Well, in that case, Hitler wasn't the only man to misunderstand him.
There was Mencken, after all.
There is Zeev Sternhell.
There was Isaiah Berlin.
Two points.
First, who is a counter-enlightenment (or anti-enlightenment) thinker and what are its defining features depends on a prior decision who is an enlightenment thinker and what are its defining features.
If Enlightenment is essentially denial of the truth claims of religious myths, Christian or otherwise, then Hume, Rousseau, d'Holbach, and Helvetius, are as much Enlightenment figures as Kant and Locke, and Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud are their legitimate offspring.
But if Enlightenment essentially includes faith in natural rights and justice, and that these require equality and popular government, then the latter figures are of the Counter-Enlightenment, but so is Hume, and so are Bentham and Mill. And even Voltaire!
But as to N in particular, he despised socialism, democracy, the hoi polloi, popular government, and political equality as well as a politics and a society devoted to the general welfare.
And he rejected entirely the notions of natural rights and justice.
For these things Mencken adored him.
And Hitler was not wildly off the mark to take his denunciations of the weak, his exaltation of the strong, and his exuberant praise of the "blonde beast" as an endorsement of both fascism and racism.
And, hair-splitting aside, who can deny the equation, fascism + racism = Nazism?
Though of course hair-splitting is all very well, in its place.
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