In a column earlier this month for the Daily Mail, conservative commentator Peter Hitchens lamented that “no one seems to know” that the Nazis were “very left-wing.” He cites evidence like the high taxes the German middle class had to pay to support the war effort and the fact that the Nazis and the Soviets held an “amicable prisoner swap” during their short-lived pact in 1939.

None of this comes within ten thousand miles of establishing his conclusion. It’s worth spelling out why not, given that Hitchens is arguing for a conclusion common on the Right. At least he’s trying to make a historical case, instead of replying on the usual semantic argument that the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists” so they must have been socialists. (To see what’s wrong with that one, ask yourself whether the German Democratic Republic was a democracy.)

The Nazis imposed strictly socially conservative values on German society. Under their rule, workers who tried to organize for better conditions on the job were brutally repressed while politically connected capitalists grew fabulously wealthy from state contracts. And the German left was exterminated en masse.