Why were the workers opposed to Hitler becoming the chancellor of Germany near the end of the Weimar republic?

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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:

  • Marxism Sometimes Socialism serves as a proxy for Communism, which in itself is usually a proxy for Marxism, i.e. the ideology grounded in the writings of Karl Marx (Marx himself often used terms Socialism and Communism interchangeably, although later Communists tend to associate Socialism with a historical stage between Capitalism and Communism.)
  • Liberal socialism In many places Socialism is a designation for social democracy, i.e. welfare capitalism - a capitalist system augmented with redistribution of wealth, in order to help those who are less fortunate and/or in need. This is how it is understood in modern Europe. Note however, that European states tend to call themselves Social rather than Socialist - the latter term being used officially mainly by the USSR and its satellites. Many liberal democratic parties however call themselves Socialist - sometimes they trace their roots to pre-Marxist socialist movements (like the French Socialist Party or various Democratic socialists in the UK), in some cases they are former Marxist parties that abandoned the revolutionary Marxist orthodoxy and opposition to parlamentary democracy and liberalism, and sometimes a mix of both (like the German SDP, which traces its origins to Ferdinand Lassalle, but also to a pro-Marxist Eisenacher movement.)
  • Other In some cases Socialism is also used as a catch-word for helping average people, whatever is the rest of the ideology - this is how it was used by National-Socialists.

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.

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