The head of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, Andreas Wirsching, has criticized AfD leader Alice Weidel’s claim that Adolf Hitler was actually a communist. described as “historically fundamentally wrong”. It is a claim that appears again and again in the right-wing extremist scene.
Such a statement is cynical, politically misleading and infamous with regard to the victims of the Nazi regime. “Under Hitler’s responsibility, not only tens of thousands of communists were persecuted, locked up in concentration camps and murdered, but also countless social democrats and trade unionists.”explained Wirsching.
Since 1919 at the latest, Hitler had been a radical anti-Semite, a racial nationalist and a militant enemy of communism said Wirsching in a written statement at the request of the German Press Agency. His program was aimed at a racially and ideologically reformatted national community.
In an online conversation with US tech billionaire Elon Musk on his platform X on Thursday evening, Weidel commented on Hitler, among other things, and described the National Socialist as a “communist”. “National Socialists, as the word suggests, were socialists,” Weidel said. “He was a communist and saw himself as a socialist.” Hitler nationalized companies and demanded high taxes.
Wirsching: “popular deceptive maneuver”
Wirsching said that Weidel’s claim that Hitler nationalized German businesses after 1933 was also false. The private sector as such was not affected, but was put at the service of the war economy through various directive measures. “Jewish entrepreneurs were persecuted and pushed out. Many German private companies made large profits under the Nazi regime and through the war economy,” explained the historian.
The attempt to describe Hitler as “left-wing” due to the early anti-capitalist sentiments of the NSDAP and its socialist name element is still a popular deception today. This was intended to protect sympathizers and right-wing nationalists from justified accusations of collaboration with National Socialism. “In fact, it is a pure propaganda maneuver that, compared to historical truth, is infamous. It is intended to camouflage right-wing pasts and the true goals of right-wing extremist politics,” said the history professor.