The long and the short of it is that the persecution of communists was not an ideological contradiction because the NSDAP really was not a socialist political movement and very little of its ideological origins stemmed from the Marxian German left.

The NSDAP were ideological scavengers and many of their thinkers were bottom-feeders, much of their ideas came from the German intellectual right. But beneath these half-baked ideas there were some consistent ideas within Nazi thought. In the case of capitalism, the NSDAP ideological platform did maintain a difference between schaffendes Kapital (creative/ productive capital) and Finanzkapitalismus (financial capitalism) or Raffendes Kapital (which translates roughly to "money-grubbing capitalism). These type of distinctions were common within the Weimar right and had their antecedents within the Kaiserreich. There was a strong strain among the German universities' mandarins that supported the closer cooperation of the state and productive industry. The First World War sharpened the division between productive/non-productive capitalism within the German right as the stock image of the UK in wartime propaganda was that it was the haven of Mammonism and finance. This continued in the postwar period and the destabilization of the currency only added more fuel for the attacks on finance. The penetration of American-style capitalism likewise upset many traditionalists within the German right which saw such consumerism as crass and contrary to German traditions of probity and craftsmanship. Not surprisingly, antisemitic ideologues often associated Raffendes Kapital with Jewish financiers as this charge of Jews achieving wealth through the magic of moving money had a pedigree that stretched back into the Middle Ages in Central Europe.

The 25 Points of the NSDAP platform might look "socialistic," but most of its pledges were about reigning in the excesses of Raffendes Kapital and their allegedly non-German practitioners. There were some elements of the NSDAP that wanted a more thorough restructuring of the economy and its social relations. The Strasser brothers and Ernst Röhm were the general leaders of the party's "left-wing," but this label is deceptive. The "left wing" was not really left in the sense of the contemporary German KPD or SPD was; the NSDAP's approach to the social question tended to stress that removing "foreign" elements within the economy would render socioeconomic distinctions moot. This built on right-wing German intellectuals' rejection of Marxian solutions to socioeconomic problems. Röhm's call for a national militia as tool for social leveling had much more to do with the mythology of the Burgfrieden of 1914 and the supposed camaraderie of the trenches rather than any bastardized Marxian ideology.

So Hitler once in power did not really walk back on the "socialism" of the NSDAP in favor of the industrialists after 1933. Goebbels's diary entries for the Bamberg Conference reveal Hitler already considered Aryan private property sacrosanct and Hitler did try to cultivate contacts within German industry. While most of Germany's industrial leaders favored the more mainstream right wing such as the DNVP, this often obscures the fact that Weimar's political right was not that ideologically far from the mainline thinking of the NSDAP on economic matters. One of the key factors in the NSDAP's startling 1930s rise in the polls was that it siphoned off considerable voters from right-wing parties like the DNVP. There was even more alignment between the NSDAP the German right over the hostility towards the Republic and its SPD supporters. NSDAP ideologues may have claimed that its government would offer "true socialism" to German workers, but it also made it clear that it would drive out "non-German" Marxists, end trade unionism, and prevent Raffendes Kapital from exploiting Germans. NSDAP ideologues likewise maintained that the Republic was an illegitimate creation of both the KPD and SPD in 1918 and that the two parties were in collaboration with each other to destroy Germany on behalf of the allegedly Jewish-run USSR. This was at odds with the historical record as the KPD's relationship with the Republic was strained at best, but this made little difference to men like Rosenberg or Goebbels. Additionally, the preceding were all stock positions among the Weimar right, but the NSDAP was far more doctrinaire about them and willing to use violence to accomplish them.

the Nazis never disavowed the S once in power, but Nazi discourse invariably used Sozialismus/sozialistische in combination with National or, more uncommonly, German. This conceptualization of socialism was deeply intertwined with racialist thought to the point where Nazi ideologues claimed socioeconomic distinctions were irrelevant given the natural instincts of racial solidarity. In the NSDAP's Weltanschauung, the Aryan business tycoon would create a business empire based on the craftsmanship and skills of his workers and both men would work in symbiosis. The dictatorship put incredibly little effort or interest in redistribution of Aryan wealth, changing the decades-old social insurance programs, or restructuring the German tax codes. Whether through the voluntary one pot Sundays or donations to the Winter Relief, the socioeconomic leveling under National Socialism was to be voluntary. State levers of coercion to get Germans to volunteer were present but not omnipresent. Not surprisingly, while many Germans participated in these programs there was a widespread sense that not everyone was pulling their fair share. The Third Reich's schema that divided the German people into a healthy Volkgemeinschaft composed of all walks of life and various racial traitors encouraged the social formation of in- and out- groups.

The state's intervention in the economy may have been severe, but it was not really to alter the socioeconomic fabric of Germany. Nationalization or quasi-nationalization through the command economy was related to rearmament far more than any restructuring of the economy and its people. The state might use the stick to bring industry to task for rearmament as it did with the Junkers firm, but both it and industry was much more comfortable with offering German businesses the carrots of a German-dominated European economy, state siding with industry over labor, and the promise of expropriated property of non-German and Jewish rivals. The state may have capped profits, but Germany's corporations often used the state to maximize capital investments and prepare for a not too-distant future where Germany and its private enterprises would dominate the continent. By the same token, the state seldom intervened to shut down small-scale or medium -sized private enterprises, even if doing so could lead to greater rationalization of the economy or the better employment of scarce German labor. The proprietors of these establishments were often the middle-class burgerlich bedrock for the NSDAP's support.

Fascist parties and the NSDAP certainly did try to brand themselves as a "third way," but this is rhetoric that is all too common among insurgent political movements. So taking these claims of propagandists at face value often generates more heat than light. Fascist movements, including the NSDAP, made common cause with the traditional right once in power. This political alliance was not without its frictions and mutual loathings but the fact is that fascism sought to co-opt and use its right-wing allies to buttress their dictatorships.