This can be divided into two sections.

First the period 1933-1939, before the war.

Then the period 1939-1945, during the war.

During wartime, the state assumes a lot of control of the economy - regardless wether it is pursuing a socialist, a liberal, a conservative or a corporatist with rationing, price controls, bonds (mandatory or voluntary) and war production. There's little difference between various economic systems in time of war - all of them become more or less state-controlled in order to fuel the war.

What were nazi economic policies? That is hard to say specifically. Just like many other nazi policies, it varied over time, with whom was influential at the time and how seriously people took Hitler's long rants at dinners (often collected, written down and attempted as policies by his followers).

I don't think the nazi economic policies can be called socialist. The nazis never attempted to move ownership of industry to the state or worker collectives. When the nazi state siezed companies and industries from Jews and other "undesirables" they almost immediately sold those to Germans.

The nazis also heavily supressed unions and other socialist organisations.

The nazis tried to copy the pre-ww1 Bismarckian and industrialist "benovelent feudal industrialism" where the state would provide some help (pensions, unemployment benefits, invalid pensions, sick pay etc) and the companies would provide vacation retreats, cheap travel, good housing and so on to their employees. The nazis created the "kraft durch freude" (strength through joy) program which built sea resorts, cruise liners and other vacation resorts for regular workers. However, the program never gained much traction, and it was only a small minority of German workers that had a chance to enjoy any benefits of the program before the war started and it was suspended.

The nazis certainly did not run a liberal or market-liberal economic policy. They tried to regulate inflation through price and wage controls while printing reichsmarks that in theory were pegged to gold but impossibel to exchange for gold - causing the reichsmark to become useless for international trade. The Germans had to use hard currency (dollars or pounds mostly), gold or industrial products to pay for their imports. German international trade fell sharply 1933-1939.

The nazis did not run a conservative economic policy either - they defaulted on all foreign loans in early 1939, causing further problems with their international trade and continued to print MEFO (a extra currency to be used between companies and the state only) and reichsmark while spending huge amounts to re-arm. The hige budget deficit and international trade deficit quickly eroded the German gold reserve and it was only the capture of the Austrian and Czechoslovak gold reserves in March 1938 and March 1939 respectively that allowed the Germans to avoid economic collapse (or a 20-30% drop in military production, which the nazis most likely never would have agreed to).

Generally, the German economy of the nazis sided with the industrial gaints over the unions, attempted (with short and underfunded for what the grand intention was) some benovelent feudal industrialism, heavily and violently supressed all labour organisation, attempted corporatist organisation of the market and used heavy price and wage controls and enormous deficit spending.

It was not socialist (or leftist), it was not market-liberal and it was not classic conservative. A heavily regulated corporatist corrupt and sprawling special interest jockeying for influence economy is what the nazis ran.

I sense this question comes from a place of modern discourse, as it's been popular among some on the American right wing to compare socialism (or any left wing economic theory) with fascism. As the saying goes, "It's called national socialism for a reason!" However, a nation that outlaws unions, bans strikes, and endorses Social Darwinism is not compatible in any way with Socialism or Communism as those concepts would then or now be understood. While some elements of the early Nazi Party sympathized with workers' rights and found Socialism appealing (Ernst Röhm and the SA, an early rival to the SS), these elements were eventually purged, and the Nazis from the beginning identified Communists as a threat.

It can be difficult to define German fascism, because the political atmosphere in Germany was revolutionary, dangerous, and more than a bit fickle based on perceived state needs and internecine political rivalries. At its core, it's best to describe it as an economy designed to be on a permanent war footing, so the resources necessary to invade Europe could be appropriated by the state years ahead of time. Any resemblance to left-wing policy by the nationalization/subsidization of industry could be said to be incidental, because the goals simply weren't the same. Industry in Germany served the state, rather than "to each according to his need."

Fascism was long promoted as a "Third Way," separate from right or left. In a way it was, because it identified large swathes of the population as "undesirable" in its concept of Social Darwinism. This was a corruption of Darwinism, in fact, because Darwin himself recognized sympathy and compassion as an inherent and natural good:

"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature."

Social Darwinism set the stage for eugenics, and from there we eventually arrive at the pretexts for Germany's genocide. There are important differences between even the most hardline conservative ideology and fascism, though there is an argument to be made that these are only semantic differences.

More on Social Darwinism: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/the-taint-of-social-darwinism/

Slouching Towards Utopia, on World War II Economies in Germany and Russia: http://web.archive.org/web/20080511190923/http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_Purge15.html

I could probably answer this question but can I ask from when are you wanting to know? E.g. 1933-1939/1939-1945 or both? Because it would be slightly different depending on whether it was pre/during ww2.

Adrian Tooze, The Wages of Destruction is a great book on this. Nazi policies would be considered socialist today, as it was more or less a command economy in which the regime strictly controlled capital, both through actual money and mefo notes, which were bonds guaranteed against the largest companies and which helped the economy keep going despite the increasing isolation of the regime in the mid 1930s.

But to capitalists, Nazism was a godsend, as it protected them and their privileges from the alternative, socialism and communism. So right-wingers today who are keen to say Nazism was 'socialism' have some basis for the claim, but capital owners were very much supportive of Hitler, once the more traditional alternatives lost influence.

Ian Kershaw in "Hitler" makes the claim that Hitler had little understanding of economics (funny considering how many people think he was some kind of economic genius) and in fact found the entire subject boring. This lead to Hitler basically giving the order to his underlings who were running the economy to do whatever they needed to do as long as it wasn't socialist.

The 1934 you mentioned was the year of the Night of the Long Knives. This was when Hitler purged Germany and the NSDAP of those people who he thought were a risk to his rule. This included a number of the NSDAP's left wing faction, such as Roehm. Roehm was a committed socialist and kept bringing up the NSDAP's 1920's 25 Point Plan. This plan had many socialist policies. Roehm wanted the revolution to continue to bring forth these ideas. However, many in the party, including Hitler, had abandoned these ideas pretty much from the start and had moved the party more to the right. Members of the NSDAP such as Roehm who wouldn't move to the right with them were seen as a threat and were purged.

Another thing to consider is that Germany was put on a war making footing long before WW2 broke out in 1939. Hitler's aim was to get the country ready for war. He wasn't redistributing wealth so that the little guy could have it and control it he was doing it so factories could make more war goods. This made the owners of the factories richer which is hardly socialism.

It seems that the Nazis were neither to the left nor to the right, and found both the materialist ideologies of capitalism and communism, contemptible.

But that may just be opinion. So, in order to understand Nazi economics and to avoid much of the politically motivated obfuscation and nonsense that often seems to pass for scholarship on that era, you need to familiarise yourself with Gottfried Feder for one. He was a founding member and the economic theoretician of the National Socialist party.

Incidentally, it was apparently one of his lectures against 'Debt Slavery' that drew Adolf Hitler to join the Nazis. Once the NSDAP was elected to government however, he was only appointed Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Economics. Feder left politics three years later, accepting a professorship at the Technische Hochschule of Berlin.

Anyway, tldr, Gottfried Feder is the man you need to read.