Instead of elaborating why the tired "Nazi stands for 'national socialist'" meme is irrelevant I'll just link to the early history of the DAP/NSDAP (the Nazi Pa

Instead of elaborating why the tired "Nazi stands for 'national socialist'" meme is irrelevant I'll just link to the early history of the DAP/NSDAP (the Nazi Party) on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_existence:_1918.E2.80.931923 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_e... To summarize: they were initially just called the "German Worker's Party" and had a strong basis in the middle-class. They weren't interested in socialism (i.e. social ownership of capital) but merely in profit sharing (i.e. paying workers better). Their leaders were nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist pretty much from day one -- which is also why they were categorically opposed to communists and other (anti-national or non-nationalist) socialists. The entire party can be explained as a radical reaction to the fallout from WW1 in Germany: economy in ruins, political lack of power, basically Euro-crisis Greece but significantly worse because everybody hated them and there wasn't an international union trying to fix them. The reason capitalists liked the NSDAP was that there literally wasn't much capitalisting to do in Germany without first re-asserting Germany's political (and military) power in Europe -- and that's one of the main things the NSDAP tried to do. Though I'm sure Jewish or non-anti-Semitic (remember: before WW2 anti-Semitism was socially acceptable) capitalists weren't too thrilled about the rampant anti-Semitism.