Hitler believed in biological determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism. Lenin and Hitler actually had similar backgrounds. Both were the sons of minor bureaucrats. Neither ever seriously attempted to make a living by any means other than politics, and both were only really at home in a world where the pursuit of power by conspiracy, agitation and force was the chief object and satisfaction of existence. But in that world both were masters. They had the same intellectual egoism, lack of self-doubt, ruthlessness in personal relations, preference for force as opposed to discussion, and the ability to combine absolute fidelity to a long-term aim with skillful opportunism. They even shared a certain puritanism: both had little personal vanity and were not corrupted by the more meretricious aspects of power.
The Austrian racist theorist Lanz von Liebenfels, who developed a systematic program of race-breeding and extermination "for the extirpation of the animal-man and the propagation of the higher new-man," claimed both Lenin and Hitler among his disciples, seeing an analogy between the extermination of classes "thrown into the dust-bin of history" and races eliminated by breeding programs, two forms of social Darwinism.
Hitler, Lenin and Stalin were all superb practitioners of social engineering. Both Hitler and Lenin had nothing but contempt for parliamentary democracy or any other aspect of liberalism. I read somewhere that the October Revolution inspired Hitler to carry out the Beer Hall Putsch. It was either Lenin or Trotsky that was the first European to use the term "concentration camp." The word "exterminate" was also one that Lenin frequently used.
