It seems I read once that “socialist” was just in the party name to garner support of those who would be supportive of socialist values. I can’t recall the publication, but wonder if that’s true?
Yeah, but that’s something that is harder to be succinctly convincing about to someone who is enough of a philistine to say “nazis were socialist” to begin with. That said, in the source I linked, the very next paragraph is:
‘We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our Socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the State on the basis of race solidarity. To us, State and race are one…
If it’s nearly as appropriate to call yourselves liberal as it is to call yourselves socialist, you probably aren’t much of either (and indeed, as much as I despise liberals, Hitler was not a liberal either).