The main origin point for this particular quote is John Toland's 1976 biography of Hitler. Toland translates and cites this speech as a 1 May 1927 speech, but his citation is absent and there are some who argue that Toland cribbed the speech from an earlier one from Otto Strasser, who was one of the leaders of the small left-wing of the NSDAP. This is not completely outside the realm of possibility since Toland was not the most scrupulous of researchers and Hitler gave a lot of speeches, so it is possible that he confused Strasser's speech for Hitler's, or even was duped by Strasser claiming his speech as coming from the mouth of Hitler.

But assuming Toland's translation and source is accurate, putting the quote into a pat meme is disingenuous to the Toland's biography and indicates someone did not read the book. Toland cited the speech as an example of how Hitler to bait the German left and appeal to German workers by reclaiming the title socialist for the NSDAP's own Völkisch brand of class relations. It not only reigned in the left-wing of the Party like the Strasser brothers, who were engaging in a political turf war with Goebbels in April 1927, but it was also a direct provocation of the Left in the hopes of delegitimizing it. May Day was a major holiday for both the KPD and SPD and this was a period in which the NSDAP was rebranding itself as a mainstream political party after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. Seizing enemy "territory" was one of the common tactics of the NSDAP in its late Weimar phase, and in this case the claim was rhetorical, not physical like a neighborhood. Replicating this component of the speech without any attention to the Völkisch components of NSDAP socialism also removes vital components of how Hitler defined his economic program.

This type of Völkisch socialism had little in common with the political definition of socialism in 2017, or even that of the interwar period. For the NSDAP, they had their own definition of "socialism," one that was inextricably linked to their construction of a racially-based Volksgemeinschaft and mediated by the party-controlled state.

In his "Why We Are Antisemites" speech delivered in 1920 and later much publicized after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hitler was already differentiating his own brand of socialism from its Marxist-influenced contemporaries:

Thus we can see the two great differences between races: Aryanism means ethical perception of work and that which we today so often hear – socialism, community spirit, common good before own good. Jewry means egoistic attitude to work and thereby mammonism and materialism, the opposite of socialism. ... Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.

Beneath the appalling antisemitism, Hitler was already outlining what he envisioned as his own new definition of socialism: one in which socialism is a sober racial community in which class differences between Aryans have been erased without any recourse to class warfare. In this schema, there is no real need to fundamentally alter the relationship between capital and labor, as a true racial solidarity trumps such divisions.

The anti-capitalist component of the NSDAP platform was predicated on a notion that there was nothing inherently wrong with capital (i.e. private wealth), but a rather specific definition of capitalism. The NSDAP celebrated industrialists like the Krupp family that built massive, world-competitive concerns as a sign of German genius and promised that German economic domination over various arenas would be increased under the aegis of the NSDAP. Hitler would claim to be setting the tone for industry by making much of his refusal to take his Chancellor's salary in 1933, promoting an image of an ascetic German leader whose legacy was not in personal wealth but what he built (he quietly began drawing a salary a year later and the graft from bribes and other gifts undercut his claims to be a poor simple servant of the German people). But complementing this sanguine view of German industry was an inverse of parasitic exploitation that created nothing lasting. Not surprisingly, the NSDAP ideologues associated this predatory capitalism with Jews and other outsider groups that did not belong in the racial Volksgemeinschaft. But the line between good and bad forms of capitalism was always hazy during the Third Reich and the fear that the state could turn on private wealth was one of the soft levers used by the state to get businesses to comply with directives like Aryanization or rearmament. Furthermore, redistribution of wealth in the Third Reich was never about about fundamentally altering capitalist exchanges or production, but rather taking back wealth that had allegedly been stolen or ill-gotten by enemies of the people's community. Ideally, purging out racial Feinds would resolve the majority of the problems of capitalism according to National Socialism.

Debating whether or not Hitler was a socialist is a foolish game that generates far more heat than light. The Third Reich never disavowed the word, but they pursued something they called socialism that was very unrecognizable and different than conventional definitions of the political term. Rather than trying to connect this idea to current political movements, it is much more useful line of historical inquiry to explore what exactly Hitler and his followers meant when they invoked socialism in their political rhetoric.