The usual terms. Five claims you likely saw this week, what happened when each was checked, and what was true underneath. Three came from the right, one from the left, and one from a lawyer. The week’s pattern is at the end, and it is the strangest one this column has had, because no outside source was required to kill any of them.
1. Hitler was a far-left socialist.
The claim. On Friday, Elon Musk quoted a French account that had been complaining about getting “history lessons” in its replies and added: “Hitler was a far left socialist. Literally in the name of his party!” He has more than 200 million followers and the post went where his posts go.
What happened when it was checked. The check was performed by Grok, the AI his company builds and his platform runs, when a user asked it whether the “socialist” in the party’s name was anything other than Nazi propaganda. Grok answered within the hour: “Nazis added ‘socialist’ to their name as propaganda to lure workers from actual leftist parties.” It went on that Hitler rejected Marxism, banned unions, jailed socialists and communists, and “killed his own party’s left wing in 1934,” and that “Mainstream historians place Nazism on the far right.” A second user asked it why its owner was spreading the claim. Grok cited Kershaw, Evans, Britannica and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and added a sentence that deserves to outlive the week: “No owner dictates facts.”
What was true underneath. The name. The German Workers’ Party added “National Socialist” in 1920 to compete with the Social Democrats and the Communists for the same factory floors, and then spent the next thirteen years destroying both. On May 2, 1933, the SA occupied every trade union office in the country, and the unions were dissolved the following day. The first prisoners marched into Dachau in March 1933 were Communists and Social Democrats. On June 30, 1934, Gregor Strasser, the leader of the party’s anti-capitalist wing, was shot through the window of his cell during the purge that also killed Röhm. Otto Strasser had been expelled four years earlier for taking the word socialist seriously. The name survived because it was never a description, which is the point Grok made in fewer words, to its owner, on his own product.