After the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler, this loudmouth of a jurist demanded the immediate arrest and trial of the famous (and Catholic, a religion despised by the regime) Ernst Jünger for his critique of totalitarianism in On the Marble Cliffs, as the intellectual instigator against the life of the Führer. He was stopped only by Hitler because public opinion would not allow such a trial to commence against a war hero. An American bombing brought an end to him and his kangaroo court.

Additionally, over 70 percent of the Storm Troopers were militants who defected from the German Communist Party, important stooges in administering the bloody orders of the Third Reich. The KPD failed to stop its membership drainage, with Ernst Thälmann going as far as combining nationalist elements with communist principles in his 1930 manifesto. And no wonder! In 1929 and 1930 alone, the Communists and the Nazis joined hands and voted 70 percent of the time together in both the Landtag (Prussian Parliament) and Reichstag.

All of them were openly hostile towards free-market capitalism, subjugating individuals to collectivism in the name of the “people” or the “state,” and fiercely nationalistic. Let this serve as an important lesson: where socialism prevails, freedom erodes, and war follows.