One channel for transmitting Communist models to the Nazi movement were right-wing intellectuals with a left-wing bent close to Hitler, known as the … - Richard Pipes

For historians of the left even to raise the question of affinities between Soviet Communism and ‘Fascism’ is tantamount to conceding the possibility of a causal relationship. Since ‘Fascism’ for them is by definition the antithesis of socialism and Communism, no such affinities can be admitted and the sources of ‘Fascism’ must be sought exclusively in conservative ideas and capitalist practices. In the Soviet Union this trend went so far the under Lenin, Stalin and their immediate successor, it was forbidden to use the term “National Socialist.”

Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property. Property was to be respected, but only as long as the owner used it for the benefit of the nation and state: in the words of a Nazi theorist, ‘[P]roperty was . . . no longer a private affair but a kind of State concession, limited by the condition that it be put to ‘correct’ use.’

From 1920 onward, [Mussolini] depicted Italy as a ‘proletarian’ nation exploited by hostile ‘plutocratic’ countries determined to deny her her rightful place under the sun. The true class struggle, according to Fascist doctrine, was the struggle between nations. Fascism strove to surmount narrow class allegiances: all classes had to subordinate their private interests to those of the nation and collaborate against the external enemy.