” a common sight was West German Mercedes and BMW’s lying kaput at the side of the potholed roads, while the Trabants rolled merrily on. So don’t mock the Trab!”

So have you been to Liverpool; or Dundee?

Hitler had no sympathy with the syndicalist tendencies of the NSBO, and in January 1934 a new Law for the Ordering of National Labour effectively suppressed independent working-class factory organisations, even Nazi ones, and put questions of wages and conditions in the hands of the Trustees of Labour (Treuhänder der Arbeit), dominated by the employers. At the same time Muchow was purged and Ley’s control over the DAF re-established. The NSBO was completely suppressed and the DAF became little more than an arm of the state for the more efficient deployment and disciplining of labour to serve the needs of the regime, particularly its massive expansion of the arms industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ley

Re:

perhaps it would be better to say that the nazis were a kind of socialists until the point where the conservative establishment started fellating them

I think that’s right on one level, but kind of misses the point that what really distinguished Hitler and Stalin, and their regimes, was not an opinion about ownership of means of production, but a shared addiction to political violence and the abuse of law.

For a German policeman with 12 years experience working for the Nazis, starting work for Stalin in 1945 did not constitute much of a day-to-day change in his employment. Different rhetoric – same job.

There are also more direct social parallels – there was something very (national) socialist about Robert Ley’s “Strength through Joy” organisation, for example:

“As of August 1 [1938], the great savings programme for the People’s Car ‘Strength-Through-Joy’ will begin. I herewith proclaim the conditions under which every working person, can acquire an automobile.

Each German, without distinction of class, profession, or property can become the purchaser of a Volkswagen.

The minimum weekly payment, insurance included, will be 5 marks. Regular payment of this amount will guarantee, after a period which is yet to be determined, the acquisition of a Volkswagen. The precise period will be determined upon the beginning of production.

Application for the Volkswagen savings programme can be made at any office of the German Labour Front and of ‘Strength Through Joy’, where further details can also be obtained. Factories and shops can submit collective orders.

A Volkswagen for every German—let that be our aim. That is what we want to achieve. Will all of you help in that; it shall be our way of saying ‘thank you’ to the Führer.

At least in the case of Ethiopia, they did not only act as trainers and avisors, but participated actively in torturing and murder. Germans being Germans, the Stasi personel serving Mengistu kept records and archives of their deeds, so it would have been perfectly possible to prosecute them after the fall of the GDR. The supreme court of reunited Germany, however, amnestied them all.
When speaking of Iraq, one should not forget Saddam’s attack on Iran; morally, it might have been a fight of evil against evil, but from a legal point of view, it was still a war of aggression, and the role of East German helicopter pilots and the tactics developed by them in this war of aggression were crucial and might even have been strategically decisive, see here: http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_214.shtml

MfS officers also trained the secret police services in Mozambique, Angola, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, the ‘Peoples Democratic Republic’ of Yemen, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

And Angela Merkel was a member of a “front” party. Burn the witch.