Hitler was a communist, actually — and other things history didn't know until a livestream

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History has been wrong for eighty years, and it took a livestream with Elon Musk to set it right. During a live talk, Germany’s then-chancellor candidate for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, explained that Hitler “was a communist,” not right-wing. Historians, who have been doing this for a living, strongly disagree. But they were not on the livestream, so they do not count.

This is the great thing about historical revisionism on a live stream. You do not need a citation. You need a microphone and a host who will not interrupt. The Nazi party was founded in opposition to communism and Marxists. The word “Nazi” is literally a shortening of the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which spent its entire existence imprisoning, killing, and fighting actual communists. The first people sent to Dachau were communists and social democrats. But all of that is in books, and books do not have a live audience.

The move here is simple and worth naming: take a figure everyone agrees was far-right, claim he was actually on the other team, and therefore your far-right party cannot be the same kind of thing. It is a rebranding exercise that requires the audience to know nothing about the 1920s and 1930s. The good news is that this is a surprisingly low bar.

So, for the record: Hitler was not a communist. The AfD is not the Communist Party of Germany. And a livestream is not a peer-reviewed journal, no matter how many people are watching.

Satire verdict: The claim is false. The historians are right. The livestream was not a defense.