Mistaken? I think not! Perhaps you should consider your penchant for hyperbole………….

When you say “during the tenure of the non-agression pact, the Communist party was LEGALIZED in Germany, Hitler HAD to do it because the Communist were then his allies.” This is not the whole fabric of the truth.

I am making the assumption you were not doing an imitation of Alan Jay Lerner’s Zoltan Kaparthy, but that you simply have been victimized by being fed inadequate bits of information.

Someone failed to inform you that “non-agression” pacts were a favorite tool of that right wing zealot, Hitler. In 1934 such a pact was concluded with Poland. Typical of Hitler’s pacts, it was best described as both pragmatic and cynical. In 1935 Hitler signed a naval treaty with England in which a limited naval build-up was guaranteed. In 1936 Hitler adopted a positive anti-communist foreign policy by his direct intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1936 a government of left-wing liberals, socialists, and communists had been elected by Spain. General Francisco Franco was head of a fascist militia and with aid from Italy and Germany started a bloody civil war. The republican forces were supported by the Soviet Union and France. Britain gave some naval aid, and the American Brigade also fought on the anti-fascist side. Ernest Hemminway made all of this famous in “For Whom The Bells Toll.” In November of 1936 Mussolini committed to a pact with Nazi Germany. Also in 1936 Hitler signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact, and in 1937 Italy joined this pact. Thus Hitler cemented anti-communist resistance in both Europe and the Pacific.

In 1938 Hitler concluded the Munich agreement, which was a non-agression pact between Germany and Britain. Hitler concluded another one with France that same year.

The pact you have been tricked into making so much of was the one conducted by Hitler’s foreign minister Ribbentrop in August 1939 and known as the Hitler-Stalin pact. Hitler’s pragmatic purpose for this pact was his hope that he could attack Poland without interference.

Somewhere along the line you should come to realize that communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism and a representative democracy are all different concepts and to a real extent, antagonistic towards one another. And to another extent, due to the concept of convergence, they have all borrowed elements from each other and tend to move together over time.

You are correct in recognizing Hitler’s anti-democratic attitudes. To the same extent the Nazi idea of Volksgemeinschaft was anti-socialist and had a vision of social unity that stressed ethnic unity in opposition to labor unions, communists, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, socialists, capitalists, handicapped, resisters, Slavs,Africans, the physically weak and anyone else not part of the Nazi party. Business and Industry went along with the Nazi movement because they thought nazi’s could be controlled and the labor unions and the communists would not be allowed to be a problem. Industry saw the nazi party as a management tool to control the labor movement. Under Hitler the servants of Industry soon became the masters, but it was a symbiotic arrangement. Hitler gave industry leaders government and party positions.

Somehow you were misled into thinking that as a result of the pact that between 1939 and June 1941 the left was not only not persecuted by Hitler, but getting along with the Nazis, or as you prosaically put it, “the left DID kiss Hitler’s ass.” Actually in 1933 the German government outlawed freedom of the press, all labor unions, and all political parties except the Nazies. This is according to the account of Walter Ulbricht, founder of the German Communist part who had to flee Germany in 1933. Ulbricht re-entered Germany with the Russian troops in 1945. In 1949 he became deputy premier of the GDR and was responsible for building the Berlin wall in 1961. It seems he should know.

Publius