Progressives, socialists, and SJWs often point to what look like fascist arrangements between the State and private owners in general, but this is a major oversimplification, and they've had it backwards all along. Land, capital, businesses -- the means of production were only nominally privately owned. Yes, privatization took place -- but it was a nominal privatization. At the end of the day, nominal ownership over the means of production were contingent upon service, obedience, or usefulness to the State. Outputs, investments, and private so-called ownership of business was contingent upon submission to the direction and interests of the State. Planning was based on projected labor output rather than money.
Nazi economics retained only a vestige of capitalism due to Hitler's predisposition towards social darwinism:
Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than "parasitical". Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalise it. Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control. Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.
To compound the evidence, George Reisman gave a great lecture over a decade ago, describing at length how Ludwig von Mises aptly recognized and described the functions of the Nazi economy as de facto socialist, in stark contrast to the dishonest or ignorant claims of Marxists and Communists who wanted to distance their ideology from the horrors of Nazism. Lucky for us, said Marxists and Communists have been stuck in a relatively free society where they can't have their infamous book burning sessions and mass censorship, allowing us to excavate this reality underneath their preferred version of the events.
