Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz: The Common Good Comes before the Good of the Individual

Fascism in both Italy and Germany was more than simply anticommunism. It was also passionately opposed to the liberal, democratic, parliamentarian values of the Western democracies, which dated back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Fascists believed that such values had exalted the rights of individuals at the expense of the community. In the words of a Nazi slogan, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (“The common good comes before the good of the individual”).

--Bruce F. Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 7.