Luis Aburto

Elon Musk is promoting a video that rewrites the history of Nazism to suit today’s far right. Here’s what happened in 1933, who made the video, and why it matters. Within weeks of Hitler taking power in January 1933, the organised left was being dismantled. Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists were rounded up, and Dachau opened in March, initially to imprison political opponents, above all Communists. On 2 May the Nazis smashed the independent trade unions and replaced them with the state-controlled German Labour Front. A week later, students burned the works of Marx and Kautsky, with a fire oath declaring itself “against class struggle and materialism”. Dachau’s first murders came on 12 April 1933, when the SS shot four Jewish prisoners: Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn and Erwin Kahn. Benario and Goldmann were young left-wing activists from Fürth. The very rich were treated differently. Many industrialists had feared the Nazis were socialists, so in January 1932 Hitler addressed Düsseldorf’s Industry Club, playing down his antisemitism and stressing his anti-Marxism to reassure them. Few backed him openly until he took power. On 20 February 1933, Hitler met leading industrialists, Gustav Krupp among them, and told them: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.” It was conceivable, he said, only where people had “a sound idea of authority and personality”. They contributed more than two million Reichsmarks to the election fund of Hitler’s coalition. Private ownership was preserved for compliant industrialists, company profits rose sharply, and in the mid-1930s the regime even sold state stakes in banks, steelworks and shipping back into private hands. In 1934, Hitler also had members of his own movement who took its anti-capitalist rhetoric seriously murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. Yes, the Nazis controlled prices, wages and investment, as Britain did in wartime. State control tells you how an economy is run, and the question that matters is whom it serves. The Nazi state crushed independent labour, protected compliant employers, and harnessed the economy to rearmament and conquest. That is why historians place Nazism on the far right, including conservatives such as Ernst Nolte, who saw anti-Marxism as fascism’s defining feature. The word in the party’s name was largely a recruiting device, designed to lure workers away from the real socialist and communist parties. A name settles nothing, any more than North Korea’s makes it democratic. The man Musk is amplifying is Brivael Le Pogam, the Paris-based co-founder of Argil, a Silicon Valley-backed company selling AI video avatars, who boasts of using AI to win hundreds of millions of views. His self-described “masterclass” spends minutes on price controls and the voting habits of American professors. It never once mentions the Holocaust. Race appears once, as “fuel”. He is candid about why. With Hitler on the right, he complains, anyone defending “borders” or “the nation” is “one step away from fascism”. That is “why Milei is far right” and “why people call Elon Musk a Nazi”. A nationalist politics is to be cleansed by relabelling history’s most murderous nationalist. He even cites Leo Strauss’s “reductio ad Hitlerum”, the fallacy of condemning an idea because Hitler held it, and then commits it from start to finish. And his test of freedom is simply the free market, which would place Pinochet’s Chile, with its torture and disappearances, on the side of freedom. So the world’s richest man is promoting an attempt to free the far right from its own history, turning the Nazis’ first victims into props for their persecutors. History records which side Germany’s richest men chose in 1933. It’s worth noticing who is now keen to blur it. It’s polished, confident and wrong, and it’s built to divide: anyone who objects is cast as the enemy of freedom. Freedom for whom? Remember who filled Dachau first.