Kanye West (now going by “Ye,” I believe) recently came out with a song called “Nigga Heil Hitler” which has that as a refrain in it. Jonathan Pageau has a very interesting video where he talks about it in the context of the breakdown of the post-WW2 concensus:

It’s very worth watching, but the basic point is that all foundational narratives made by men contain a contradiction in them and the post-WW2 narrative of good-vs-evil necessarily exculpated Stalin, who was in reality just as bad as Hitler, in order to make the WW2 narrative good-vs-evil.

He doesn’t focus on this aspect of it in the video because he’s more concerned with other things, but this very much explains why it was that the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is ignored by most people. This is why people pretend that they weren’t real socialists or they maybe started out as real socialists but then abandoned it once they gained power, etc. etc. They needed to explain the Nazis as a unique evil different from the evil of anyone on the Allies’ side. And since there’s not actually very much that distinguishes the Nazis from the Communists—in the 1930s people would flip flop between them to the point where the Nazis had an insult “beefsteak Nazi” meaning someone brown on the outside but red on the inside—what people came up with was the Nazis being racist. Well, that and nationalist. Sort of.

Regarding the racism, it’s not like the communists weren’t racists—they were—but racism wasn’t central to their socialism while it was central to the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. So this one is at least a difference. And while you could find plenty of racism in 1930s/1940s America, it was, at least, a different kind of racism. And especially after the civil rights movement of the 1950s, this ceased to be such a problem.

The nationalism of the Nazis is a curious issue because it is true it’s a major distinction between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis were national socialists while the communists were international socialists. But that meant, in practice, that Hitler only wanted to conquer most of Europe while Stalin wanted to conquer the world. That’s not really the kind of distinction that was desired, though, so people tended to pretend that Hitler wanted to conquer the world. Certainly that was what I was taught when I was a child.

This is a very interesting point and explains a lot of the modern world.