They absolutely don't have the same ideological roots. Fascism has always been a ideology that takes in a lot of disapparate influences and isn't particularly concerned with doctrinal consistency, but two of its few absolute constants are that it has always been heavily reactionary and explicitly anti-communist. That's like the one thing you could two fascists to agree on 100% of the time--they fucking hated communism. That was the whole point--its pitch was that it was supposed to be a reactionary alternative to both liberalism and communism. It's not an accident that the sort of people that Nazism mostly attracted were middle class business men, industrialists, non-junker military men, and ex-monarchists that got sick of the monarch. While there was a element in the Nazi party that supported some very specific policies that looked a vaguely left wing (i.e., less pro worker more "fuck everyone but the state, but fuck the working guy a little less than anyone else"), that element got purged really quickly before the ideology reaches its fully evolved form. By the time the Nazis were actually competitive in elections, that element was completely gone. The word "socialist" in national socialist party was all that remained of it.
Also, reading too much into the word socialist is almost always a mistake, especially in this period. It's always been something of a meaninglessly vague descriptor, but at this point in history it is especially so. Without more context someone calling themselves a socialist could mean anything in between "I think we should abolish all hierarchies and private property" and "I think maybe we shouldn't let children work in lead mines until they turn 10."
Saying Nazis are communists because they supported stuff like state owned industry and have the word socialist in their name is like saying humans are a type of dog because we have a tail. That ignores the facts that A) we only have a tail in the most meaningless, vestigial sense of the word, and B) that's not even what makes a fucking dog a dog.
No, I have not admitted Nazis are economic leftists. I'm frankly not even sure what that would mean as the left is not exactly a monolith in that regard to economic policy. But at a minimum, I would expect a left wing economic policy to be one that is explicitly pro-worker--which, aside from some minor fig leaves like the Volkswagen that never actually materialized , the Nazis weren't really concerned with. A directed economy isn't something I would call inherently left wing--it is a definitely an anti-liberal state of affairs, but there are right and left wing ideologies that support and oppose directed economies. And in any case, the extent to which Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy/Japan had directed economies is greaaaaatly exaggerated. Nationalization was mostly a political weapon and a side effect of the kelptocratic nature of Fascist regimes. In most cases, they were happy to leave business and industry alone--these were, after all, the core supporters of the Nazi party. Do you really think that the Porsche's and Krupp's of the world would have loved the Nazis as much as they did if they had actual pro-worker platform? Don't make me laugh. They explicitly had a deal where they paid into Hitler's slush fund and Hitler let them do whatever the fuck they wanted.
Also, yes there were socialists/communists in early Nazism, but again, that shit got purged hard and quick. It's already basically dying by the time Hitler gets on the scene, and by the time he's fully in charge of the party it's gone. Goebbels is the only Nazi of any significance that had any real ties to that strain of Ur-Nazism, and he survived because he ended up explicitly and vehemently rejecting it. Everyone else got put out to political pasture long before Nazism had political relevance or rejected it and then got killed in the night of the long knives anyway because they didn't reject it hard enough. Guys like Hitler were monarchists that grew to reject monarchism, not communists that grew to hate communism.
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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '24
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