Your post is essentially misdirection. Strasser wasn't the only member of the Nazi party that favored socialism. I seem recall that both Goebbels and Eichmann survived the Night of the Long Knives (A bit of an understatement.) for example. The National Socialists were not simply engaged in rhetoric but enacted a variety of policies consistent with socialism. I can understand the desperate attempt to claim that the National Socialists weren't really socialists in any way since some people conflate the concepts of socialism and goodness and the Nazis were certainly not good.
Hitler's Handouts - Inside the Nazis' welfare state
Adolf Eichmann viewed National Socialism and communism as “quasi-siblings,” explaining in his memoirs that he “inclined towards the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.” As late as 1944, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels publicly celebrated “our socialism,” reminding his war-weary subjects that Germany “alone [has] the best social welfare measures.” ....
.... To “achieve a truly socialist division of personal assets,” he [Aly] writes, Hitler implemented a variety of interventionist economic policies, including price and rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes, frequent “polemics against landlords,” subsidies to German farmers as protection “against the vagaries of weather and the world market,” and harsh taxes on capital gains, which Hitler himself had denounced as “effortless income.”
Aly demonstrates convincingly that Nazi “domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime.” And with fresh memories of Weimer inflation, “transferring the tax burden to corporations earned the leadership in Berlin considerable political capital, as the government keenly registered.”
For instance, at the outset of war Nazi economists established a “wartime tax of 50 percent on all wages” that applied only to the wealthiest Germans. In the end, Aly writes, “only 4 percent of the population paid the full 50 percent surcharge.”
Putting the Socialism Back Into National Socialism:
The idea that Nazism was an extreme form of "capitalism" and Hitler primarily a tool serving the interests of "big business" is a longstanding myth that even now retains a measure of popularity in some quarters. This, despite the fact that the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and that Nazi political strategy was explicitly based on combining the appeal of socialism with that of nationalism (thus the choice of name). Once in power, the Nazis even went so far as to institute a Four Year Plan for running the German economy, modeled in large part on the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans.
I. The Socialist Elements of Nazism.
Two recent books further explain the socialist elements of Nazi economic policy, and will hopefully put the final nails in the coffin of the myth that the Nazis were "capitalists" or free marketeers. In The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, historian Adam Tooze describes the statist nature of Nazi economic policy in great detail, and concludes that the Nazis imposed greater government control over the economy than any other noncommunist regime in modern history. (pp. 658-60). Tooze notes that, even before the outbreak of World War II, government military spending accounted for some 20% of the GDP, while much of the rest of the economy came under government control as a result of the Four Year Plan and other similar measures.
In Hitler's Beneficiaries: : Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Gotz Aly argues on the basis of extensive evidence, that German support for Nazi rule was maintained by the creation of a massive welfare state funded in large part by plunder captured in Hitler's foreign conquests, but also partly by means of "soak the rich" taxation within Germany itself.
