It was really their doctrine of racial exceptionalism that bit the Nazis in the ass hard.
That “Nazis think whites are the master race” claim is a post-war retcon. The German armed forces had Māoris, Pacific Islanders, Tibetans, Africans, Indians, Asians, Slavs etc. and even Jews. They were the most diverse fighting force in the entire war. Blacks were part of the NatSoc movement from the start.
If they would have promoted Nationalism in the sense that every ethnicity should have its homeland and no ethnic diversity to minimize interior conflict, they could have gotten massive support from the integrated ethnicities of the empires of the time, the colonial ones and the communist ones.
National Socialism was intended to set and example for the foreign volunteers, who would then take it back to their home countries and establish it there. It was intended to be an oppositional force to Jewish Bolshevism and Marxism, which Hitler feared would take over the world, destroying individual nations’ ability to chart their own futures. It was absolutely a political movement that supported the notion that each ethnicity should have a homeland.
They could still have thrived like that, with the Germans safeguarding their independence in exchange for economic and political influence, kind of like the Americans did it after WW2.
Could have broken down both the British and the Soviets with that, but they had to be dictatorial, supremacist overlords. Didn't make them many friends, imagine that.
They did thrive for a while. The Anschluss was the first step in establishing a wider scope to eject Jewish communists, Bolshevists and Marxists from the European continent. The next steps were, of course, military occupation and the ejection of these undesirables to British Palestine (the Haavara agreement). Unfortunately the kind of people targeted worked collectively and globally, and were happier to nudge the world into its greatest war rather than surrender their dream of absolute dominance free of restriction by national borders.
Don’t forget that after Hitler’s fall, even Patton wanted to team up with Germany and steamroll the Red Army back to Moscow and destroy Stalin and Communism, and history has proven that would have likely been a far smarter move than leaving that cancer to fester.
Rejecting National Socialism because Jews told you it was bad is like declining chemotherapy because the cancer tells you you’re better off without it.
Tagging
@John.Doe as a fellow NatSoc in case he wants to chime in.
