselves to be lefties and socialists.
For example, there's a famous quote by Goebbels "Der Idee der NSDAP entsprechend sind wir die deutsche Linke. Nichts ist uns verhasster als der rechtsstehende nationale Besitzbürgerblock." Some people in the german left are actually trying to make it illegal to even mention that quote.
And Hitler himself said "Wir sind Sozialisten, wir sind Feinde der heutigen kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsordnung für die Ausbeutung der wirtschaftlich Schwachen, mit seinen unlauteren Gehälter, mit seinen Auswertung eines Menschen nach Reichtum und Besitz, anstatt Verantwortung und Leistung, und wir alle sind entschlossen dieses System unter allen Bedingungen zu zerstören."
And one can find quite a number of such quotes by famous Nazis that sound like they were said by some present-day leftie.
| Bofferbrauer2 said: They even had a slur for those who actually believed they had any socialism in the party by calling them beefsteaks (brown on the outside, but red inside, as in the colors of the NSDAP and Socialism respectively) |
That is the first time I've ever heard something like that. Despite coming from germany myself, where there's always at least one documentary about the Nazi regime running on TV, no matter when you switch on.
Since you made me curious, I just looked that term up. Because obviously, "Beefsteak Nazi" is not a german phrase. As it turns out, there's an entry about it in Wikipedia, but strangely, only in the english one, nowhere else. Which is strange, because there's like a million articles in the german Wikipedia just about anything that is even remotely Nazi-related.
The english Wikipedia claims that "Beefsteak Nazi" is a translation of the german "Rindersteak Nazi", which sounds plausible. But if one googles that german phrase, one basically doesn't find a single mention. Looking the term up in Google NGRAM (A page that creates charts showing how popular certain words or phrases were over time) doesn't yield a single entry as well (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content="Rindersteak+Nazi"&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&case_insensitive=on&corpus=31).
And looking at the references in the "Beefsteak Nazi" Wikipedia page, the only reference they mention from back in the Nazi days is a book by an author named Heiden (who wasn't even living in germany back then). All other references are from the 1990s or later. There doesn't seem to be a single clear proof of the Nazis having used that phrase. So even if Heiden did indeed once witness someone saying say something like that, it definitely wasn't a widespred slur and most definitely wasn't said by a high-ranking Nazi, otherwise there'd be more evidence.
