So there isn't just one fascism; there are multiple kinds of fascisms that are necessarily different from one another because it was a fundamentally syncretic ideology. Fascisms absorbed the rhetoric advocated by conservatives and the anxieties of the bourgeoisie in each country that it manifested in, meaning that each fascism had a distinct flair. All fascisms shared some broad similarities: a concern for man's alienation in industrial society, advocacy for corporatism, a rejection of positivism and liberalism, a rejection of socialism, liberalism and (to an extent) conservatism, virulent anti-communism and an emphasis on the power of will and unrestrained emotion. Beyond these base elements, different national fascisms had different emphases and different policies for ending industrial alienation based on the preexisting conditions of the country they developed in.

For example, French fascism was extremely elitist and conservative, socially but not biologically anti-Semitic (meaning that French fascists accepted Jews who served France in the military) and was fixed on destroying the Third Republic, Irish fascism was preoccupied with the status of the Irish Republic's independence treaty with the UK while Italian fascism was populist, preoccupied with creating a new Italian empire and (initially) not concerned with issues of race. All of these positions were initially articulated by each country's respective conservative, reactionary and bourgeois social stratas. In Germany, Nazism drew from preexisting reactionary platforms and bourgeois anxieties such as the necessity for the conquest and colonization of Eastern Europe, a strong conception of biological race and a hierarchy of races with Germans at the top, virulent anti-Semitism, discarding the Treaty of Versailles and punishing those who "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918.

From this wider perspective, we can argue that Nazism was one of many fascisms, that appeared so unique because it drew from political and social traditions that were popularly accepted in Germany but nowhere else in Europe to the same extent. We can also argue that it was the most extreme of all the fascisms in both its treatment of perceived political enemies and in its actual national and international political policies.

Nazism is (was) a branch of fascism. They did hold some different ideas from straight fascism however, such as the extreme racism and the whole death camp thing. A lot of Nazi ideology was taken from Mussolini, and mixed with a more Germanic outlook.