From The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes, 2018) p157
Hitler and Lenin: Dark Modernism
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Just as von Seeckt’s Prussian Junker army, radicalised by defeat, found much to agree on with the Red Army, so Hitler’s ideas were closer to Lenin’s than to any traditional European conservatism. Both Lenin and Hitler appealed to perverted versions of that great 19th-century liberal ideology (as seen in Hegel, Marx and Darwin): the idea of of progress-through-struggle-to-utopia. This is a notion fundamentally at odds with conservative thought. In both Leninism and Nazism, that pre-1914 ideological DNA had been deformed and hardened by the industrial slaughter of the Great War. Hitler and Lenin cared as little as a WW1 general had for the fate of any individual. They defined Progress solely in terms of the Masses, be they the Workers or the German Race, and were happy to condemn — literally, to condemn to death ~ anyone they regarded as a block to that Progress. It’s no coincidence that both were fascinated by Fordism, the cult of mechanised modernity centred on the high-tech guru of the new production-line era, Henry Ford.
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