ANGELA MERKEL’S Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) has lost seats in elections in Germany’s eastern states and, last weekend, in Berlin as well.

The party making gains at the expense of the governing CDU is called Alternative for Germany – Alternative fur Deutschland (AFD) – which has been described as an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim party.

The only surprise about the rapid rise of the AFD is that anyone should be surprised.

Last year Frau Merkel announced that Germany would have an “open doors” immigration policy and allowed a million immigrants, mainly from Syria and Iraq and from Sudan and Somalia, via Libya.

Unsurprisingly, millions have fled the terrors of IS and the Syrian civil war and millions more, mainly Muslims, have followed the example of these refugees and made their way to Europe in search of a better quality of life.

So the million who entered Germany, courtesy of Frau Merkel’s “Come in everyone” policy were only the first wave: many hundreds of thousands more have arrived since and the “open doors” policy is still being operated.

A German living in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg reads the papers and watches TV news and sees chaotic scenes in Italy and Greece caused by the relentless influx of migrants. He fears that Germany, his own country, will be overwhelmed.

Neither the CDU nor the Social Democratic party shows any intention of reducing the immigrant numbers, so where does he turn except to the one party which promises to stem the tide – the AFD?

Hungarians, Austrians, the French and even the Swedes also fear being overwhelmed.

Some people are more than surprised: they are shocked and they compare these anti-immigration parties to the Nazis.

Politicians and media commentators are dismayed. For example, Justin Huggler wrote recently from Berlin, “The success of the AFD marks the far Right’s best performance in the German capital since 1945” – in other words, since Hitler’s Nazis. It is at this point that I should like to correct a widespread misapprehension by the introduction of some facts.

All the commentators describe the Nazis as a party of the far Right. They were not. They were the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie – the National Socialist German Workers Party. The Nazis were socialists, and of an extreme sort.

This is frequently denied by those who claim that Hitler proved he was no socialist by leaving the huge German armaments industries in the private ownership of firms such as Krupp. But this was a pretence.

The Nazi state decided the types and amounts of arms to be manufactured and they set the price. Thus the industrialists in nominal control were not free market capitalists but employees of the state.

Hitler ran a centralised command and control economy with a fist as iron as Stalin’s. Hitler’s four year economic plan was almost identical to Stalin’s five year plan.

All construction – think of the autobahns – was under state jurisdiction.

In 1936 Hitler imposed total control of wages and prices. The Soviet and the Nazi economic and political systems differed only in minor details. Both were socialist in all essentials.

You can call Hitler all the nasty names under the sun, and I hope you will. But don’t describe him and the Nazis as far Right.