Why were the workers opposed to Hitler becoming the chancellor of Germany near the end of the Weimar republic?

Question

I just started reading " The rise and fall of the third Reich " by Shirer and came across paragraph stating a hundred thousand workers opposed Hitler becoming the chancellor. If Hitler was the head of the Socialist party why were the workers opposed. Isn't a socialist form of government something the workers would want?

Here's the excerpt from the book:

The wildest rumors of what might happen were rife in the capital that fateful winter weekend, and the most alarming of them, as it happened, were not without some foundation. There were reports that Schleicher, in collusion with General Kurt von Hammerstein, the Commander in Chief of the Army, was preparing a putsch with the support of the Potsdam garrison for the purpose of arresting the President and establishing a military dictatorship. There was talk of a Nazi putsch. The Berlin storm troopers, aided by Nazi sympathizers in the police, were to seize the Wilhelmstrasse, where the President’s Palace and most of the government ministries were located. There was talk also of a general strike. On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor. One of their leaders attempted to get in touch with General von Hammerstein to propose joint action by the Army and organized labor should Hitler be named to head a new government.1 Once before, at the time of the Kapp putsch in 1920, a general strike had saved the Republic after the government had fled the capital.

Answer 1

If Hitler was the head of the Socialist party why were the workers opposed. Isn't a socialist form of government something the workers would want?

Socialism is a very broad and vague term:

• Marxism Sometimes Socialism serves as a proxy for Communism, which in itself is usually a proxy for Marxism, i.e. the ideology grounded in the writings of Karl Marx (Marx himself often used terms Socialism and Communism interchangeably, although later Communists tend to associate Socialism with a historical stage between Capitalism and Communism.)
• Liberal socialism In many places Socialism is a designation for social democracy, i.e. welfare capitalism - a capitalist system augmented with redistribution of wealth, in order to help those who are less fortunate and/or in need. This is how it is understood in modern Europe. Note however, that European states tend to call themselves Social rather than Socialist - the latter term being used officially mainly by the USSR and its satellites. Many liberal democratic parties however call themselves Socialist - sometimes they trace their roots to pre-Marxist socialist movements (like the French Socialist Party or various Democratic socialists in the UK), in some cases they are former Marxist parties that abandoned the revolutionary Marxist orthodoxy and opposition to parlamentary democracy and liberalism, and sometimes a mix of both (like the German SDP, which traces its origins to Ferdinand Lassalle, but also to a pro-Marxist Eisenacher movement.)
• Other In some cases Socialism is also used as a catch-word for helping average people, whatever is the rest of the ideology - this is how it was used by National-Socialists.

Shirer mentions the young Göbbels' opinion that Nazis shared objectives with the German Communists and should have collaborated with them. However, National-Socialists never subscribed to the Marxist ideology, and Göbbels himself later went on to draw the distinction between the two in his pamphlet Nazi-Sozi. Claiming that Nazis were opposed to Communsits is somewhat misleading - they did oppose them as their political rivals in Germany, and Hitler's plans for expansion to the east necessarily brought Nazis in opposition with Stalin's Soviet Union. However, without the collaboration between Hitler and Stalin in 1939-1941 the history of Nazism and the World history might have been very different. Not in the least, the Communists took early on a habit of calling fascist any of their opponents - real fascists, liberal capitalists, European socialists opposed to the Soviet repressions and even each other (like Yugoslav communists after the break with Stalin or Khrushchev after disavowing Stalin's cult of personality), thus greatly exaggerating the opposition.

Nazis also opposed to the liberal form of Socialism - their objective being creation of a state under the leadership of a single Leader and single party.

National-socialism was indeed a popular movement aiming at redistribution of wealth, and as such it could be termed socialist. Once Hitler was in power, he found an accomodation with the leading German industrialists, while many in the movement still believed that "the National-Socialist revolution" was not over (mostly the infamous Brown shirts.) This resulted in the Night of the long knives. Still, even afterwards the Nazi movement conserved many of its socialist and even collectivist features in terms of workers organization, children summer camps, etc. Furthermore, Nazis largely followed through with the Keynesian economic policies they inherited from Weimar republic - the German equivalent of the New Deal in the US, which assured the Nazi economic miracle.