Nazi Hate of individualism and capitalism

Hitler’s Rejection of Individualism and Liberal Capitalism: From Mein Kampf to the Zweites Buch (Second Book)

Adolf Hitler’s worldview was built on the absolute subordination of the individual to the racial state and the total coordination (Gleichschaltung) of every sphere of life—political, cultural, and economic—under the will of the Führer. Both Mein Kampf (1925–1926) and the unpublished Zweites Buch (1928) make this unmistakably clear: liberalism, individualism, and what Hitler called “Jewish” or “international finance capitalism” were, in his eyes, mortal enemies of the German Volk and had to be eradicated root and branch.

The Destruction of Individualism

Hitler regarded the very idea of individual rights and personal freedom as a corrosive Jewish invention that dissolved the organic unity of the race. From Mein Kampf (1925, Ralph Manheim translation):

“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.” (Vol. I, Ch. 2)

“Any crossing of two beings not of the same level produces… a medium between the level of the two parents. […] Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life.” (Vol. I, Ch. 11)
(Here the individual has no right to choose a partner; biology and the state decide.)

In the Zweites Buch he is even more explicit:“The bourgeois world is governed by the view that the individual is everything and the community nothing… This individualistic attitude is the greatest enemy of a real national community.” (p. 25)

“Individualism… destroys the very foundation of any higher human community.” (p. 153)

The practical consequence is spelled out repeatedly: the individual exists only to serve the Volk; the Volk exists only to serve the Führer who embodies it. There is no private sphere, no personal ambition, no “human rights” that can stand above the demands of the racial state.

The Condemnation of Liberal Capitalism

Hitler did not oppose private property in principle (National Socialism always distinguished itself from Bolshevik communism), but he despised capitalism as it actually existed in the liberal-democratic West: stock-exchange capitalism, international finance, and the idea that the economy could be left to impersonal market forces or individual profit-seeking.

From Mein Kampf:

“The harder it was [for the Jew], the more he pushed himself into the circles of the ‘upper class’… In a short while he began to twist the whole State into an instrument of his own particular usury. […] The stock exchange began to triumph and prepared slowly but surely to determine the fate of the nation.” (Vol. I, Ch. 10)

“The internationalization of the German economic life had been begun even before the War through the medium of stock shares… One part of the German industrialists… took a hostile attitude toward the national interests.” (Vol. II, Ch. 14)

In the Zweites Buch the attack becomes systematic:“Capitalism as a whole… has become an instrument in the hands of the international Jew… The stock exchange has become the center of gravity of economic life.” (p. 149)

“The most terrible example of this madness is the bourgeois-social world of today, which in its capitalistic form has made the stock exchange the center of its economic thinking and feeling.” (p. 35)

“The capitalistic economic system… is in its deepest essence nothing other than the economic expression of the liberal-democratic worldview.” (p. 107).

The Positive Vision: Total Control by the Führer-State

Hitler demanded that every owner—factory director, landowner, shopkeeper—place his property and his decisions at the service of the racial community as defined by the Führer.

From Mein Kampf:

“The folkish state… must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure… It must see to it that only the healthy beget children… Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future.” (Vol. II, Ch. 2)

In the Zweites Buch he lays out the foreign-policy corollary: Germany must seize Lebensraum in the East, and the entire economy must be reoriented toward that war of conquest. Private economic freedom is therefore impossible:

“A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” (Mein Kampf, Vol. II, Ch. 2)

In practice this meant that after 1933 every aspect of German life—wages, prices, investment, labor allocation, what farmers could plant, what newspapers could print, whom one could marry—was brought under the control of the NSDAP state. The Reich Economics Ministry, the German Labor Front, the Four-Year Plan Office, and ultimately Hitler himself decided the destiny of every German and every mark.

Conclusion

Hitler’s writings leave no room for ambiguity. Individualism was “the greatest enemy of a real national community,” and liberal capitalism was simply “the economic expression of the liberal-democratic worldview”—both had to be crushed.

The only permissible freedom was the freedom to obey the Führer, who alone embodied the will of the racial Volk.

In the end, as the Zweites Buch and Mein Kampf both make clear, the National Socialist revolution was not about liberating the individual or the entrepreneur; it was about delivering the most total control over human life—spiritual, biological, and economic—that any modern state has ever attempted.