This article was first published by Daily Friend on 31 July 2025
The modern left gets much joy from construing anything to the right of Karl Marx as “fascist” or “Nazi,” but gets upset when, inevitably, it is pointed out what the “zi” in “Nazi” stands for.
No way, they exclaim, just because sozialistische appears in the Nazi Party’s name does not mean they were socialists. They protected private property, after all! But there is one key reason why this is false.
I recently read Time-Life Books’ Storming to Power, which forms part of its “The Third Reich” series. This edition details the largely democratic campaign that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party undertook in the 1920s and 1930s to attain power in Germany.
The authors, at various junctures – but without truly engaging the question – note that Adolf Hitler sought to assuage big business about the security of their property under Nazi rule and, when convenient, sought to portray the party as one dedicated to middle- and upper-class interests. At other times, of course, living up to their name, the National Socialists appealed viscerally to the interests of workers as against big capital, and the interests of the social as against the (anti-social) individual.
Reading this reminded me of the many conversations I have had over the years with socialists who sought to distance themselves from their historical German brethren. They hide, largely, behind the notion that the Nazis “supported” or “protected” private property… just not for the Untermenschen.
And therein lies the rub.
The right to property
The right to private property is one that originated in disputes between ordinary people. Every notable legal tradition globally developed a concept of property to deal with this conflict so inherent to human nature.
But it was only with the advent of constitutionalism, primarily in the West, that the right to property acquired a new dimension: while still dedicated to protecting property against deprivation by other legal subjects, the right to property is now (perhaps primarily) a right to be vindicated against the state.
Evidently, protecting property inter se alone did not solve the problem of property conflict. As it turned out, the political authority – whether a republican or monarchical one – was one of the greatest instigators of this conflict, when it should have been an impartial guardian.
You see, the state was very keen on safeguarding the interests of those in close proximity to political power. Whether the favoured dukes and barons or the rent-seeking merchant class, the state was fiercely protective of their property. On the other hand, it ran roughshod over the property interests of those who did not score political favour.
It was within this context that constitutionalists “invented” the right to property as we know it today. They took the subjective right to property that has existed since time immemorial, and stripped it of its arbitrary political exemption. Henceforth, even (and especially) the political authority must be bound to protect property rights across class and factional interests.
This is the right to private property of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution so intimately associated with liberalism today, and the “private property” that Marxists in particular and leftists in general deplore.
Pro-big business regime “protecting” property?
For the left to continuously insinuate, when they are not saying it outright, that the government of Nazi Germany “protected private property,” is very deliberately and consciously dishonest. The real headscratcher is that they admit, openly, that the classes and factions that did not enjoy political favour – the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, social democrats, racially impure Germans, Slavs, and so forth, in their tens of millions – did not enjoy property rights under the Nazis.
One can never honestly claim that any government is “supportive” or “protective” of private property, when one actually means that that government supports or protects the property of its clients, friends, and allies.
The presence of liberty – which unambiguously includes the liberty of property – is only and exclusively measured by the degree to which the state respects the liberty and property of those not in power; of those socially demonised; of those without political influence.
Was Nazi Germany also “protective” of freedom of expression, because Adolf Hitler and other Nazis could speak freely? Of course not. Did the regime respect the right to life, because members of the Nazi Party were generally free from the fear of arbitrary execution? No.
It is precisely because the Nazis did not protect or respect the property of Jews, Gypsies, and their many other opponents, that that regime can never be construed as being protective of private property rights per se.
In fact, even in the most diehard communist regimes of the world – Cuba and North Korea – the ruling elite is aggressively protective of the property of the inner cabal. One can scarcely say that these bastions of leftism preside over “pro-property” dispensations.
But no, one hears the modern left cry: they might not have protected everyone’s property, but the Nazis were essentially capitalists. They were pro-business, pro-capital!
This shift in emphasis changes nothing, however.
If the Nazis were capitalists and pro-big business, how did Ignatz Nacher, the majority owner of one of the largest breweries in Berlin – which, under his leadership, grew to be the second largest in Germany – come to lose his assets to an “Aryanised” pro-government bank? Why did the wealthy Czech Petschek family, with its vast commercial empire, hurriedly sell off its assets in the 1930s, fearing the oncoming Nazi dominance of Europe? The Nazis, after all, were pro-capital!
Well, of course, both Nacher and the Petscheks were Jews. Like thousands of other capitalists and industrialists who did not fit the Nazi conception of valid personhood, they could not benefit from the regime’s supposed and ostensible “pro-big business” or “capitalist” sympathies.
To be clear, then: no, the Nazis did not “protect” private property. Like literally any other authoritarian, illiberal regime, from left to right, they protected the property that they considered theirs, or belonging to the people they considered their own. This inherently and necessarily excludes them from fitting within the notion of being “protective of private property” in its liberal, capitalist, constitutionalist sense. It does not even rise to the level of being “cronyist.” It is, simply, socialist.
Socialism
Too often people assume that socialist necessarily means Marxist. It does not.
Today, Marxism is the most well-known and dominant form of socialism, but it is by no means the first or the only. The Nazis were unequivocally socialist and unequivocally anti-Marxist. The same applies – to a categorical difference in degree – to the National Party in South Africa, which only shed much of its socialism in the 1980s.
Socialism is, in reality, nothing more than a synonym for collectivism. When one speaks of “socialising” something, one can just as easily speak of “collectivising” and mean the same thing. Anti-social behaviour and anti-collective behaviour, too, are synonymous.
Socialism is about preferencing the social, or society, over the individual, as a matter of compulsory public policy. Of course, this is to be distinguished from highly commendable forms of communitarianism, with its core being “community” – something that is necessarily voluntary.
There is, clearly, something necessarily socialist about the state, even the liberal state.
In the words of the great liberal Frédéric Bastiat, public law, indeed the state, “is the collective organisation of the individual right to lawful defence”. The individual’s absolute natural right to defend their interests is partly socialised and delegated to the state in terms of the so-called social contract.
But this is where liberalism and voluntarism’s singular socialist element begins and ends. One step back will result in an unattainably pure liberalism, or what is sometimes called anarcho-capitalism. The Nazis, fascists, Marxists, and yes, even democrats, one and all, take socialism and run miles with it, using only good vibes to mask the necessary totalitarianism of their ideologies.
The Nazis did not protect private property. They selectively safeguarded the assets of their allies while stripping others of theirs. The property rights of capitalism and liberal constitutionalism protect everyone, especially the marginalised, against state overreach.
[Image: Nazi SA paramilitaries outside the Nathan Israel Department Store in Berlin on April 1, 1933, holding signs: “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” (Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!). The business was started in 1815 by Nathan Israel as a small second-hand store in the Molkenmarkt. By 1925, it employed over 2,000 people and was a member of the Berlin Stock Exchange. In the 1930s it ranked as one of the largest retail establishments in Europe. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14469 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5481328]
