| “ | I know that many of my Anglo-Saxon friends have sometimes been shocked by the semi-Fascist view they would occasionally hear expressed by German refugees, whose genuinely socialist convictions could not be doubted. But while these observers put this down to the others' being Germans, the true explanation is that they were socialists whose experience had carried them several stages beyond that yet reached by socialists in England and America. It is true, of course, that German socialists have found much support in their country from certain features of the Prussian tradition; and this kinship which in Germany both sides gloried, gives additional support to our main contention. But it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism. It was the prevalence of socialist views and not Prussianism that Germany had in common with Italy and Russia-and it was from the masses and not from the classes stepped in the Prussian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism arose. | ” |
| — Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944 | ||