Woltmann's Ideas: From Marxism to Racism to National Socialism

In effect, Woltmann, perhaps more than any other thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century, identified the topics that transformed the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into ideological variants that were to inform the revolutionary movements destined to overwhelm the world.

It is a relatively simple matter to trace Woltmann’s ideas from Marxism to racism—and from there into the ideology of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Far less easy is relating Woltmann’s thought to those forms of Marxism that pretended to be true to the thought of the masters. V. I. Lenin never admitted he had taken liberties with the Marxism he inherited.

--A. James Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 74.