Here's a quick quiz. For the entire set considered together, which government is being referred to, the USSR or the Third Reich?
1. They set up a network of forced labor camps.
2. They discriminated against Jews, justifying this by claiming that as rich capitalists they were enemies of socialism.
3. They claimed to represent the working class.
4. They invaded and captured other countries.
5. They were a dictatorship.
6. They were famous for their high levels of propaganda.
7. In their printed materials they stated explicitly "We are socialists", demanded a program of nationalization and stated that all citizens were equal.
8. They imprisoned, exiled or killed their political opponents.
9. Most importantly for this thread, they aggressively censored their opponents and directly controlled the media.
You can't tell what the answer is, because every point is correct for both of them. The differences were much smaller than their similarities.
This matters because it leads to people using NSDAP/USSR ideological tactics like censorship of their political opponents, whilst claiming to be fighting the very same.
This obvious comparison has been suppressed by systematic and vicious attacks on anyone who points it out for a very long time, so I doubt this post will get good reactions and unfortunately HN isn't a good forum for pointing this out because it tends to blame people for the reactions of others regardless of how polite or intellectually curious they may actually be, giving a kind of hecklers veto to discussions. But the confusion here leads to people repeating the mistakes of the past and trying to fight fire with fire, so it's really important to point out. That's why Germany is now punishing an American author for using a swastika in his criticism of politicians: the whole point of studying history is to be able to say "wait, that behaviour looks like something we've seen before" and yet the people doing that are now being attacked as Nazis themselves. This upside-down sort of behaviour is inevitable for as long as people keep insisting on upside-down interpretations of history. You can't claim to be fighting Nazi-ism whilst simultaneously using their tactics!
While I know you think "both" is the right answer to all of them: 1, 2, 3, 7 and 9 are the USSR, 6 and 8 apply to both, the rest describes the Nazis.
1. Equating the Holocaust and the gulag system is not just idiotic but outright malicious. The Holocaust was not "a network of forced labor camps". The Nazis had extermination camps. Many also died on the trains to the death camps. They also massacred people directly. The goal of WW2 was to depopulate Eastern Europe and establish "living space" much like the Westward expansion of the early US.
2. The Nazis believed that Jews were migratory parasites lacking any allegiance to a state, draining the host country for resources before moving on to the next country. It equated this with "international bankers" who likewise had no loyalties. The anti-capitalism was rooted in antisemitism, not the other way around. The talk about bankers was what we would now call a dogwhistle.
3. The DAP (later NSDAP) was the only nationalist party that tried to appeal to the working class because it represented the largest voting block. Their politics were however always defined by ethno-nationalism ("völkisch" nationalism to be precise) and antisemitism. The other nationalist parties generally favored a return to the monarchy.
4. That describes most military conflicts in history. However Germany did not want to capture Eastern Europe, it wanted to depopulate it. While the Western Front was largely about revanchism, the Eastern Front was entirely about creating "living space". The Soviet Union did engage in imperalism (although Lenin would disagree based on semantics he invented) but it was more interested in creating distinct Soviet republics and most of its territorial expansion happened in WW2.
5. While the USSR was not what I would call a functioning democracy (and even less so than the USA), even Stalin did not have the same level of power as Hitler. The Bolsheviks embraced bureaucracy and strongly believed in the rule by committees. Given the internal power plays within the party, it's fair to describe Stalin as dictatorial in practice though. However the cult of personality around him was mostly built up after the fact and against his wishes and didn't transfer to his successors like in the DPRK.
6. So was the US? We think of these two as examples of massive propaganda because they were created when mass media became available and we have an outside perspective on their propaganda. The Nazis were however way ahead of the Soviets during their time and the US didn't go to quite the same lengths even before the end of the Cold War.
7. The DAP was explicitly anti-Marxist and embraced what Marxists call "class collaborationism" (as opposed to Marxist class struggle): the idea that despite the divisions, all Germans belong to one people ("Volk", defined by "blood and soil") and differences must be set aside to protect this. When the DAP was renamed, the "socialist" was deliberately chosen to appeal to the working class but the party strongly considered alternative labels to distance itself from Marxism. Any actual anti-capitalist tendencies that survived the Great Depression were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives when a few holdouts like Strasser were killed to align the party closer with Hitler's vision. The Nazi government also generally did not "nationalise" businesses (not more than other capitalist countries at least), it disowned Jewish people and those deemed enemies of the state. Often these businesses were then sold for very low prices to existing companies. During the war, some companies were also offered cheap access to slave labor in order to aid the war effort. The famous Autobahn and other "accomplishments" of the Nazis were built by companies. I've actually heard people jokingly credit the Nazis for making the idea of "public-private partnerships" popular.
8. If you have to put it so vaguely, you might as well apply that to many other countries including the modern US. I don't think this is a useful framing even if I think that some of the things you're lumping into this both countries did worse than others.
9. Again, you're describing authoritarianism and trying to turn this into a gotcha. Arguably the Nazis had controlled their media less than the Soviets because they would just literally kill or imprison people whereas the Soviets had to create mock trials and torture them until they provided plausible confessions.
I won't even address the rest of your post because it's completely unrelated to your claim. Remember: your claim is that the NSDAP was a left-wing socialist organization and that by implication the Nazi government was socialist and therefore left-wing. You have provided no evidence of that. At best you've demonstrated that the USSR was similarly authoritarian and in many ways did not adhere to its supposedly socialist ideology in practice. That is the opposite of what you claimed to intend to demonstrate.
Serious kudos for taking the time to write out such a measured and thoughtful reply! I honestly wasn't expecting that. Your post has been killed now which I disagree with, but I have showdead turned on so was able to see what you wrote.
That's a lot of words so I probably can't reply to them all, but I'd start by observing that the fact it's so complex to dispute these points indicates it can't possibly be so clear cut, can it?
For example in point 1, I didn't mention the Holocaust. These points were worded carefully. The Nazis did run extermination camps, and they also ran a network of forced labor camps. You yourself mention the use of slave labour later in your reply. This point is not specific to the USSR.
In point 3, you seem to be agreeing. The NSDAP advertised itself as being on the side of the working class, as socialists (at that time) always did. They even selected their name for that reason. Their politics were defined that way to the public.
In point 7, again, you're not arguing with the point as written. They did indeed both do these things. But if you want to widen the context, think about how tiny these differences are you're highlighting! They said they'd nationalize industries, but then they only did it to their enemies. The ones who became subservient to the state voluntarily were allowed to notionally remain "private". This is a wafer thin distinction.
I've seen attempts to debunk or fact check this idea before, and they all look the same. They boil down to "The Nazis said they were socialist, but then they didn't do the things they promised so they weren't really!" which is a ridiculously weak rebuttal. Of course they didn't do the things they said they'd do, of course they didn't live up to their espoused principles. Socialists never do! That's why there was a whole cold war to try and stop them spreading.
The fact that they didn't really care about the workers or any of the other pretty ideas they marketed, does therefore not mean they were on the right.
The difficulty I have with that idea is that logically "far right" means the opposite of the far left. The USSR was far left, I'm sure we both agree. The opposite of the USSR would have been the USA (strong free speech protections, no forced labor camps, etc). Which was the Reich closer to - USSR or the USA? It seems obvious it was the USSR. It therefore cannot be the opposite of that.
As you can see in my reply (which is veering dangerously close to the size limit on HN, which is why I'm replying to it instead of adding this to it directly), responding to a false claim and debunking it takes a lot more writing and effort than simply stating it and moving on to the next one.
The NSDAP was far right. The vast majority of political and historical scholars agree on this. It was also decidedly not socialist. By the 1930s it also was no longer anti-capitalist in any meaningful way (again: working class populism isn't socialism, otherwise Tucker Carlson would be a socialist).
By focusing solely on the USSR and the NSDAP you're also ignoring countries like Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain and the Second Portuguese Republic. These states were as much alike as they were different but if you pay enough attention you might find a better pattern than "socialism is when authoritarianism".
The USSR was authoritarian. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they disbanded the workers councils (which btw is what "soviet" means, ironically) and trade unions because the Bolsheviks thought that Russia was too agricultural to be capable of having a true communist revolution and needed the party intelligentsia to figure out how to apply communism for the people. Lenin actually disagreed with Marx on many things, which is why the school of thought based on his writing is known as Marxism-Leninism, not simply Marxism. Specifically Lenin's followers generally think that Marx only described the end goal and Lenin described how to get there. Demonstrably, he did not get there, however. It's worth pointing out that even the USSR and its like agreed on this, which is why they referred to their states as "real existing socialism" (to contrast their systems with "utopian socialism", i.e. what they initially stated would be the end goal but eventually argued was impossible to achieve).
I understand that the American right and its many copycat right-wing movements across the Global North often think "actually the NSDAP was the national SOCIALIST party and it was left-wing" is a nice and easy way to smear anyone left of Reagan but what I want you to understand is that this is not only untrue but also severely misunderstands the extent of the suffering the Nazis inflicted and wanted to inflict. "What if the Nazis had won" makes for entertaining television but in reality it would have meant the systematic death of thousands of millions of people.
The Nazis did not win an election. They did not overthrow the government. They were lifted into power by the Christliche Mitte, a center-right Christian conservative party, because the right saw them as the best weapon against the rise of socialism and the (at that point) imagined threat of a communist revolution[0]. When leftists today talk about "enabling Nazis", this is what they're concerned about. All of Germany did not need to be Nazis for Germany to become Nazi Germany. It didn't even take a majority of voters, let alone a majority of the population[2]. It only took a large enough group and an even larger group of right-wing "moderates" that felt comfortable enough with them to hand them the wheel.
The USSR on the other hand was the result of a revolution. Unlike what the USSR said, this wasn't a revolution of the Bolsheviks although the Bolsheviks had the same enemy: the czar. But the Bolsheviks were the strongest and best organize left when the dust settled and they took the opportunity, first by integrating leftist movements, then by abolishing them, eventually by destroying them. Instead of giving power to the people they said they themselves were the people and they gave all the power to themselves. Instead of ruling bottom-up by delegation they built a bureaucracy and an intricate tapestry of elections and representation.
If you want to understand socialism, you're better off reading Bakunin than Lenin, Bookchin than Stalin, Graeber than Mao. I've commented elsewhere previously in another discussion about real world socialist projects that actually deserve the label rather than using it as statements of aspiration at best or for blunt populism at worst. But they all have in common that they don't start from authoritarianism because authoritarianism always poisons everything. It's difficult to find this information if you don't look for it because we exist in a culture shaped by anti-communist hysteria and Bolshevist propaganda both agreeing on using the labels of communism and socialism exclusively for flavors of authoritarianism. But learning always takes a little effort if you want to do it right.
[0] I'm saying "at that point" because there were genuine attempts to establish forms of communism in the chaos after World War 1, including a number of groups that were aligned with the Bolshevists. There was actually a lot of infighting in the German left over whether to support the Bolshevists or not that largely boiled down to "but they're doing communism wrong" versus "but they're the only ones successfully doing a revolution right now". Most of them died[1] either in battles with the monarchist Freikorps (which were also the breeding ground for the (NS)DAP btw), during violent clashes with other left-wing groups, or at the hands of the Nazis, either prior to their rise of power or thereafter.
[1] It's worth pointing out that despite the Weimar Republic having a central government, many judges would deem defendents not guilty of murder or assault when the act was done "out of love for the country", which specifically meant the monarchy. This largely gave the Freikorps and nationalist groups free reign whereas socialists would be sentenced if they did the same.
[2] The Nazis weren't very popular in Germany when Hitler came to power. The popularity came from the power and even then it was largely artificial. The reason you see cheering crowds in historical documentaries is because those were the scenes the Nazis wanted you to see. You only saw a fraction of the people but it was implied (or outright said) that "the silent majority" was on your side if you agreed with the Nazis. Once they were sufficiently entrenched in power, joining the Party was just an easier way to do networking for your business or your career. You'd do the salute somewhat ironically and both of you would be in on the joke of it, but eventually it stopped being funny but you still did it. Then you had to do it.
1. They set up a network of forced labor camps.
2. They discriminated against Jews, justifying this by claiming that as rich capitalists they were enemies of socialism.
3. They claimed to represent the working class.
4. They invaded and captured other countries.
5. They were a dictatorship.
6. They were famous for their high levels of propaganda.
7. In their printed materials they stated explicitly "We are socialists", demanded a program of nationalization and stated that all citizens were equal.
8. They imprisoned, exiled or killed their political opponents.
9. Most importantly for this thread, they aggressively censored their opponents and directly controlled the media.
You can't tell what the answer is, because every point is correct for both of them. The differences were much smaller than their similarities.
This matters because it leads to people using NSDAP/USSR ideological tactics like censorship of their political opponents, whilst claiming to be fighting the very same.
This obvious comparison has been suppressed by systematic and vicious attacks on anyone who points it out for a very long time, so I doubt this post will get good reactions and unfortunately HN isn't a good forum for pointing this out because it tends to blame people for the reactions of others regardless of how polite or intellectually curious they may actually be, giving a kind of hecklers veto to discussions. But the confusion here leads to people repeating the mistakes of the past and trying to fight fire with fire, so it's really important to point out. That's why Germany is now punishing an American author for using a swastika in his criticism of politicians: the whole point of studying history is to be able to say "wait, that behaviour looks like something we've seen before" and yet the people doing that are now being attacked as Nazis themselves. This upside-down sort of behaviour is inevitable for as long as people keep insisting on upside-down interpretations of history. You can't claim to be fighting Nazi-ism whilst simultaneously using their tactics!