Goebbels Assured His Audience that Nazism Had Not Simply Used "Socialism" as a Catchphrase to Achieve Power: "Our Socialism Is the Exact Opposite of Marxism"

Speaking before an assembly of the “Young People for German Socialism” in December 1933, Goebbels assured his audience that Nazism had not simply used “socialism” as a catchphrase in order to achieve power: “Socialism is not just an over-and-done-with affair, not just a … parade horse that we rode while fighting for power, and from which we are now going to dismount because we’ve come into power. Socialism is a conviction that the people have to fulfill, that doesn’t have anything to do with bourgeois prejudices.” Making sure that his young audience did not misunderstand the form that Nazi socialism was going to take, Goebbels continued: “Our socialism, as we understand it, is the best of our Prussian inheritance. We inherit it from the Prussian army, from the Prussian civil service.” He went on to link Nazism with the greatness of the German past: “It is the socialism that enabled the great Frederick and his army to withstand seven years of war. It is the socialism that gave a starved and exhausted Prussia, after this seven years of war, the strength to rebuild not only its old but also its new provinces.” This was a socialism, Goebbels continued, that had “something soldierly … about it.” Drawing a connection between socialism, militarism, and the needs of Germany as a nation, Goebbels stated, “What socialism is within the nation, nationalism is to the outside world. The distinction is no longer between classes … but between values.” Goebbels summed up his argument as follows: “Our socialism … is the exact opposite of Marxism.”

--Timothy S. Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance, Monographs in German History 28 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 132.