You’ve probably heard the idea that in the early 1930s when the NSDAP became strong that many Communists swapped over and became National Socialists.
There were popular jokes at the time to that effect.
But it’s not true—about 3% of the Communist electorate, KPD voters, swapped from Communism to National Socialism.
There was more movement from every other party towards National Socialism—which makes sense, because Communism was the hardest and most determined position.
Why would the hardcore swap?
So it was rare for people to move from KPD to NSDAP.
The idea is put about by social democrats who want to make out “it’s all the same thing, really, it’s all extremism, it’s all totalitarianism”—but it wasn’t so.
Communism and National Socialism are not the same thing.
You can tell from the way they make decisions.
Even though Stalin was in charge, all decisions were nominally run through the Politburo—Stalin was just “chief administrator for the nation”, for a central committee.
He was nicknamed “the grey blur”, as people used to call me, as it happens, because he moved so quickly in his bureaucratic chicanery.
But he didn’t speak mystically to the nation, couldn’t even speak Russian very well—so he was an outsider.
Hitler took sole responsibility for the state—which is a right-wing position.
And he was a religious or mystical leader for the state, not a rational bureaucrat.
What confuses people is that both regimes were brutal—so it’s assumed that means “the same”.
But one was the reaction to the other—Hitlerism was the extreme defensive reaction to an extreme leftist position.
It wasn’t “the same thing”—that was argued post-war by social democrats, like Arendt, who popularised the term “totalitarianism” in order to rehabilitate leftist ideas so disassociated from Stalinism.
The idea was “those were totalitarian twins, actually identical though they claimed to be different—what you really need is moderate social democracy” (which turns out, in the end, to be very similar in essence to Soviet Communism—as it was always intended to be).