Nolte was not alone in dismissing the “socialism” of National Socialism, which others have characterized as either “fake” or the enemy of the socialist idea.19 German writers commonly identify “genuine socialism” with the established left-​wing parties of those times and today. Yet it is worth recalling that socialism came in infinite varieties that stretched back into the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, numerous parties around the globe declared that they were the “real” socialists, and they damned all the others.

Robert Gellately, Hitler's true believers: how ordinary people became Nazis, New York, New York, 2020, p. 16