Hey buddy! It's good to hear from you again.
I was, in fact, the complete opposite of you. As both an ethnic and Messianic Jew, I believed in collectivism and was, therefore, a Socialist.
Collectivism of any kind removes the individual from the equation, and it isn't a sign of intelligence, in the least.
An example of the unintelligible nature of socialism is Marxist Russia. When the Marxist worker mob overthrew the collectivist Tsars, they implemented their version of socialism, which emphasized worker control and ownership of the means of production.
The Marxist collectivists judged everyone by their class. The bourgeoisie had no chance of salvation; they either needed to be enslaved or murdered. Once a bourgeois, always a bourgeois. The belief was that the bourgeoisie were born evil. This ideology meant that individuals did not exist; people were judged solely by the class to which they belonged, not as individuals. There is nothing intelligible about a system like this.
Hitler took a very similar approach to that of the Marxists. Although he didn't have a worker group controlling the means of production, he held the German worker collective in very high regard, which was quite similar to the Marxists. Hitler's socialism involved the racial collective owning and controlling the means of production.
Hitler’s ideology shared so much in common with Marxism that he even stated that if the National Socialists removed the importance of race from National Socialism, it would become an ideology that competes with Marxism, as discussed in Mein Kampf. In other words, National Socialism would become Marxism if the racial theory were removed.
The individual and the collective are polar opposites, and this was a problem Hitler was unable to resolve as he struggled to attach the individual to his collectivism. There was no way Hitler could collectivize the racial group in society while also maintaining the importance of the individual. The entire concept falls apart. Individuality always leads to competition, and Hitler did not want pure-blooded German Aryans competing with each other for supremacy. Had Hitler allowed pure-blood Aryans to compete amongst themselves, he wouldn't have been able to collectivize the Aryan racial group as he intended.
The fact is, Hitler claimed to believe in the individual; however, I don't think he properly understood what it meant when he made such statements, as he could never reconcile what having individuals entails. Alternatively, he may have simply been lying.