Upvote:-1
If Hitler was the head of the Socialist party why were the workers opposed. Isn't a socialist form of government something the workers would want?
Socialism is a very broad and vague term:
Shirer mentions the young GΓΆbbels' opinion that Nazis shared objectives with the German Communists and should have collaborated with them. However, National-Socialists never subscribed to the Marxist ideology, and GΓΆbbels himself later went on to draw the distinction between the two in his pamphlet Nazi-Sozi. Claiming that Nazis were opposed to Communsits is somewhat misleading - they did oppose them as their political rivals in Germany, and Hitler's plans for expansion to the east necessarily brought Nazis in opposition with Stalin's Soviet Union. However, without the collaboration between Hitler and Stalin in 1939-1941 the history of Nazism and the World history might have been very different. Not in the least, the Communists took early on a habit of calling fascist any of their opponents - real fascists, liberal capitalists, European socialists opposed to the Soviet repressions and even each other (like Yugoslav communists after the break with Stalin or Khrushchev after disavowing Stalin's cult of personality), thus greatly exaggerating the opposition.
Nazis also opposed to the liberal form of Socialism - their objective being creation of a state under the leadership of a single Leader and single party.
National-socialism was indeed a popular movement aiming at redistribution of wealth, and as such it could be termed socialist. Once Hitler was in power, he found an accomodation with the leading German industrialists, while many in the movement still believed that "the National-Socialist revolution" was not over (mostly the infamous Brown shirts.) This resulted in the Night of the long knives. Still, even afterwards the Nazi movement conserved many of its socialist and even collectivist features in terms of workers organization, children summer camps, etc. Furthermore, Nazis largely followed through with the Keynesian economic policies they inherited from Weimar republic - the German equivalent of the New Deal in the US, which assured the Nazi economic miracle.