A lot of this (non)-controversy stems from a lack of understanding of the interwar German Right.
Much of the German Right - particularly the
revolutionary conservatives, exemplified by novelist
Ernst Junger - had no problems whatsoever with the concept of socialism itself; many, in fact, were to the left (economically) than even the more extreme partisans of our Democratic Party - perhaps the closest American equivalent to them today are our Southern populists, but unlike those rabble, the revolutionary conservatives grounded their political view on something approaching an intellectual philosophy.
The root of their vehement opposition to communism lay not in its economic arrangement, but in its internationalism: they were staunch nationalists first and foremost, and utterly loathed anything which might require them to reject the German nation-State for such amorphous concepts as the "international
proletariat". As a corollary to this, they were vehemently militaristic as well, and their ideal State was shared with Hegel: a universalized vision of the Prussian military aristocracy.
Their chief concern was "
Blud und Boden" - blood and the soil. They rejected free-market capitalism and political liberalism more generally because, they felt, such forces reduced the community to one of materialistic trade, atomizing the 'natural' bonds between the individual and society in the process. At the same time, Marxism's roots in scientific materialism was utterly repugnant to them - this is the basis of their 'Third Way' political philosophy, that sought to combat materialism and individualism in
all of its forms.
And so the German Right during the years prior to the Nazification of Germany was something that might seem bizarre to
modern readers, but which was pieced together holistically and made perfect sense within its own intellectual context: a movement that prioritized the (national and racial) community above all else - they were more socially conservative than any non-fringe American conservatism could possibly be, but they inherited from Bismarck and German political thought more generally an appreciation for tariffs and support for a minimal social safety net. Libertarianism in Germany between the wars was a purely left-wing phenomenon; the political status-quo was conservative Statism.
Were some of them socialists? Yes. Were
any of them 'leftists'? No, most absolutely not. And this is the intellectual tradition that Hitler and the NSDAP took and vulgarized to make it more palatable to the masses. While I myself reject revolutionary conservatism, it is at least honest with itself and with others, which is more than can be said for American conservatism and Reaganism, which are both wholly worthless. Unlike the American conservatives, the interwar German Right was not saddled with a political need to pretend to want freedom or to pretend to preserve individualism, and was hence free to make its true thoughts publicly known.
At the time, in a German context, Hitler would have been recognized to be an extreme right-winger (there being
no liberal right-wing movement in Germany of the day). Today, in an American context, where Statism is usually taken to be a left-wing phenomenon, it becomes a little more blurry.
