Weidel claims Hitler was a communist and the AfD the opposite

Weidel: “Hitler was a communist” and the AfD, the opposite

The party that promises to shrink the state to a minimum claims its historical enemy also wanted a giant state. To prove it, its candidate reached for a label: Hitler was a socialist. And the richest man in the world lent her the megaphone.

Elon Musk urged Germans to vote for Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the February 23 elections during a live conversation with Alice Weidel, the party’s candidate for chancellor, broadcast on the social network he owns. “Only the AfD can save Germany, or things will get much worse,” he said. The talk, in English and without video, drew a peak of 209,000 accounts on X. It is no minor detail: the European Commission was examining the broadcast as part of its ongoing investigation into X over possible breaches of the Digital Services Act.

“Hitler was a socialist, a communist”: what exactly Weidel said

The candidate claimed the Third Reich, “which was National Socialist, created huge taxes and nationalized industry,” and added that the country’s greatest success was labeling Hitler a conservative when, in her account, he was nothing but “a socialist, a communist.” Against that supposed state socialism, she presented the AfD as “a conservative and libertarian party” that wants to “free the people from the state” and give them “freedom to create wealth.”

In the same conversation she compared the German press to the National Socialist regime itself and accused Brussels of censorship: “EU bureaucrats are trinc our conversation because of a law that is simply censorship against freedom of speech,” she said. Musk, for his part, suggested the party is “massively distorted in the Western media.”

Did Hitler nationalize industry or hand it out to party friends?

Here the discussion gets interesting, because the ideological label is decided in the accounts. One line of argument holds that the regime sold a not inconsiderable package of entities into private hands: Preussag AG, Commerz-und Privatbank —today’s Commerzbank, founded in 1870 and transferred to private hands in 1937—, Deutsche Bank und Disconto-Gesellschaft, privatized between 1935 and 1937, or Golddiskontbank, created in 1924 to support German exports. Golddiskontbank also served to force Jews who were emigrating to transfer their properties to an account at the entity.

The rebuttal comes with names and dates: many of those companies were not state-owned but private firms that Chancellor Brüning had rescued in 1931, and what the regime did was return them to friendly hands. On paper, ownership was private; in practice, this reading holds, whoever received them was bound to employ whomever the party ordered, manufacture whatever they were told, sell at the prices set by the Reich Price Commissioner and be paid in paper marks printed by the Central Bank.

There is a third account, more uncomfortable for Weidel’s thesis: expropriation without using the word. Companies subjected to inspections and fines above their value until an NSDAP member appeared willing to buy them for two cents, and from then on the sanctions vanished by magic. With that mechanism, it is argued, hundreds of companies changed hands without anyone writing the word nationalization in any official gazette. The full breakdown of those operations, entity by entity, is the material worth reading in full before accepting either label.

The German Labor Front and the captive labor business

Less attention is given in the public exchange to another fact that does appear in the body of the discussion: the participation of private companies in the exploitation of prisoners. In early 1941, a few hundred Auschwitz prisoners were leased to IG Farben and 300 Mauthausen prisoners to Steyr-Daimler-Puch. Both companies used that labor to cover the shortage of workers, initially in unskilled and construction tasks, while the SS maintained control of the inmates and profited. The role of the DAF, the party’s union, and of NSDAP leaders in the management of the supposedly privatized companies is also cited.

Can the AfD govern after February 23?

No, based on the data the debate itself was using. An INSA institute poll put the AfD at 21.5%, behind the conservative CDU/CSU (31%) and well ahead of Olaf Scholz’s SPD (15.5%). The party is second, but the cordon sanitaire imposed by the other parties makes its entry into a governing coalition practically nil. INSA director Hermann Binkert considered that Musk’s arguments had helped reduce the party’s stigma. That, and not an economic program, was what was at stake in the conversation.

The label as a political weapon

The heart of the matter is that the debate over whether National Socialism was extreme capitalism, state socialism or a third position has gone unresolved for decades, and it will not be resolved in a broadcast. What does change is the use of that debate: if Hitler ceases to be the exclusive preserve of the right, the worn-out tactic of pinning the label on an opponent loses its edge. The AfD is second in the polls while its candidate rewrites the 20th century to suit herself. Does the insult stop working when the other side reuses it?