I spent two lovely months in Bamberg, Germany, in 2025, and it became one of my favorite cities in the world. I count myself lucky to have experienced this World Heritage city and the inhabitants who welcomed me into their homes and lives.
The world was a different place in 1926, though. This is the date of the Bamberg Conference, held at the Gasthaus zum Goldenen Anker, where the leader of the Nazi party made it explicit that the party had very little to do with socialism, keeping the word in its name as bait primarily as a marketing ploy to attract working-class voters away from the Social Democrats and Communists. While a faction in the party did take socialism seriously, the party leader explicitly crushed it, speaking for several hours and dismantling the faction’s arguments.
At the end of the day, the Leader had won over the hearts and minds of several faction members, including Joseph Goebbels.
The Night of the Long Knives came 8 years later. The party’s leader spent the 1920s defeating the socialists and the 1930s killing them.
If you still believe that the Nazis were socialists because “it’s right there in the name,” I recommend The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett.
He explains the “Strasserite” (socialist) wing’s defeat very clearly. It reads almost like a warning manual on how democracies get subverted from within.
Photo: Period postcard
Memoirs of an Earthling 