Hitler: National Socialism Is What Marxism Might Have Been If It Could Have Broken Its Absurd and Artificial Ties with the Democratic Order

The official Communist creed was rationalistic and lionized the legacies of the Enlightenment, while the Nazi ideologues (Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Baumler, Otto Strasser) insisted on the power of irrational, vital energies and scorned the allegedly sterilizing effects of reason. The reality was that, underneath the ostensible philosophical incompatibilities between the two rival ideologies, Nazism contained a number of tactical affinities with the much-decried Marxism. Hitler himself admitted that he found inspiration in Marxist patterns of political struggle: “I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. I don’t mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, . . . and so on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole National Socialism is based on it . . . National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.”

--Vladimir Tismaneanu, prologue to The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 12-13.