National Socialism Was Founded on a Doctrine of Inequality between Races but Promised Germans Greater Equality; Hitler Promised the Creation of a Socially Just State to Eradicate All Social Barriers

The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves than they had enjoyed during either the Wilhelmine empire or the Weimar Republic. In practice, this goal was achieved at the expense of other groups, by means of a racist war of conquest. Nazi ideology conceived of racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims. The ideal of the Volksstaat—a state of and for the people—was what we would now call a welfare state for Germans with the proper racial pedigree. In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised “the creation of a socially just state,” a model society that would “continue to eradicate all [social] barriers.”

--Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 13.