During Thursday's live discussion between Elon Musk and Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in February's election, on the X (formerly Twitter)platform, both participants made many hard-to-verify claims, several of which DW's fact checkers have already looked into.
But one claim in particular, about the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), or Nazis, and World War II, was particularly off: Weidel said Adolf Hitler was not "right-wing," but a "communist." This historical revisionism, an attempt to retell the history of National Socialism, is not new. As nationalists rise in international politics, it is frequently being repeated.
Claim: "[The National Socialists] nationalized the entire industry. ... The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn't a conservative. ... He was a communist, socialist guy," Weidel told Musk. In a follow-up interview with the German broadcaster ntv, she repeatedly emphasized: "I don't deviate from this either: Adolf Hitler was a leftist."
This claim is false and trivializes the atrocities committed under Hitler and the Nazis from 1933 through 1945. The AfD, which in Germany is often classified as far right to extreme right, has repeatedly tried to distance itself from Nazism. Right-wing politicians in the United States, including Vice President-elect JD...
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