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Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
I'm sorry, but you need to consider intent and what those actions accomplished.
Confiscating property and allocating to the elite class isn't even an example of wealth distribution, let alone an example of socialism. Anything based on a caste system can't be socialism as the goal of socialism is to minimize class difference. The Nazis confiscated property and gave it to elites to deepen and enforce class divisions.
It's like calling Donald Trump a socialist for bailing out certain industries. The intent was to reinvigorate the capital potential of the industries. You have to look at what the goal and accomplishments of the Nazis were. Find the forest through the trees.
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Great point. The Germans "nationalized" industries so they could finance and build out their military industrial complex needed to spread their ideology by force. There was no socialism in this, this was about achieving a geopolitical objective through the most obvious of means. The Germans still got into bed with many industrialists and foreign companies to further their goals. IBM, GM, Ford, Alcoa, Dow, Coca Cola, and Chase Manhattan were just a few of the big American interests who profiteered off the Third Reich.
I really wish Beninho had left his quotes from the leadership of the Third Reich up as I wanted to explain the importance of context. In one he had Hitler speaking at great lengths about their connection to the Soviets and being "brothers in socialism." The context that was missing from that quote was that at the time the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was still hanging by a precarious thread, and Hitler needed to keep the Soviets convinced the pact would protect them and buy the Germans time to step up the industrialization of their war machine. The second quote, espousing how Germans would show the Soviets how "socialism worked" was made (and I believe tongue in cheek) in the lead up to Operation Barbarossa when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would crumble and the Germans would pour over the border into the Soviet Union. Context matters.