Nazi leaders courted Communist support to govern against any parliamentary majority

Evidence

The founders of the Nazi party referred to it occasionally even before Hitler took over as a “party of the Left.” An incident which occurred after the parliamentary elections of 1932 is also interesting: “Gregor Strasser bitterly pointed out to his Leader that before the elections the National Socialists in the Reichstag might have formed a majority with the Center; now this possibility was ended, the two parties were less than half of parliament;…But with the Communists they still had a majority, Hitler replied; no one can govern against us” (Heiden, op. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2561

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Foundations Module 2 work: the Nazi self-conception as a ‘party of the Left’ shows the class-identity instability that the subsequent Islamophobia readings assume when analyzing populist movement politics.