Strasserism ( or , see ß) is a dissident, far-right ideology based on Nazism, named after brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, who were associated with the early Nazi movement. It shares Nazism's core rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism, racialism, anti-capitalism, antisemitism, and anti-communism, along with aspects of its populism. It is a type of "Third Position" that postures as revolutionary in order to advance an ultranationalist agenda, similar to the foundational fascist movements of Hitler and Mussolini.
The ideology is primarily the creation of Otto Strasser, who promoted what he claimed was a more "authentic" and revolutionary "German Socialism" in opposition to Hitler. His vision called for a radical restructuring of society based on a rejection of urban industrialism, aiming for a "de-proletarianized" agrarian society governed by "state feudalism." Under this system, society would be organized into hierarchical estates ruled by a cultivated elite, with private property replaced by medieval-style fiefs (Erblehen) and trade guilds. To achieve this vision, he advocated for relocating urban populations to the countryside (de-urbanization), abolishing heavy industry by dismantling it into small decentralized structures, and replacing international finance with a barter economy, while advocating for the revival of domestic private bankers and unsecured interest-bearing loans.
Gregor Strasser remained within the Nazi leadership until his resignation in 1932 and is characterized by historians as a pragmatic party organizer rather than a committed ideologue. He sought to gain power by convincing Hitler to accept pragmatic coalitions and compromises with the existing state. He never joined Otto's dissident movement and was murdered during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives.
Scholars have largely debated narratives about the Strasserist ideology. Otto Strasser's accounts of his conflict with Hitler are considered unreliable by historians. The 1932 Sofortprogramm promoted by Gregor, was largely plagiarized from the ideas of bourgeois reformers at the time. Politically, Otto's 1930 split from the Nazi party is noted as having had minimal impact, despite the fact that he at times received material support from institutions like British intelligence and, according to contemporary reports and his own claims, certain German industrialists.
In the post-war era, where overt Nazism was proscribed, the "Strasserist" label itself was repurposed as a guise for various far-right groups, including both Strasser's own followers and figures with direct continuities to Hitlerite Nazism. According to historian Christoph Hendrik Müller, this allowed them to use its nominally "anti-capitalist" and anti-liberal rhetoric as a legal vehicle for coded antisemitism, while distancing themselves from the Hitler regime.
In parallel, Otto Strasser modified his doctrine into "Solidarism" (Solidarismus) and attempted to frame it as aligned with Catholic social teaching, avocating for a tripartite co-ownership structure involving the state, employees, and private enterprise within the capitalist mode of production, and calling for three "White and Christian federations."
Principles and characteristics
Self-positioning Otto Strasser's unique self-positioning predated his entry into the Nazi Party. In his own accounts of his service in the Freikorps—where he participated in the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic—he portrayed himself as "the Red Lieutenant". According to this narrative, Strasser urged the old Imperial officer corps not to simply repress the workers' longing for social justice, but to "give guidance and leadership" to it, arguing that the traditional "governing classes" should adopt the socialist cause themselves and offer a national alternative to the Communist leadership he was taking up arms against. Note: Douglas Reed was an apologist and biographer for Strasser.
Like mainstream Nazism, Strasserism saw the nation and its "nature", rather than class, as the central organizing principle of society. Strasserism's main difference from mainstream Nazism lies in a detailed and unique ideological framework for a radical, total reconstruction of society. Otto Strasser advocated for what he claimed was a more authentically socialistic alternative to what he condemned as Hitler's state-managed capitalism, and he labeled his own ideology "German Socialism." He contrasted his vision with what he considered Hitler's deviation from the movement's original path, particularly the party's dealings with capitalist interests and Hitler's specific strategies for seizing power, which he saw as a betrayal of anti-materialism and the German labour.
Otto Strasser made a consistent effort to portray his own faction as the genuine "left-wing" of the Nazi movement. In his 1943 memoir Flight from Terror, he claimed that the Nazi Party was only seen as the "Rightest" party due to Hitler's "pro-monarchist statements and industrial support," while asserting his own Prussian membership was "far more left than right". In the same passage, he presented General Erich Ludendorff as their own candidate, meant as an alternative to the mainstream conservative candidate, whom he portrays as a heroic figure in the earlier parts of the work. In his book Germany Tomorrow, published three years prior to this memoir, Strasser described the rejection of Prussian militarism as one of his key political objectives, condemned Prussia itself as an "appendage to Russia" and advocate for its partition.
Otto Strasser also equated Hitler's regime with both Mussolini's Fascism and Stalin's Bolshevism and criticized all three as totalitarian "State Capitalism" with oppressive bureaucracy. He condemned "State Socialism," which he considered to be the same as "State Capitalism," and presented his own model as the realization of a true "people's (nation's) State" (Volksstaat).
To express his opposition to the Führerprinzip, Otto Strasser reported that during his debate with Hitler in 1930, he had challenged the idea of human agency in history and dismissed the role of "great men" and even humanity itself ("Men") in shaping the history. Instead, human beings were nothing more than "the emissaries, the instruments of destiny."
In Otto Strasser's book Germany Tomorrow, he cited both Oswald Spengler and Tomáš G. Masaryk as the philosophers that guided his vision of "German Socialism."
Strasser later presented his ideology under the term "Solidarism": "Capitalism, the class rule from above, is the system of economic insecurity. Communism, the class rule from below, is the system of personal unfreedom. Solidarism is the system of economic security and personal freedom, in which all classes and estates work together for the common good." His motto was: "Monopolies for no one—property for everyone."
Racism and antisemitism
The early 1925/26 Strasser Program, with Otto as its primary ideologue and Gregor as its political face and promoter, proposed a systematic plan for segregation and expulsion of the Jewish population. It called for the expulsion of all Jewish immigrants who arrived after 1914, and also for the stripping of citizenship from all German Jews, who were to be legally reclassified as "foreigners" and "Palestinians" and lose all political rights.Kühnl, Reinhard, 'Zur Programmatik der nationalsozialistischen Linken: Das Strasser-Programm von 1925/26', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte vol. 14 (1966), No. 3, p. 327-330.
In Otto Strasser's 1930 "Fourteen Theses," he accused "Jewry" (Judentum) of destroying the "German soul" and asserted that this destructive behavior stemmed "partly out of racial compulsion" (teils aus Artzwang) and "partly out of will", arguing that Jews represented an inherent threat of "racial degeneration" (rassische Entartung) to the German organism.Strasser, Otto (1930). Die 14 Thesen der Deutschen Revolution.
In his 1940 book Germany Tomorrow, Strasser advocated for the support of Zionism. He presented Zionism not only as a way to separate the Jewish population from Germany, but also as a "genuine endeavour for the renovation of Judaism" that deserved the support of all "nation-conscious" peoples. While Strasser also deemed assimilation or "national minority" status as theoretical options to solve the "Jewish Problem", he allows the former only if the German Jews abandoned Judaism completely and guaranteed to become German "in every respect."
Strasser's vision of a "German Socialism" involved the preservation of a "White Europe", a goal already stated in his 1930 "Fourteen Theses". In 1952, he advocated for a global order with three "White and Christian federations"—the Confederation of Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the Pan-American Union.
After World War II, Strasser claimed that his prolonged exile was not due to the denazification policies of the Allies, but was the result of a conspiracy by Jewish, Communist, and Allied forces working together to silence him. Similarly, as early as 1942, Otto's close collaborator, Father Bernhard Strasser, claimed that the opposition to Otto in the West was orchestrated by "Communists and Jews"; he also attacked rival anti-Hitler figures as being "Jewish-maintained."
Douglas Reed, one of Otto Strasser's post-war sympathizers, attempted to portray Strasser's stance as a moral opposition to Hitlerian ultranationalism in his work Prisoner of Ottawa. Reed drew a moral equivalence between the Zionist state and the Hitler regime and attacked both as the products of cruelity and exclusivity; he also suggested that Jewish distinctiveness itself inevitably provoked persecution, casting Strasser not as an exclusionist, but as a figure with historical prescience whose proposals provided a necessary solution against "Political Zionism". This narrative contradicts Strasser's 1925 program, which tried to reclassify Jews as "Palestinians", and his advocation for Zionism to facilitate Jewish emigration in the 1940s.
Socioeconomic model Strasser called for the deproletarianization, re-agrarianization, and de-urbanization of Germany. To achieve these, he advocated decentralizing industry and population away from major urban centres to a network of smaller towns and rural communities, arguing that this was not only made practical by modern technologies like long-distance electricity transmission, but was also necessary to make Germany less vulnerable to aerial bombing and gas attacks. Strasser also called for the complete breakup of all large landed estates, with their ultimate ownership transferred to the nation. This policy was aimed at the traditional Prussian Junker aristocracy, whom he identified as the social pillar of militarism and reaction that must be removed.