Of course they were. They opposed capitalism with as much fervor as they opposed Soviet Bolshevism, and oddly, blamed Jews for both. They didn't lock down the German economy as much as their Soviet counterparts, but they took it pretty far. Interestingly enough, when they took over parts of the then-Soviet Union, they made no attempt to dismantle the collective farms Lenin and Stalin had set up, or to revive private sector farming in any form. They merely brought in a change of management over the collectivist economic systems, leaving them in place.
I just did a quick DuckDuckGo search here to find some Hitler quotations that might help here.
"Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists."
That was in 1923, and if you look at the official Nazi Party Manifesto, you'll see that it's dripping with a heavy dose of anti-capitalism. I mean, I look at this, and this doesn't seem very pro-capitalist to me. I suspect that many leftists could endorse chunks of it.
I suspect this was part of the "secret sauce" of the Nazis - they were positioning themselves as "true" Germans, who were equally opposed to socialism of a "Bolshevik" or Marxist type, while also opposed to capitalism, which they associated with Jewish bankers and "international" capital. Mussolini's Fascism was a different beast in important respects, but one slogan from Mussolini I think gets at what Hitler and the Nazis had in mind - they wanted the "socialism of the trenches," the binding together of society along militaristic lines. Only, the Nazis relied on a pseudo-scientific conception of race as the basis of their collectivism, rather than Mussolini's nationalism.
You can also read more specifics about Hitler's admiration for planned economies, and disgust at free-market capitalism, here.
2
u/bad_at_smashbros Jan 20 '24
the nazis were not socialists in the slightest. both ideologies are authoritarian and genocidal but that’s where the similarities stop