“Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

— Götz Aly

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 16

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Götz Aly 10

German journalist, historian and social scientist 1947

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“The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker ‘a pillar of the community,’ and the ‘bourgeois’—along with the traditional aristocracy—a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a ‘socialist,’ had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as ‘comrades (Genossen). His conception of the part was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization a Kampfbund, or ‘Combat League.”

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“Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

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Götz Aly 10

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