Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist ("Völkisch nationalist"), racist, and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany.[13] The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.[14] Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeoisie, and anti-capitalism, disingenuously using socialist rhetoric to gain the support of the lower middle class;[15] it was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes.[16] The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.[12]
AskHistorians
Just as I thought. Thank you for the answer!
www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/
(This article is from 2017 and adorably states that "Nobody, least of all the millions of rank-and-file right-leaning Americans who voted for Donald Trump, wants to be lumped in with Nazis. It's a fact, however, that Nazi-friendly organizations, Nazi symbols, and Nazi gestures were in evidence at the disastrous Charlottesville event, whose unfortunate title was not "Unite the Left," but "Unite the Right.")
The full name of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, the political movement that brought him to power and supplied the infrastructure of the fascist dictatorship over which he would preside, was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to historians, the complicated moniker reveals more about the image the party wanted to project and the constituency it aimed to build than it did about the Nazis' true political goals, which were building a state based on racial superiority and brute-force governance.
[...]
And this is what came out of Adolf Hitler's mouth on another occasion when a comrade riled him by harping on socialism (as reported by Henry A. Turner, author of German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985): "Socialism! What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism."
There was a period in the early 30s when the communist and left-wing elements had been purged from the Weimar Republic, and the right-wing working-class German Workers’ Party hoped to court their supporters by renaming itself the National Socialist party. (Imagine if, in pre-Trump USA, the Sanders/AOC DSA had been expelled from the Democratic party, and the Tea Party tried to pull support from them by calling itself the Tea Party Socialists.) But they never adopted socialist ideology—the only thing they had in common was their working-class demographics. Socialism, communism, and anarchism all had their origins in the 19th-century Internationalist movement, which was expressly anti-nationalist—so the very name “National Socialism” was a transparent contradiction in terms.
(That said, Mussolini in Italy did have an early phase where he was a bona fide socialist, but the Italian socialists expelled him for his racism.)
Thank you for the answer!
Why are you called Green_Mouse when you’re not a green mouse?
ETA: I didn't realise what community I was in when I replied to the OP. Apologies for not being more community appropriate in my approach to OP's question.
Because I don't want to use my real name and surname?
My, admittedly flippant, point was that they called themselves socialists that doesn’t mean they were.
I didn't say they were, I asked why they were called National Socialists, and why they are called that even today.
The wiki snippet someone else posted explains why back then. They're sometimes called it today because:
- Many people are functionally politically illiterate and still repeat the BS not knowing it's BS.
- There are still nazis running around (sadly far too many) who want to muddy the waters and want naziism to once again don the veil of socialism to appeal to people in category 1 who would otherwise despise the nazi's true intent.
Democratic People's Republic of Korea aka North Korea, is not very democratic. Politicians are masters of BS and so they mask what they do and say with a veil of BS to appeal to more people. Socialism is far from extreme, it's a great middle ground between communism and capitalism, whereas nazis and other far right weirdos don't know what a middle ground is.
Why does North Korea say they're a Democratic Republic when it's a monarchy?