Political Memes

Yeah, to claim that people like Ernst Roehm weren't socialist is revisionist, to put it mildly. Dude was anticapitalist and wanted to nationalize most industries.

From Wikipedia:

The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (English: National Socialist German Workers' Party) and they officially used the acronym NSDAP. The term "nazi" had been in use, before the rise of the NSDAP, as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant. It characterised an awkward and clumsy person, a yokel. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Igna(t)z (itself a variation of the name Ignatius)—Igna(t)z being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged.[17][18]

In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this. Using the earlier abbreviated term "Sozi" for Sozialist (English: Socialist) as an example,[19] they shortened the NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive "Nazi", in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the aforementioned term.[20][18][21][22][23][24] The first use of the term "Nazi" by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi ["The Nazi-Sozi"]. In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word "Nazi" only appears when linked with the word "Sozi" as an abbreviation of "National Socialism".[25]

After the NSDAP's rise to power in the 1930s, the use of the term "Nazi" by itself or in terms such as "Nazi Germany", "Nazi regime", and so on was popularised by German exiles outside the country, but not in Germany. From them, the term spread into other languages and it was eventually brought back into Germany after World War II.[21] The NSDAP briefly adopted the designation "Nazi" in an attempt to reappropriate the term, but it soon gave up this effort and generally avoided using the term while it was in power.[21][22] In each case, the authors typically referred to themselves as "National Socialists" and their movement as "National Socialism", but never as "Nazis". A compendium of Hitler's conversations from 1941 through 1944 entitled Hitler's Table Talk does not contain the word "Nazi" either.[26] In speeches by Hermann Göring, he never uses the term "Nazi".[27] Hitler Youth leader Melita Maschmann wrote a book about her experience entitled Account Rendered.[28] She did not refer to herself as a "Nazi", even though she was writing well after World War II. In 1933, 581 members of the National Socialist Party answered interview questions put to them by Professor Theodore Abel from Columbia University. They similarly did not refer to themselves as "Nazis".[29]

And to be even clearer: the only reason why they chose this name was to appeal to common people and workers, the biggest part of the electorate. And it worked.

One example of their bullshit: They promised an end to unemployment and they did manage to get millions back into a job! How, you ask? Why, by making them build public sector projects like the Autobahn in MANUAL LABOR. While back then obviously very good machines already existed. But they'd need 1 operator and not 10 "hard-working, strong Aryan men with shovels and pickaxes".

Of course, most of the public infrastructure projects didn't benefit the public. It benefitted Hitler's war machine a few years later. Can't roll your Panzers over dirt roads.

Source: I have the misfortune of choosing history as my academic path....