Nsdap

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Hitlerjugend durch Nürnberg marschiert --- NSDAP Partei Congress

Festival Nuremberg - National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) pt1

Festival Nuremberg - National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) pt2

Word and Act - The 90-th anniversary of NSDAP

Der Reichsparteitag der NSDAP in Nürnberg

HIMNO DEL NSDAP -HORST WESSEL- ESPAÑOL Y ALEMÁN.wmv

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Allgemeine SS
The Allgemeine SS ("General SS", literally "Universal SS") was the most numerous branch of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany. It was managed by the SS-Hauptamt (English: SS Main Offices). The Allgemeine SS was officially established in the autumn of 1934 to distinguish its members from the SS-Verfügungstruppe (which later became the Waffen-SS) and the SS-Totenkopfverbände (concentration camp guards).
Starting in 1939, foreign units of the Allgemeine SS were raised in occupied countries. They were later consolidated into the Leitstelle der germanischen SS (English: Directing Center of the Germanic SS) from 1940.
The SS was created on April 4, 1925 and subordinated to the SA on November 1, 1926. It was thus a subunit of the SA and the NSDAP. It was considered to be an elite organization by both party members and the general population.
The main task of the SS was the personal protection of the Führer of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler. As early as the winter of 1925 the SS consisted of approximately 1,000 members, but of this number there were barely 200 active members. Heinrich Himmler tried to separate the SS from the SA, and SA leaders generally had no authority over SS personnel from 1927 onwards. Himmler began to systematically develop and expand the SS with stricter requirements for members as well as a general purge of SS members who were identified as drunkards, criminals, or otherwise undesirable for service in the SS.

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Alsace
Alsace (French: Alsace [alzas]; Alsatian: Elsàss [ˈɛlsɑs]; German: Elsass, pre-1996: Elsaß, IPA: [ˈɛlzas]; Latin: Alsatia) is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area (8,280 km²), and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km² (total population in 2006: 1,815,488; 1 January 2008 estimate: 1,836,000). Alsace is located on France's eastern border and on the west bank of the upper Rhine adjacent to Germany and Switzerland. The political, economic and cultural capital as well as largest city of Alsace is Strasbourg. Because that city is the seat of dozens of international organizations and bodies, Alsace is politically one of the most important regions in the European Union.
The name "Alsace" can be traced back to the Old High German Ali-saz or Elisaz, meaning "foreign domain". An alternative explanation derives it from a Germanic Ell-sass, meaning "seated on the Ill", a river in Alsace. The region was historically part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was gradually annexed by France in the 17th century under kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV and made one of the provinces of France. Alsace is frequently mentioned in conjunction with Lorraine, because German possession of parts of these two régions (as the imperial province Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1918) was contested in the 19th and 20th centuries, during which Alsace changed hands four times between France and Germany in 75 years.

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Austria
Austria (ⁱ/ˈɒstriə/ or /ˈɔːstriə/; German: Österreich [ˈøːstɐˌʁaɪç] ( listen)), officially the Republic of Austria (German: Republik Österreich (help·info)), is a landlocked country of roughly 8.47 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers 83,855 square kilometres (32,377 sq mi) and has a temperate and alpine climate. Austria's terrain is highly mountainous due to the presence of the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 metres (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,798 metres (12,461 ft). The majority of the population speak local Austro-Bavarian dialects of German as their native language, and German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other local official languages are Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene.
The origins of modern-day Austria date back to the time of the Habsburg dynasty when the vast majority of the country was a part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria became one of the great powers of Europe and, in response to the coronation of Napoleon I as the Emperor of the French, the Austrian Empire was officially proclaimed in 1804. In 1867, the Austrian Empire was reformed into Austria-Hungary.

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Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria (German: Freistaat Bayern, pronounced [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈbaɪ.ɐn] ( listen)), is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of 70,548 square kilometres (27,200 sq mi), it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany. Bavaria is Germany's second most populous state (after North Rhine-Westphalia), with 12.5 million inhabitants, more than any of the three sovereign states on its borders. Bavaria's capital is Munich.
One of the oldest states of Europe, it was established as a duchy in the mid first millennium. In the 17th century, the Duke of Bavaria became a Prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire. The Kingdom of Bavaria existed from 1806 to 1918, and Bavaria has since been a free state (republic). Modern Bavaria also includes parts of the historical regions of Franconia and Swabia.
The Bavarians emerged in a region north of the Alps, originally inhabited by the Gauls, which had been part of the Roman provinces of Raetia and Noricum. The Bavarians spoke Old High German but, unlike other Germanic groups, probably did not migrate from elsewhere. Rather, they seem to have coalesced out of other groups left behind by Roman withdrawal late in the 5th century. These peoples may have included the Celtic Boii, some remaining Romans, Marcomanni, Allemanni, Quadi, Thuringians, Goths, Scirians, Rugians, Heruli. The name "Bavarian" ("Baiuvarii") means "Men of Baia" which may indicate Bohemia, the homeland of the Celtic Boii and later of the Marcomanni. They first appear in written sources c. 520. Saint Boniface completed the people's conversion to Christianity in the early-8th century. Bavaria was, for the most part, unaffected by the Protestant Reformation.

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Beer Hall Putsch
The Beer Hall Putsch (also known as the Munich Putsch,German: Hitlerputsch or German: Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch) was a failed attempt at revolution that occurred between the evening of 8 November and the early afternoon of 9 November 1923, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, and other heads of the Kampfbund unsuccessfully tried to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
Beer halls in the early 20th century existed in most larger southern German cities, where hundreds or even thousands of people were able to gather during the evenings, drink beer and often engage in political or social debate. They were also places where political rallies could be held, a tradition still alive today. One of the largest beer halls in Munich was the "Bürgerbräukeller", where the Beer Hall Putsch was launched.
German power and prestige were destroyed in the aftermath of World War I. Like many other German nationalists, Hitler believed in the Dolchstoßlegende (Stab-in-the-back legend), which claimed that the army, "undefeated in the field," had been "stabbed in the back" by civilian leaders and Marxists back on the home front, later dubbed the November Criminals. In Munich, Hitler took part in "national thinking" courses organized by the Education and Propaganda Department of the Bavarian Reichswehr under Captain Karl Mayr. Thereafter, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler, then an Army corporal, to infiltrate the tiny Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated DAP (German Workers Party). Hitler joined the DAP on 12 September 1919. Hitler rose to its top post in the chaotic political atmosphere of postwar Munich. By agreement, Hitler was given the political leadership of several Bavarian "patriotic associations" (revanchist) which collectively were known as the Kampfbund. With this political base, Hitler could call on about 15,000 brawlers, mostly ex-soldiers.

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Berlin
Berlin ( /bɜrˈlɪn/; German pronunciation: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn] ( listen)) is the capital city of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.5 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city and is the second most populous city proper and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany, it is the center of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has 5.9 million residents from over 190 nations. Located in the European Plains, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers and lakes.
First documented in the 13th century, Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945).Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city became divided into East Berlin—the capital of East Germany—and West Berlin, a West German exclave surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989). Following German reunification in 1990, the city regained its status as the capital of Germany, hosting 147 foreign embassies.

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Breslau
Wrocław ( /ˈvrɒtswəf/; Polish pronunciation: [ˈvrɔt͡swaf] ( listen); German: Breslau [ˈbʁɛslaʊ̯] ( listen); Czech: Vratislav), situated on the River Oder (Polish: Odra), in Lower Silesia. It is the largest city in western Poland.
Wrocław was the historical capital of Silesia, and today is the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. Over the centuries, the city has been part of either Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia, or Germany, and has been part of Poland since 1945 as a result of border changes after World War II. According to official figures for 2010, its population is 632,996, making it the fourth largest city in Poland.
Wrocław is one of the hosts of UEFA Euro 2012, and has been selected as a European Capital of Culture for 2016. In 2017, Wrocław will host the World Games, a competition in 37 non-olympic sport disciplines.
The city's name was first recorded, in Latin, in the form "Wrotizlava", in the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg, which mentions it as a seat of a newly installed bishopric in the context of the Congress of Gniezno. The first municipal seal stated Sigillum civitatis Wratislavie. A simplified name is given, in 1175, as Wrezlaw, Prezla or Breslaw. The Czech spelling was used in Latin documents as Wratislavia or Vratislavia. At that time, Prezla was used in Middle High German, which became Preßlau. In the middle of the 14th century the Early New High German (and later New High German) form of the name Breslau began to replace its earlier versions.

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Canton of Basel
Basel was a canton of Switzerland that was in existence between 1501 and 1833, when it was split into the two present-day 'half-cantons' of Basel-City and Basel-Country.
The town of Basel was called "Basilia" in Latin, this from the Greek Βασιλεία, Basileía, "royal" (fem.). The name is documented from the year 374 AD. From 999 until the Protestant Reformation, Basel was ruled by prince-bishops (see Bishop of Basel, whose memory is preserved in the crosier shown on the Basel coat of arms, as above). In 1019, the construction of the cathedral of Basel (known locally as the Münster) began under Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor. In 1225–26, the bridge over the Rhine was constructed by Bishop Heinrich von Thun and lesser Basel (Kleinbasel) founded as a bridgehead to protect the bridge.
Basel became the focal point of western Christendom during the 15th century Council of Basel (1431–49), including the 1439 election of antipope Felix V. In 1459, Pope Pius II endowed the University of Basel where such notables as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Paracelsus and Hans Holbein the Younger taught. At the same time the new craft of printing was introduced to Basel by apprentices of Gutenberg; the Schwabe publishing house was founded 1488 by Johannes Petri and is the oldest publishing house still in business. Johann Froben also operated his printing house in Basel and was notable for publishing works by Erasmus.

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Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia (Czech and Slovak: Československo, Česko-Slovensko) was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992. From 1939 to 1945, the state did not de facto exist because of its forced division and partial incorporation into Nazi Germany, but the Czechoslovak government-in-exile nevertheless continued to exist during this period. In 1945, the eastern part of Carpathian Ruthenia was taken over by the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Form of state:
Neighbours:
Topography:
The country was of generally irregular terrain. The western area was part of north-central European uplands. The eastern region was composed of northern reaches of Carpathian Mountains and Danube River basin lands.
Climate:
The weather was predominantly continental, but varied from the moderate temperature of Western Europe in the west, to more severe weather of Eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union in the east.

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Danzig
Gdańsk ( /ɡəˈdænsk/ or /ɡəˈdɑːnsk/; Polish: [ˈɡdaɲsk]; German: Danzig, pronounced [ˈdantsɪç]) is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the center of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.
The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay (of the Baltic Sea), in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population of over 800,000. Gdańsk itself has a population of 455,830 (June 2010), making it the largest city in the Pomerania region of Northern Poland.
Gdańsk is Poland's principal seaport as well as the capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship. It is also historically the largest city of the Kashubian region. The city is close to the former late medieval/modern boundary between West Slavic and Germanic lands and it has a complex political history with periods of Polish rule, periods of German rule, and extensive self-rule, with two spells as a free city. It has been part of modern Poland since 1945.

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East Prussia
East Prussia (German: Ostpreußen, pronounced [ˈɔstˌpʁɔʏsən] ( listen); Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Lithuanian: Rytų Prūsija or Rytprūsiai; Russian: Восточная Пруссия or Vostochnaya Prussiya; Latin: Borussia orientalis) was the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.
East Prussia enclosed the bulk of the ancestral lands of the Baltic Old Prussians. During the 13th century, the native Prussians were conquered by the crusading Teutonic Knights. The indigenous Balts who survived the conquest were gradually converted to Christianity. Because of Germanization and colonisation over the following centuries, Germans became the dominant ethnic group, while Poles and Lithuanians formed minorities. From the 13th century, East Prussia was part of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, which became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525. The Old Prussian language had become extinct by the 17th or early 18th century.

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Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen (German: "task forces"; singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories. The Einsatzgruppen operated throughout the territory occupied by the German armed forces following the German invasions of Poland, in September, 1939, and later, of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Einsatzgruppen carried out operations ranging from the murder of a few people to operations which lasted over two or more days, such as the massacres at Babi Yar (33,771 killed in two days) and Rumbula (25,000 killed in two days). The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murders of over 1,000,000 people, and they were the first Nazi organizations to commence mass killing of Jews as an organized policy.
The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (deputy to Heinrich Himmler) and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II. From September 1939 forward the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA - Reich Main Security Office) had overall command of the Einsatzgruppen. Their principal task during the war (according to SS General Erich von dem Bach at the Nuremberg Trials) "... was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars". The Einsatzgruppen had a leading role in the implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in the conquered territories.

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Franconia
The term of Franconia (German: Franken) is today commonly used to refer to the eastern part of former Francia in Germany.
Franconia is nowadays represented by the administrative districts of Lower Franconia (Unterfranken, capital city Würzburg), Middle Franconia (Mittelfranken, capital city Ansbach), and Upper Franconia (Oberfranken, capital city Bayreuth) in Bavaria and the northeastern region of Baden-Württemberg called Tauberfranken.
Due to the respective local dialects (East Franconian German), a large part of northern Baden-Württemberg and parts of southern Thuringia are also considered as Franconian regions.
The two largest cities of Franconia are Nuremberg and Würzburg. The metropolitan area of Nuremberg is often qualified as the economic and cultural centre of Franconia.
The Western natural border of Franconia is formed by the Spessart. To the north it is framed by the Thuringian Forest and the Franconian Forest, to the east by the Fichtelgebirge. The largest River of Franconia is the Main. Together with its largest tributary the Regnitz, the Main drains the most parts of Franconia. Other large Rivers are the Tauber, the Jagst and the Altmühl.

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Free City of Danzig
The Free City of Danzig (German: Freie Stadt Danzig; Polish: Wolne Miasto Gdańsk) was a semi-autonomous city-state that existed between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig (today Gdańsk) and surrounding areas.
The Free City was created on 15 November 1920 in accordance with the terms of Part III, Section XI of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 without a referendum. The Free City included the city of Danzig and over two hundred nearby towns, villages, and settlements. As the League of Nations decreed, the region was to remain separated from the nation of Germany, and from the newly resurrected nation of Poland. The Free City was not an independent state; it was under League of Nations protection and put into a binding customs union with Poland. Poland also had special utilization rights towards the city. The Free City was created in order to give Poland sufficient access to the sea, while at the same time recognizing that its population was mainly German.
In 1933, the City's government was taken over by the local Nazi Party and the democratic opposition was suppressed. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Free City was abolished and incorporated into the newly formed Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Widespread anti-Semitic and anti-Polish discrimination and organized murder followed.

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Free State of Anhalt
The Free State of Anhalt (German: Freistaat Anhalt) was formed after Joachim Ernst, Duke of Anhalt abdicated on 12 November 1918, ending the Duchy of Anhalt. It was a state of Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. In May 1932 the Nazi Party came to power in Anhalt and, after the Nazis attained power at the federal level in 1933, Anhalt was abolished de facto by the federal Nazi government, becoming part of the Gau of Magdeburg-Anhalt.
At the end of World War II, when Germany was divided into zones of occupation, Anhalt was merged with the bulk of the Prussian Province of Saxony to form the Soviet-administered German state of Saxony-Anhalt. This state was then dissolved in 1952 but reformed in 1990 after the reunification of Germany.
Reichsstatthalter for Anhalt and Brunswick (headquarters in Dessau)

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Germany
Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.

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Gestapo
The Gestapo (German pronunciation: [ɡeˈstaːpo, ɡəˈʃtaːpo] ( listen); abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, "Secret State Police") was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police (Chef der Deutschen Polizei). From September 1939 forward it was administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) ("Reich Main Security Office") and was considered a sister organization of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) ("Security Service") and also a suboffice of the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) ("Security Police").
As part of the deal in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Göring—future commander of the Luftwaffe and an influential Nazi Party official—was named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave him command of the largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Göring detached the political and intelligence sections from the police and filled their ranks with Nazis. On 26 April 1933, Göring merged the two units as the Gestapo. He originally wanted to name it the Secret Police Office (German: Geheimes Polizeiamt), but discovered the German initials "GPA" would be too similar to the Soviet GPU.

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Groß-Berlin
The Greater Berlin Act (German: Groß-Berlin-Gesetz), in full the Law Regarding the Reconstruction of the New Local Authority of Berlin (German: Gesetz über die Bildung einer neuen Stadtgemeinde Berlin), was a law passed by the Prussian government in 1920 that greatly expanded the size of the German capital of Berlin.
Berlin had been part of the Province of Brandenburg since 1815. On 1 April 1881, the city became Stadtkreis Berlin, a city district separate from Brandenburg. The Greater Berlin Act was passed by the Prussian parliament on 27 April 1920 and came into effect on 1 October of the same year. The region then termed Greater Berlin acquired territories from the Province of Brandenburg and consisted of the following:
The act increased the area of Berlin 13-fold from 66 km² (25.5 mi²) to 883 km² (341 mi²) and the population doubled from approximately 1.9 million to near 4 million, with almost 1.2 million of these new inhabitants coming from the 7 surrounding towns alone.
Greater Berlin was then sub-divided into 20 boroughs (Verwaltungsbezirke):

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Halle-Merseburg
The Province of Halle-Merseburg (German: Provinz Halle-Merseburg) was a province of the Free State of Prussia from 1944-45. The provincial capital was the city Merseburg.
Halle-Merseburg was created on 1 July 1944, out of Regierungsbezirk Merseburg, an administrative region from the former Province of Saxony. The governor of the new province was Joachim Albrecht Eggeling, the Gauleiter of the Nazi Gau Halle-Merseburg. In 1945, the Province of Halle-Merseburg was dissolved into a recreated Province of Saxony.

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Hamburg
Hamburg ( /ˈhæmbɜrɡ/; German pronunciation: [ˈhambʊɐ̯k], local pronunciation [ˈhambʊɪç]; Low German/Low Saxon: Hamborg [ˈhaˑmbɔːx]), officially Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is the second-largest city in Germany, the thirteenth largest German state, and the sixth-largest city in the European Union. The city is home to over 1.8 million people, while the Hamburg Metropolitan Region (including parts of the neighbouring Federal States of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein) has more than 4.3 million inhabitants. Situated on the river Elbe, the port of Hamburg is the second largest port in Europe (after the Port of Rotterdam) and 11th-largest worldwide.
Hamburg's official name, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (German: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg), reflects Hamburg's history as a member of the medieval Hanseatic League, as a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, and that Hamburg is a city-state and one of the sixteen States of Germany.
Hamburg is a major transport hub in Northern Germany and is one of the most affluent cities in Europe. It has become a media and industrial centre, with plants and facilities belonging to Airbus, Blohm + Voss and Aurubis. The radio and television broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk and publishers such as Gruner + Jahr and Spiegel-Verlag are pillars of the important media industry in Hamburg. In total, there are more than 120,000 enterprises.

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Harburg
Harburg is a district (Landkreis) in Lower Saxony, Germany. It takes its name from the town of Harburg upon Elbe, which used to be the capital of the district but is now part of Hamburg. It is bounded by (from the east and clockwise) the districts of Lüneburg, Heidekreis, Rotenburg and Stade, by the City of Hamburg and the State of Schleswig-Holstein (District of Lauenburg).
In 1885 the Prussian government established three districts in this region: the District of Harburg, the District of Winsen and the district-free City of Harburg upon Elbe. In 1932 the districts of Winsen and Harburg were merged; the City of Harburg-Wilhelmsburg (which had been merged in 1927) became the capital of the district, although it remained district-free and hence was not a part of the district.
In 1937 the City of Harburg-Wilhelmsburg was incorporated into the City of Hamburg with the Greater Hamburg Act. Harburg and Wilhelmsburg became two boroughs of Hamburg. The District of Harburg remained with the State of Prussia and retained its autonomy. Winsen upon Luhe became the new capital of the District in 1944.

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Innsbruck
Innsbruck is the capital city of the federal state of Tyrol in western Austria. It is located in the Inn Valley at the junction with the Wipptal (Sill River), which provides access to the Brenner Pass, some 30 km (18.6 mi) south of Innsbruck. Located in the broad valley between high mountains, the Nordkette (Hafelekar, 2,334 metres or 7,657 feet in the north, Patscherkofel (2,246 m or 7,369 ft) and Serles (2,718 m or 8,917 ft) in the south. It is an internationally renowned winter sports centre, and hosted the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics as well as the 1984 and 1988 Winter Paralympics. Innsbruck hosted the first Winter Youth Olympics in 2012. The word bruck comes from the German word Brücke meaning "bridge" which leads to "the bridge over the Inn".
Earliest traces suggest initial inhabitation in the early Stone Age. Surviving pre-Roman place names show that the area has been populated continuously. In the fourth century the Romans established the army station Veldidena (the name survives in today's urban district Wilten) at Oenipons (Innsbruck), to protect the economically important commercial road from Verona-Brenner-Augsburg.

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Kattowitz
Katowice (Polish: [katɔˈvʲit͡sɛ] ( listen); German: Kattowitz) is a city in Silesia in southern Poland, on the Kłodnica and Rawa rivers (tributaries of the Oder and the Vistula respectively). Katowice is located in the Silesian Highlands, about 50 km (31 mi) north of the Silesian Beskids (part of the Carpathian Mountains) and about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of the Sudetes Mountains.
It is the central district of the Upper Silesian Metropolis, with a population of 2.2 million to 3.5 million. Katowice is the center of science, culture, industry, business and transportation in southern Poland. It is the main city in the Upper Silesian Industrial Region and of the 2.7 millionconurbation, the Katowice urban area, within a Silesian metropolitan area populated by 4,676,983 people.
Katowice has been the capital of the Silesian Voivodeship since its formation in 1999. Previously, it was the capital of the Katowice Voivodeship, before then, of the Silesian Voivodeship and before then Province of Upper Silesia in Germany.

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Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945, and the easternmost large German city until it was conquered by the Soviet Union near the end of World War II. In 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad.
Historically, the official name was Königsberg in Preußen (abbreviated Königsberg i. Pr. (until 1936) and later Königsberg (Pr) (1936–1946)), Königsberg in Prussia, German pronunciation [ˈkʰøˑnɪçsbɛɐk], pronunciation (help·info)). Königsberg's literal meaning is 'King's Mountain'. Historically, several regional names were used for Königsberg. Its Latinised form was Regimontium Prussorum. In Modern Saxon or "Low German", a Germanic language spoken by many of its German inhabitants, the name was Königsbarg (local pronunciation: /ˈkʰeˑnɪçsbɒɐç/), mixing German König (nds. köning) with Low German barg (hill, mountain). Further names include Lithuanian: Karaliaučius; Polish: Królewiec and the modern Russian and current official name Калинингра́д, Kaliningrad).
Königsberg was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement Twangste by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and was named in honour of King Ottokar II of Bohemia. The city successively became the capital of their monastic state, the Duchy of Prussia, and East Prussia. The Baltic port developed into a German cultural center, being the residence of, among others, Simon Dach, Immanuel Kant, Käthe Kollwitz, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and David Hilbert, Agnes Miegel and Michael Wieck.

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Mecklenburg
Mecklenburg (Low German: Mękelnborg) is a historical region in northern Germany comprising the western and larger part of the federal-state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The largest cities of the region are Rostock, Schwerin, and Neubrandenburg.
The name Mecklenburg derives from a castle named "Mikilenburg" (Old Saxon: "big castle", thus the Grecised name variant Megalopolis used in Medieval Latin sources), located between the cities of Schwerin and Wismar. It was the ancestral seat of the House of Mecklenburg and for a time divided into Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz among the same dynasty.
Linguistically Mecklenburgers retain and use many features of Low German vocabulary or phonology.
Mecklenburg is known for its mostly flat countryside. Much of the terrain forms a morass, with ponds, marshes and fields as common features, with small forests interspersed. The terrain changes as one moves north towards the Baltic Sea.
Under the peat of Mecklenburg are sometimes found deposits of ancient lava flows. Traditionally, at least in the countryside, the stone from these flows is cut and used in the construction of homes, often in joint use with cement, brick and wood, forming a unique look to the exterior of country houses.

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Nazi Germany
The Third Reich, also Nazi Germany, is the common name for Germany when it was a totalitarian state ruled by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany, quickly eliminating all opposition to rule as sole leader. The state idolized Hitler as its Führer ("leader"), centralizing all power in his hands. Historians have emphasized the hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups. Kessel writes, "Overwhelmingly...Germans speak with mystification of Hitler's 'hypnotic' appeal..." Under the "leader principle", the Führer's word was above all other laws. Top officials reported to Hitler and followed his policies, but they had considerable autonomy. The government was not a coordinated, cooperating body, but rather a collection of factions struggling to amass power and curry favor with the Führer. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazi government restored prosperity and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy of free-market and central-planning practices. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of the Autobahns. The return to prosperity gave the regime enormous popularity; the suppression of all opposition made Hitler's rule mostly unchallenged.

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Nuremberg Trials
Coordinates: 49°27.2603′N 11°02.9103′E / 49.4543383°N 11.048505°E / 49.4543383; 11.048505 The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, in 1945–46, at the Palace of Justice. The first and best known of these trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried 25 of the most important captured leaders of the Third Reich, though several key architects of the war (such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels) had committed suicide before the trials began.
The initial trials were held from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The second set of trials of lesser war criminals was conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT); among them included the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial. This article primarily deals with the IMT; see the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials for details on those trials.

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ODESSA
The ODESSA, from the German Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning “Organization of Former SS Members,” is believed to have been an international Nazi network set up toward the end of World War II by a group of SS officers. The purpose of the ODESSA was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, to allow SS members to avoid their capture and prosecution for war crimes. Most of those fleeing out of Germany and Austria were helped to South America and the Middle East.
Several books by those involved in the War Crimes Commission (including T.H. Tetens and Joseph Wechsberg) have verified the organization's existence and provided details of its operations. Wechsberg studied Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs on the ODESSA and verified them with his own experiences in the book The Murderers Among Us.
In a note, persons claiming to represent the ODESSA claimed responsibility for a 9 July 1979 car bombing in France, which was aimed at anti-Nazi activists Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.^{[citation needed]}

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Pomerania
Pomerania - Polish: Pomorze, Kashubian: Pòmòrze or Pòmòrskô, (German: Pommern, Latin: Pomerania or Pomorania) is a historical region on the south shore of the Baltic Sea. Divided between Germany and Poland, it stretches roughly from the Recknitz River near Stralsund in the West, via the Oder River delta near Szczecin, to the mouth of the Vistula River near Gdańsk in the East. Pomerania was strongly affected by 20th century, post-World War I and II border and population shifts.
Pomerania belongs to the lowlands of the North European Plain. Outside its few urban centers − most notably the Szczecin and Tricity metropolitan areas − the poor soil is mostly used as farmland, dotted with numerous lakes, forests, and small towns. Agriculture primarily consists of raising livestock, forestry, fishery and the cultivation of cereals, sugar beets, and potatoes. Since the late 19th century, tourism has become an important sector of the economy, primarily in the numerous seaside resorts along the coast. Of the limited industrial zones, the most important products are ships, metal products, refined sugar, and paper.

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Province of Silesia
The Province of Silesia (German: Provinz Schlesien; Polish: Prowincja Śląsk; Silesian: Prowincyjo Ślůnsko) was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia, existing from 1815 to 1919, when it was divided into the Upper and Lower Silesia provinces, and briefly again from 1938 to 1941. As a Prussian province, Silesia became part of the German Empire during the Prussian-led unification of Germany in 1871. The provincial capital was Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland).
The territory on both sides of the Oder river formed the southeastern part of the Prussian kingdom. It comprised the bulk of the former Bohemian crown land of Upper and Lower Silesia as well as the adjacent County of Kladsko, which the Prussian King Frederick the Great had all conquered from the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy under Empress Maria Theresa in the 18th century Silesian Wars. It furthermore included the northeastern part of Upper Lusatia around Görlitz and Lauban, ceded to Prussia by the Kingdom of Saxony according to the resolutions of the Vienna Congress in 1816.

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Republic of Baden
The Republic of Baden (German: Republik Baden) was a state of Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic, formed after the abolition of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1918. It is now part of the modern German state of Baden-Württemberg.
With revolution threatening the German Empire in the dying days of World War I, the state ministry of the Grand Duchy of Baden passed an electoral reform on 2 November 1918 in a final attempt to preserve the monarchy there. On 8 November, workers' and soldiers' councils were established in Lahr and Offenburg. On the following day, similar councils were established in Mannheim and Karlsruhe and the entire Badische state ministry stepped down.
On 10 November, a provisional government was formed in Karlsruhe and an assembly of the various revolutionary councils was held on the following day. On 13 November, Grand Duke Frederick II, relinquished all governing duties and eventually abdicated on 22 November, almost a week before the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

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Ruhr
The Ruhr (German Ruhrgebiet, colloquial Ruhrpott, Kohlenpott, Pott or Revier), is an urban area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population density of 7100/km² and a population of some 7.3 million, it is the largest urban agglomeration in Germany. It consists of several large, formerly industrial cities bordered by the rivers Ruhr to the south, Rhine to the west, and Lippe to the north. In the Southwest it borders to the Bergisches Land. It is considered part of the larger Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region of more than 12 million people.
Since the Ruhr is polycentric, coordinates shown are general in nature and so can be used to focus on the entire region of the Ruhr: 51°30′N 7°30′E / 51.5°N 7.5°E / 51.5; 7.5.
From west to east, the region includes the cities of Duisburg, Oberhausen, Bottrop, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, Herne, Hagen, Dortmund, and Hamm, as well as parts of the more "rural" districts Wesel, Recklinghausen, Unna and Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis. Historically, the western Ruhr towns, such as Duisburg and Essen, belonged to the historic region of the Rhineland, whereas the eastern part of the Ruhr, including Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, Dortmund and Hamm, were part of the region of Westphalia. Since the 19th century, these districts have grown together into a large complex with a vast industrial landscape, inhabited by some 7.3 million people (when including Düsseldorf and Wuppertal). It is the fifth largest urban area in Europe after Istanbul, Moscow, London and Paris.

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Sachsen
The Free State of Saxony (German: Freistaat Sachsen [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈzaksən]; Upper Sorbian: Swobodny stat Sakska) is a landlocked state of Germany, bordering Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with (18,413 square kilometres (7,109 sq mi), and the sixth most-populous (4.3 million) of Germany's sixteen states.
Located in the middle of an erstwhile German-speaking part of Europe, the history of the state of Saxony spans more than a millennium. It has been a medieval duchy, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, a kingdom, a republic from 1918 to 1952 and then again from 1990.
The area of the modern state of Saxony should not be confused with Old Saxony, the area inhabited by Saxons. Old Saxony corresponds approximately to the modern German states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and the Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Sachsen is divided into three Direktionsbezirke — Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig — which are subdivided into 10 districts:

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Schleswig-Holstein
Schleswig-Holstein (pronounced [ˈʃleːsvɪç ˈhɔlʃtaɪn] ( listen)) is the northernmost of the sixteen states of Germany, comprising most of the historical duchy of Holstein and the southern part of the former Duchy of Schleswig. Its capital city is Kiel; other notable cities are Lübeck, Flensburg and Neumünster.
The former English name was Sleswick-Holsatia, the Danish name is Slesvig-Holsten, the Low German name is Sleswig-Holsteen, the Dutch name is Sleeswijk-Holstein and the North Frisian name is Slaswik-Holstiinj. Historically, the name can also refer to a larger region, containing both present-day Schleswig-Holstein and the former South Jutland County (Northern Schleswig) in Denmark.
The term "Holstein" derives from Old Saxon, Holseta Land, meaning "the land of those who dwell in the wood" (Holz and Holt mean wood in modern Standardised German and in literary English respectively). Originally, it referred to the central of the three Saxon tribes north of the Elbe river, Tedmarsgoi, Holcetae, and Sturmarii. The area of the Holcetae was between the Stör river and Hamburg, and after Christianization their main church was in Schenefeld. Saxon Holstein became a part of the Holy Roman Empire after Charlemagne's Saxon campaigns in the late eighth century. Since 811 the northern frontier of Holstein (and thus the Empire) was marked by the river Eider.

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Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel (German pronunciation: [ˈʃʊtsʃtafəl] ( listen), translated to Protection Squadron or defence corps, abbreviated SS—or with stylized "Armanen" sig runes) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II (1939–1945). After 1945, the SS was banned in Germany, along with the Nazi Party, as a criminal organization.
The SS began as a small permanent guard unit made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for Nazi Party meetings in Munich. Formed at the end of 1920, they were known as the "Saal-Schutz" (Hall-Protection). Later under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler between 1929 and 1945, the SS was renamed the "Schutz-Staffel" and grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the Third Reich.
The SS grew from a small paramilitary unit to a powerful force that served as the Führer's "Praetorian Guard", the Nazi Party's "Protection Squadron" and a force that, fielding almost a million men (both on the front lines and as political police), managed to exert as much political influence in the Third Reich as the Wehrmacht (Germany's regular armed forces).

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SS
The Schutzstaffel (German pronunciation: [ˈʃʊtsʃtafəl] ( listen), translated to Protection Squadron or defence corps, abbreviated SS—or with stylized "Armanen" sig runes) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II (1939–1945). After 1945, the SS was banned in Germany, along with the Nazi Party, as a criminal organization.
The SS began as a small permanent guard unit made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for Nazi Party meetings in Munich. Formed at the end of 1920, they were known as the "Saal-Schutz" (Hall-Protection). Later under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler between 1929 and 1945, the SS was renamed the "Schutz-Staffel" and grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the Third Reich.
The SS grew from a small paramilitary unit to a powerful force that served as the Führer's "Praetorian Guard", the Nazi Party's "Protection Squadron" and a force that, fielding almost a million men (both on the front lines and as political police), managed to exert as much political influence in the Third Reich as the Wehrmacht (Germany's regular armed forces).

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Stettin
Szczecin ([ˈʂt͡ʂɛt͡ɕin] ( listen); German: Stettin [ʃtɛˈtiːn] ( listen)}), is the capital city of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in Poland. In the vicinity of the Baltic Sea, it is the country's seventh-largest city and the largest seaport in Poland. As of June 2011 the population was 407,811.
Szczecin is located on the Oder River, south of the Szczecin Lagoon and the Bay of Pomerania. The city is situated along the southwestern shore of Dąbie Lake, on both sides of the Oder and on several large islands between the western and eastern branches of the river. Szczecin borders with the town of Police.
The city's beginnings were as an 8th century Slavic Pomeranian stronghold, built at the site of today's castle. In the 12th century, when Szczecin had become one of Pomerania's main urban centres, it lost its independence to Piast Poland, Saxony, the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark. At the same time, the Griffin dynasty established themselves as local rulers, the population was converted to Christianity, and German settlers arrived. The native Slavic population was assimilated and sometimes discriminated against in the following centuries. In 1237/43, the town was built anew and granted vast autonomy rights, and it joined the Hanseatic League.

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Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung (SA) (German pronunciation: [ˈʃtʊʁmʔapˌtaɪlʊŋ] ( listen);Storm Detachment or Assault Division) or Brownshirts) functioned as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Their main assignments were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies; the disruption of opposing political parties and the fight against their paramilitary units (esp. the Rotfrontkämpferbund); and the intimidation of Jewish citizens (eg. the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses).
The SA was the first Nazi paramilitary group to develop pseudo-military titles for bestowal upon its members. The SA ranks were adopted by several other Nazi Party groups, chief amongst them the SS, itself originally a branch of the SA. SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms (similar to Benito Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them were cheaply available after World War I, having originally been ordered during the war for colonial troops posted to Germany's former African colonies.

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Switzerland
Switzerland (German: die Schweiz[ˈʃvaɪts]; French: Suisse [sɥis(ə)]; Italian: Svizzera [ˈzvit͡sːɛra]; Romansh: Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ] or [ˈʒviːtsʁːɐ]), in its full name the Swiss Confederation (Latin: Confoederatio Helvetica, hence its abbreviation CH), is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in western Europe, where it is bordered by Germany to the north, France to the west, Italy to the south, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east.
Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km² (15,940 sq mi). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the Swiss population of approximately 8 million people is concentrated mostly on the Plateau, where the largest cities are to be found. Among them are the two global cities and economic centres of Zurich and Geneva.
The Swiss Confederation has a long history of armed neutrality—it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815—and did not join the United Nations until 2002. It pursues, however, an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world. Switzerland is also the birthplace of the Red Cross and home to a large number of international organizations, including the second largest UN office. On the European level, it is a founding member of the European Free Trade Association and is part of the Schengen Area – although it is notably not a member of the European Union, nor the European Economic Area.

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TENO
Technische Nothilfe (abbreviated as TN, TeNo, TENO; literally: Technical Emergency Help) was a German organisation. It was established by members of Technische Abteilung (technical unit) of the paramilitary Freikorps Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division.
The TN was founded on September 30, 1919 by Otto Lummitzsch with the stated purpose to protect and maintain vital & strategic facilities (e.g., gas works, waterworks, power stations, railways, post offices, agriculture concerns and food production activities). At the time (1919–1923), these vital infrastructure facilities were under threat from sabotage and attack during a period bordering on civil war, which was caused by the collapse of German economy following the end of World War I and exacerbated by a spate of politically motivated wildcat strikes, usually by Left-wing elements.
The organization was formed from primarily post WWI Army engineering / technical unit members, and transitioned into a volunteer civilian organisation which was registered by the Department of the Interior. The change was required by the demilitarisation requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, in order that the TN would not be classified as a military organization. Based on the nature of its operations, the background of its personnel was mainly conservative middle class, but included a large number of students, especially those in technical studies. In the Weimar Republic period, the TN was seen as a threat by the working class and thus aroused the animosity of trade unionists, and more particularly the Communist Party of Germany. The TN intervened as a volunteer aide organization, when strikes could not be avoided, and when the public welfare was endangered as in strikes of electricity, food service, railroad workers.

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Thuringia
The Free State of Thuringia (German: Freistaat Thüringen, pronounced [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈtyːʁɪŋən], English /θjʊərˈrɪndʒiə/) is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country. It has an area of 16,171 square kilometres (6,244 sq mi) and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states. Most of Thuringia is within the watershed of the Saale, a left tributary of the Elbe. Its capital is Erfurt.
Thuringia has been known by the nickname of "the green heart of Germany" (das grüne Herz Deutschlands) from the late 19th century, due to the dense forest that covers the terrain.
Thuringia is well known in Germany for nature and winter sports. It is home to the Rennsteig, Germany's most famous hiking trail, and the winter resort of Oberhof. Germany has won more Winter Olympics gold medals than any other country in the last 20 years, and half of Germany's gold medals have been won by Thuringian athletes.
From the northwest going clockwise, Thuringia borders on the German states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Bavaria and Hesse. The ridges of the western Harz Mountains divide the region from Lower Saxony on the north-west, while the eastern Harz similarly separates Thuringia from the state of Saxony-Anhalt to the north-east. To the south and southwest, the Thuringian Forest effectively separates the ancient region of Franconia, now the northern part of Bavaria, from the rolling plains of most of Thuringia. The central Harz range extends southwards along the western side into the northwest corner of the Thuringian Forest region, making Thuringia a lowland basin of rolling plains nearly surrounded by ancient somewhat-difficult mountains. To the west across the mountains and south is the drainage basin of the Rhine River.

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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.

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University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (German: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), commonly known as the University of Munich or LMU, is a university in Munich, Germany. A public research university, it is amongst Germany's oldest universities.
Originally established in Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut, the university was moved in 1800 to Landshut by King Maximilian I of Bavaria when Ingolstadt was threatened by the French, before being relocated to its present-day location in Munich in 1826 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1802, the university was officially named Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität by King Maximilian I of Bavaria in his as well as the university's original founder's honour.
The University of Munich has, particularly since the 19th century, been considered as one of Germany's as well as Europe's most prestigious universities; with 34 Nobel laureates associated with the university, it ranks 13th worldwide in terms of Nobel laureates. Among these were Wilhelm Röntgen, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and Thomas Mann. Pope Benedict XVI was also a student and professor at the university. The LMU has recently been conferred the title of "elite university" under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.

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Vienna
Vienna ( /viːˈɛnə/; German: Wien (help·info) [viːn]) is the capital and largest city of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million (2.4 million within the metropolitan area, more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 9th-largest city by population in the European Union. Until the beginning of the 20th century it was the largest German speaking city in the world, and before the first world war and the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian empire the city had 2 million inhabitants. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city lies in the east of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (Weimarer Republik [ˈvaɪmaʁɐ ʁepuˈbliːk] ( listen)) is the name given by historians to the federal republic and parliamentary representative democracy established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government. It was named after Weimar, the city where the constitutional assembly took place. Its official name was German Reich (Deutsches Reich)
Following World War I, the republic emerged from the German Revolution in November 1918. In 1919, a national assembly convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the German Reich was written, then adopted on 11 August of that same year. The ensuing period of liberal democracy lapsed in the early 1930s, leading to the ascent of the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in 1933. The legal measures taken by the Nazi government in February and March 1933, commonly known as Gleichschaltung ("coordination") meant that the government could legislate contrary to the constitution. The republic nominally continued to exist until 1945, as the constitution was never formally repealed. However, the measures taken by the Nazis in the early part of their rule rendered the constitution irrelevant. Thus, 1933 is usually seen as the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich.

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Württemberg
The Kingdom of Württemberg (German: Königreich Württemberg) was a state that existed from 1806 to 1918, located in the area that is now Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The kingdom was a continuation of the Duchy of Württemberg, which came into existence in 1495. Prior to 1495, the ruling house of Württemberg had consisted of counts ruling only a fragment of the Duchy of Swabia, which had dissolved after the death of Conrad I in 1268.
The border of the Kingdom of Württemberg, as defined in 1813, was situated between 47°34' and 49°35' North and 8°15' and 10°30' East. The greatest distance north-south was 225 km and the greatest east-west was 160 km. The border had a total length of 1800 km. The total area of the state was 19,508 km².
It shared a boundary on the East with Bavaria, and on the other three sides with Baden, with the exception of a short distance on the south, where it bordered Hohenzollern and Lake Constance.
Württemberg, once a Duchy within the Holy Roman Empire, on 1 January 1806 Duke Frederick II assumed the title of king as King Frederick I, abrogated the constitution and united old and new Württemberg. Subsequently he placed the property of the church under the control of the kingdom, whose boundaries were also greatly extended by the process "mediatisation".

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Abba Ahimeir
Abba Ahimeir (Hebrew: אב"א אחימאיר‎, 2 November 1897 - 6 June 1962) was a Russian-born Jewish journalist, historian and political activist. One of the ideologues of Revisionist Zionism, he was the founder of the Revisionist Maximalist faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement (ZRM) and of the clandestine Brit HaBirionim.
Abba Shaul Geisinovich (later Abba Ahimeir) was born in Dolgi, a village near Babruysk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). From 1912-1914, he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium high school in Tel Aviv. While with his family in Babruysk for summer vacation in 1914, World War I broke out and he was forced to complete his studies in Russia. In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of Israel. In 1920, he left Russia and changed his name from Gaisinovich to Ahimeir (in Hebrew: Meir’s brother) in memory of his brother Meir who had fallen in battle that year fighting against Poles during a pogrom.

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Adolf Eichmann
Karl Adolf Eichmann (March 19, 1906 – May 31, 1962) was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
After the war, he fled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross. He lived in Argentina under a false identity, working for Mercedes-Benz until 1960. He was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina and taken to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962. He is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.
Adolf Eichmann was born to a Lutheran family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were businessman and industrialist Adolf Karl Eichmann and Maria née Schefferling. After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. During the First World War, Eichmann's father served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. At the war's conclusion, Eichmann's father moved the family back to Linz where he operated a business. Eichmann left high school—Realschule—without having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also discontinued. In 1923, he started working in the mining company of his father. From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG and then until spring 1933 Eichmann worked as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. During this time he was a member of the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung, the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing veterans movement. In July 1933 he moved back to Germany.

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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

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Albert Forster
Albert Maria Forster (July 26, 1902 – February 28, 1952) was a Nazi German politician. Under his administration as the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia during the Second World War, the local non-German population suffered ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and forceful Germanisation. Forster was sentenced to death for his crimes after Nazi Germany was defeated.
Forster was born in Fürth, Bavaria, where he attended the Humanistisches Gymnasium from 1912 to 1920. In 1923, he became a member of the SA in Fürth and observed the trial for high treason of Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, and eight others, which took place between February 26 and April 1, 1924, in the court of Munich.
In 1930, Forster became the Nazi Party's Gauleiter of the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In the spring of 1933, Forster spearheaded the Nazi take-over of Danzig. Between 1933-1939, Forster became embroiled in a feud with the Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, Arthur Greiser, who was to remain Forster's life-long nemesis.

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Albert Krebs
Albert Krebs (3 March 1899 in Amorbach – 26 June 1974 in Hamburg) was the Nazi Gauleiter in Hamburg in the time of the Third Reich.
Krebs, a higher archive official's son, did his Abitur in 1917 after finishing school at the Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg and thereafter reported to the military as a volunteer. He was not deployed in the First World War.
Krebs was discharged in March 1919, leaving him free to begin studies in Germanistics, history, national economics, and English language in Würzburg, Tübingen, Marburg and Frankfurt am Main. In 1922, he graduated and in the same year, he joined the Nazi party, the NSDAP.
Krebs had been busying himself in the youth movement even before the war. Furthermore, during his studies, he was in the Gildenschaft (a Studentenverbindung umbrella group) and in the Freikorps von Epp and Oberland.
In March 1925, Krebs was working at the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband (German National Trade Assistants' Federation; DHV) in Spandau in Berlin. After the reorganisation of the NSDAP, Krebs joined it in May 1926, and was appointed on 4 November 1926 leader of a group that had formerly been downgraded from Nazi Gau to "local group" (Ortsgruppe). After the group was once again raised to Gau on 26 February 1928, Krebs became Gauleiter of Hamburg.

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Albert Speer
Albert Speer (born Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer; ; pronounced [ˈʃpeːɐ̯] ( listen); March 19, 1905 – September 1, 1981) was a German architect who was, for a part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. As "the Nazi who said sorry", he accepted responsibility at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs for crimes of the Nazi regime. His level of involvement in the persecution of the Jews and his level of knowledge of the Holocaust remain matters of dispute.
Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, launching him on a political and governmental career which lasted fourteen years. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commanded him to design and construct a number of structures, including the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg where Party rallies were held. Speer also made plans to reconstruct Berlin on a grand scale, with huge buildings, wide boulevards, and a reorganized transportation system.

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Alfred Hugenberg
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg (19 June 1865 – 12 March 1951) was an influential German businessman and politician. Hugenberg, a leading figure within nationalist politics in Germany for the first few decades of the twentieth century, became the country's leading media proprietor within the inter-war period. As leader of the German National People's Party Hugenberg was instrumental in helping Adolf Hitler become Chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933. Hugenberg had hoped to control Hitler and use him as his "tool" but ultimately he had little to no influence in the Third Reich.
Born in Hanover to Carl Hugenberg, a royal Hanoverian official who in 1867 entered the Prussian Landtag as a member of the National Liberal Party, he studied law in Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, as well as economics in Strassburg. In 1891, Hugenberg co-founded, along with Karl Peters, the ultra-nationalist General German League and in 1894 its successor movement the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband). In 1900 Hugenberg married his second cousin, Gertrud Adickes. At the same time he was also involved in a scheme in the Province of Posen where the Prussian Settlement Commission bought up land from Poles in order to settle ethnic Germans there.

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Alfred Meyer
Dr. Alfred Meyer (October 5, 1891 – April 11, 1945) was a Nazi official, achieving the rank of Staatssekretär and Deputy Reichsminister in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichministerium für die Besetzten Ostgebiete or Ostministerium).
Meyer was born in Göttingen, the son of a government official. He was educated at the Gymnasium in Soest, graduating in 1911. In 1912 he became a Fahnenjunker (cadet officer) with Infanterieregiment 68 (Koblenz), passing his officer exam in 1913. During World War I he fought with Infanterieregiment 363 on the Western Front, winning the Iron Cross twice. In 1917 he was injured and captured by the French. Released in March 1920, he left the army with the rank of Oberleutnant.
After the war, Meyer worked for Deutsche Erdöl AG before studying political science at the Universities of Bonn and then Würzburg. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1922 and joined the legal department of a Gelsenkirchen mining firm. He married Anna Dorothee Schenker in 1920.

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Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg (help·info) (12 January 1893 – 16 October 1946) was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government. He is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to "degenerate" modern art. He is also known for his rejection of Christianity, having played an important role in the development of Positive Christianity, which he intended to be transitional to a new Nazi faith. At Nuremberg he was tried, sentenced to death and executed by hanging as a war criminal.
Rosenberg was born in 1893 in Reval (today's Tallinn, in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire) to a family of Baltic Germans: his father, Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, was a wealthy merchant from Latvia, his mother, Elfriede, was from Estonia. (Tallinn archivist J. Rajandi claimed in the 1930s that Rosenberg's family had Estonian origins).

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Alsace
Alsace (French: Alsace [alzas]; Alsatian: Elsàss [ˈɛlsɑs]; German: Elsass, pre-1996: Elsaß, IPA: [ˈɛlzas]; Latin: Alsatia) is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area (8,280 km²), and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km² (total population in 2006: 1,815,488; 1 January 2008 estimate: 1,836,000). Alsace is located on France's eastern border and on the west bank of the upper Rhine adjacent to Germany and Switzerland. The political, economic and cultural capital as well as largest city of Alsace is Strasbourg. Because that city is the seat of dozens of international organizations and bodies, Alsace is politically one of the most important regions in the European Union.
The name "Alsace" can be traced back to the Old High German Ali-saz or Elisaz, meaning "foreign domain". An alternative explanation derives it from a Germanic Ell-sass, meaning "seated on the Ill", a river in Alsace. The region was historically part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was gradually annexed by France in the 17th century under kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV and made one of the provinces of France. Alsace is frequently mentioned in conjunction with Lorraine, because German possession of parts of these two régions (as the imperial province Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1918) was contested in the 19th and 20th centuries, during which Alsace changed hands four times between France and Germany in 75 years.

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Anastasy Vonsyatsky
Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsyatsky (Russian: Анастасий Андреевич Вонсяцкий; June 12, 1898 - February 5, 1965), better known in the United States as Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatsky, was a Russian anti-Bolshevik émigré and fascist leader based in the United States since the 1920s.
A naturalized American citizen while leading a splinter far-right organization, the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists. The headquarters RFO based on Putnam, Connecticut. Vonsyatsky was charged with the support of secret contacts with agents of Nazi Germany's and arrested by the FBI in 1942, following the United States' entry into war with Germany and Japan.
Released early from prison in 1945, Vonsyatsky lived out the remainder of his life in the United States. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1965.
Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsyatsky was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) to a privileged Russian family known for its long devotion to the Russian czars; one of Vonsyatsky's great-grandparents had been handed a titled estated from the Romanovs.

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Ante Pavelić
Ante Pavelić (14 July 1889 – 28 December 1959) was a Croatian fascist leader and revolutionary. As Poglavnik, he ruled the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He was founder and leader of the Croatian fascist movement Ustaše.
Pavelić was a lawyer and politician in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia known for his nationalistic beliefs, particularly about an independent Croatia. From 1927 until 1929, he was a member of the Yugoslav Parliament where he declared his beliefs about Croatian independence. In 1920s he radicalized his political activity and called on Croats to revolt against Yugoslavia.
After King Alexander I declared his 6 January Dictatorship Pavelić escaped to Vienna, where he established contact with Croatian political émigrés and formed a link with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in advocating independence for Croatia and Macedonia. He then moved to Italy where he founded the Ustaše (Croatian Revolutionary Movement); initially, this was a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Greater Croatia via armed revolt. In October 1934 he planned the assassination of King Alexander I and spent time in prison in Italy until 1936. From 1936 until 1939, Italian authorities banned Ustaše, so he dissolved the group. He lived under police watch, eventually seeking German support but without success. After 1939 he was active again, focusing mainly on Ustaše activity in Yugoslavia.

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Anton Drexler
Anton Drexler (13 June 1884 – 24 February 1942) was a German far-right political leader of the 1920s, instrumental in the formation of the anti-communist German Workers' Party. The German Workers' Party was the precedent to the Nazi Party, and Drexler served as mentor to Adolf Hitler during his early days in politics.
Born in Munich, Drexler was a machine-fitter before becoming a railway locksmith in Berlin in 1902. He joined the Fatherland Party during World War I. He was a poet and a member of the völkisch agitators who, together with journalist Karl Harrer, founded the German Workers' Party (DAP) in Munich with Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart in 1919.^{[citation needed]}
At a meeting of the Party in Munich in September 1919, the main speaker was Gottfried Feder. When he had finished speaking, a member of the audience stood up and suggested that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and form a separate nation with Austria. Adolf Hitler sprang up from the audience to rebut the argument. Drexler approached Hitler and thrust a booklet into his hand. It was My Political Awakening and, according to Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, it reflected the ideals he already believed in. Later the same day Hitler received a postcard telling him that he had been accepted for membership of what was at that time the German Workers' Party. After some internal debate, he says, he decided to join.^{[citation needed]} Though Hitler was originally against the idea (but later convinced), Drexler changed the name of the party to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) early in 1920.^{[citation needed]} By 1921, Hitler was rapidly becoming the undisputed leader of the Party. Drexler was thereafter moved to the purely symbolic position of honorary president, and left the Party in 1923.

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Arnold Leese
Arnold Spencer Leese (1878–1956) was a British veterinarian and fascist politician. He was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, England and educated at Giggleswick School.
After qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, he accepted a post in British India, where he became an expert on the camel. He had previously worked in the East End of London. He worked there for six years before becoming Camel Specialist for the East Africa Protectorate of the British Empire. He would remain an animal lover and teetotaller throughout his life.
He published numerous articles on the camel and its maladies, the first appearing in The Journal of Tropical Veterinary Science in 1909. He had the honour of a camel parasite being named after him: Thelazia leesei.
He joined the Royal Army Veterinary Corps of the British Army at the start of World War I and served on the Western Front and the Middle East. Captain Leese returned to England where he continued his practice, retiring and publishing A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and in Disease (1927), which would remain a standard work in India for fifty years.

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Arthur Seyß-Inquart
Arthur Seyss-Inquart (help·info) (in German: Seyß-Inquart) (22 July 1892 – 16 October 1946) was a Chancellor of Austria, lawyer and later Nazi official in pre-Anschluss Austria, the Third Reich and for wartime Germany in Poland and the Netherlands. At the Nuremberg Trials, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and later executed.
Seyss-Inquart was born in 1892 in Stonařov (German: Stannern), Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the school principal Emíl Seyss-Inquart and his German-speaking wife Auguste Hýrenbach. The family moved to Vienna in 1907. Seyss-Inquart later went to study law at the University of Vienna. At the beginning of World War I in August 1914 Seyss-Inquart enlisted with the Austrian Army and was given a commission with the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger, subsequently serving in Russia, Romania and Italy. He was decorated for bravery on a number of occasions and while recovering from wounds in 1917 he completed his final examinations for his degree. Seyss-Inquart had five older siblings: Hedwig (born 1881), Richard (born 3 April 1883, became a Catholic priest, but left the Church and ministry, married in civil ceremony and became Oberregierungsrat and prison superior by 1940 in the Ostmark), Irene (born 1885), Henriette (born 1887) and Robert (born 1891).

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Artur Dinter
Artur Dinter (27 June 1876, Mulhouse – 21 May 1948) was a German writer and Nazi politician.
Dinter was born in Mulhouse, in Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire (now France) to Josef Dinter, a customs adviser, and his wife Berta, née Hoffmann, and he was baptized in the Catholic Church.
After doing his school-leaving examination, Dinter began studying natural sciences and philosophy in 1895 in Munich and at the University of Strasbourg. From 1901 to 1903, he worked as a chemistry assistant at the University of Strasbourg. He graduated in 1903 summa cum laude. Already while he was studying, he had been undertaking endeavours as a writer. His 1906 play Die Schmuggler ("The Smugglers") was awarded a first prize.
After graduation, Dinter was director of the botanical school garden in Strasbourg. In 1904, as a senior teacher at a German school, he went to Constantinople (İstanbul). In 1905 he switched to drama and became a theatre leader in his Alsatian homeland. From 1906 to 1908 he worked as a director at the city theatre in Rostock and the Schillertheater in Berlin, founding at the same time the Federation of German Playwrights (Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller or VDB). As director he furthermore led the theatre publishing house from 1909 to 1914. Moreover, Dinter was a member of the anti-Semitic and Pan-German Alldeutscher Verband, from which he was excluded in 1917.

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August Eigruber
August Eigruber (16 April 1907 – 28 May 1947) was an Austrian-born Nazi Gauleiter of Reichsgau Oberdonau (Upper Danube) and Landeshauptmann of Upper Austria, later hanged by the Allies.
Born in Steyr, Austria, after finishing middle school, Eigruber underwent training in geodesy and fine mechanics at the Austrian Federal Teaching Institution for Iron- and Steelworking. Thereafter, he was active in his profession. In November 1922 he joined the National Socialist Worker Youth of Austria, whose leader he became in 1925. In April 1928, he joined the Nazi Party, whose Steyr-Land district leadership he took up in October 1930. For his activities in the NSDAP, which was banned in Austria, Eigruber was sentenced to several months in prison.
From May 1935, Eigruber was the Gau Director (Gaugeschäftsführer) for the banned Party in the Upper Austria Gau, and he took over complete leadership of the Gau as of 1936. After Anschluss, he was appointed Landeshauptmann on 14 March 1938. From 10 April 1938 he furthermore functioned as a ministerial adviser. Shortly before this, in March 1938, Eigruber joined the SA, in which he bore the rank of Brigadeführer.

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August Kubizek
August ("Gustl") Kubizek (3 August 1888, Linz – 23 October 1956, Eferding) was a close friend of Adolf Hitler when both were in their late teens. He later wrote about their friendship.
August was the first born and only surviving child of Michael and Maria Kubizek. His sisters Maria, Therese and Karoline died in early childhood. Kubizek later wrote that this was a striking parallel between his own life and that of Adolf Hitler, whose mother had lost four children prematurely. As the surviving sons of grief stricken mothers, August and Adolf could not help but feel they had been spared or "chosen" by fate.
Kubizek and Hitler first met while competing for standing room in the Landestheater in Linz, Austria. Because of their shared passion for the operas of Richard Wagner they quickly became close friends and later roommates in Vienna while both sought admission into college. The two shared a small room in Stumpergasse 29/2 door 17 in the sixth district of Vienna from 22 February to early July 1908.

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Austria
Austria (ⁱ/ˈɒstriə/ or /ˈɔːstriə/; German: Österreich [ˈøːstɐˌʁaɪç] ( listen)), officially the Republic of Austria (German: Republik Österreich (help·info)), is a landlocked country of roughly 8.47 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers 83,855 square kilometres (32,377 sq mi) and has a temperate and alpine climate. Austria's terrain is highly mountainous due to the presence of the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 metres (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,798 metres (12,461 ft). The majority of the population speak local Austro-Bavarian dialects of German as their native language, and German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other local official languages are Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene.
The origins of modern-day Austria date back to the time of the Habsburg dynasty when the vast majority of the country was a part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria became one of the great powers of Europe and, in response to the coronation of Napoleon I as the Emperor of the French, the Austrian Empire was officially proclaimed in 1804. In 1867, the Austrian Empire was reformed into Austria-Hungary.

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Baldur von Schirach
Baldur Benedikt von Schirach (9 May 1907 – 8 August 1974) was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Vienna.
Schirach was born in Berlin, the youngest of four children of theatre director Rittmeister Carl Baily Norris von Schirach (1873–1948) and his American wife Emma Middleton Lynah Tillou (1872–1944). Through his mother, Schirach descended from two signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence. English was in fact the first language which he learned at home and he was not able to speak German until the age of five. He had two sisters, Viktoria and Rosalind von Schirach, and a brother, Karl Benedict von Schirach, who committed suicide in 1919 at the age of 19.
On 31 March 1932 von Schirach married 19-year-old Henriette Hoffmann, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler's personal photographer and close friend. Von Schirach's family was vehemently opposed to the marriage to Henriette, but Hitler insisted. Von Schirach, says Gregor Strasser, was "a young effeminate aristocrat" upon whom Hitler bestowed Henriette and the HJ position. Through this relationship, von Schirach became part of Hitler's inner circle. The young couple were appreciated guests at Hitler's "Berghof". Henriette von Schirach gave birth to four children: Angelika Benedikta von Schirach (born 1933), Klaus von Schirach (born 1935), Robert von Schirach (1938) and Richard von Schirach (born 1942). The lawyer and bestselling German crime writer Ferdinand von Schirach is his grandson.

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Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian pronunciation: [beˈniːto musːoˈliːni]; 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party, ruling the country from 1922 to his ousting in 1943, and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of fascism.
Originally a member of the Italian Socialist Party and editor of the Avanti! from 1912 to 1914, Mussolini fought in World War I as an ardent nationalist and created the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, catalyzing his nationalist and socialist beliefs in the Fascist Manifesto, published in 1921. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the 27th Prime Minister of Italy and began using the title Il Duce by 1925, about which time he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. After 1936, his official title was Sua Eccellenza Benito Mussolini, Capo del Governo, Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell'Impero ("His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire") Mussolini also created and held the supreme military rank of First Marshal of the Empire along with King Victor Emmanuel III, which gave him and the King joint supreme control over the military of Italy. Mussolini remained in power until he was replaced in 1943; for a short period after this until his death, he was the leader of the Italian Social Republic.

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Bernhard Rust
Dr. Bernhard Rust (30 September 1883 — 8 May 1945) was Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany. A combination of school administrator and zealous Nazi, he issued decrees, often bizarre, at every level of the German educational system to immerse German youth in the National Socialist philosophy.
Rust was born in Hannover, and obtained a doctorate in German philology and philosophy. After passing the state teaching examination in 1908 he became a high school teacher at Hannover's Ratsgymnasium, then served in the army during World War I. He reached the rank of lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery.
Rust joined the NSDAP in 1922, and became the district leader for Hannover and Brunswick. In 1930, he was elected to the Reichstag. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Rust was appointed as the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs. On 1 June 1934, he was selected as Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung), and set about to reshape the German educational system to conform to his ideals of National Socialism. Considered by many to be mentally unstable, Rust would spuriously create new regulations and then repeal them just as quickly. One noted example was in 1935, when he changed the traditional six-day school week to five days, with Saturday to be "Reich's Youth Day" when children in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls would be out of school for study and testing. He then ordered the creation of a "rolling week", with six days for study, followed by the "youth day" and a rest day, in 8-day periods. Thus, a rolling week starting on Monday would end with rest on the following Monday; the next rolling week would start on Tuesday and end 8 days later on the next Tuesday. When the 8-day week proved unworkable, Rust went back to the former system.

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Black people
The term black people is used in some socially-based systems of racial classification for humans of a dark-skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups represented in a particular social context. Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class and socio-economic status also play a role, so that relatively dark-skinned people can be classified as white if they fulfill other social criteria of "whiteness" and relatively light-skinned people can be classified as black if they fulfill the social criteria for "blackness" in a particular setting.
As a biological phenotype being "black" is often associated with the very dark skin colors of some people who are classified as "black". But, particularly in the United States, the racial or ethnic classification also refers to people with all possible kinds of skin pigmentation from the darkest through to the very lightest skin colors, including albinos, if they are believed by others to have African ancestry, or to exhibit cultural traits associated with being "African-American". As a result, in the United States the term "black people" is not an indicator of skin color but of socially based racial classification.

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Carl Röver
Carl Georg Röver (born 12 February 1889 in Lemwerder - died 15 May 1942 in Berlin) was a German Nazi Party official. His main posts were as Gauleiter of Weser-Ems and Reichsstatthalter of Oldenburg/Bremen.
Röver saw service in the First World War, initially with the regular army before joining the Propaganda department of the Oberste Heeresleitung. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1923. He also joined the Sturmabteilung, rising to the rank of Obergruppenführer.
Röver was appointed to the post of Reichsstatthalter for Oldenburg-Bremen in April 1933 after the Nazi regime reorganised local government in Germany. In this post he played a role in the perpetration of the Holocaust as he personally signed the order for every Jew deported from Bremen during his life.
However in this role Röver also clashed with Hermann Goering as the Reichsmarschall, as Minister President of Prussia, made no secret of his desire to incorporate Bremen into Prussia. Röver however opposed the move consistently and managed to convince Adolf Hitler to decline Goering's requests.

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Dietrich Eckart
Dietrich Eckart (23 March 1868 – 26 December 1923) was a German journalist and politician and, with Adolf Hitler, was one of the early key members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and a participant in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.
Eckart was born Johann Dietrich Eckart in 1868 in Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate (about twenty miles southeast of Nuremberg) in the Kingdom of Bavaria, the son of royal notary and lawyer Christian Eckart and his wife Anna, a devout Catholic. His mother died when he was ten years old. Young Dietrich was expelled from several schools; in 1895, his father died also, leaving him a considerable amount of money that Eckart soon spent.
Eckart initially studied law at Erlangen, later medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and was an eager fencing and drinking corps member, but he finally decided in 1891 to work as a poet, playwright and journalist. Diagnosed with morphine addiction and nearly stranded, he moved to Berlin in 1899, where he wrote a number of plays, often autobiographical, becoming the protégé of Count Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler (1858 – 1922), the artistic director of the Prussian Royal Theatre. Eckart was a successful playwright, especially for his 1912 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, one of the best attended productions of the age with more than 600 performances in Berlin alone. It was this success that not only made Eckart a wealthy man, but gave him the social contacts needed to introduce Hitler to dozens of important German citizens of the day. These introductions proved to be pivotal in Hitler's ultimate rise to power.

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Dimitrije Ljotić
Dimitrije Ljotić (Serbian Cyrillic: Димитрије Љотић; August 12, 1891, Belgrade - April 23, 1945, Ajdovščina) was a Serbian fascist politician and Nazi German collaborationist during World War II.
Although born in Belgrade he spent most of his life in Smederevo. His Serbian ancestors came to Serbia from the village of Blace in what is today Greek Macedonia during the first half of 19th century. His father Vladimir Ljotić had a notable political and diplomatic career during which he was a consul in Thessaloniki, mayor of Smederevo and a Member of Parliament in the Serbian Parliament. Dimitrije started his education in Smederevo, before going on to graduate at the age of 16 from the Serbian lycée in Thesaloniki, and concluding his education by graduating at the University of Belgrade's Law School.
During the Balkan wars he volunteered for military medical service. In 1913 he stayed in Paris where he remained until the beginning of World War I; soon after he returned to Serbia and enlisted in the Serbian Army. After the Great War he served as commander of a railway station in Bakar, Croatia where he broke a railway strike arresting 36 workers. This event proved crucial in his life and career since it determined his choice to become a politician rather than a clergyman. In Bakar he met his wife Ivka, with whom he moved back to Smederevo in 1920 and started practicing law. In Smederevo he joined the People's Radical Party soon becoming president of the Youth branch. In 1931 King Alexander I proclaimed him Minister of Justice in the government of Petar Živković, in which capacity he would make a new draft Constitution and present it to the King. He proposed voters should vote in free and secret elections whilst candidates would be nominated by non-governmental organizations. The King refused his proposal and Ljotić resigned from office.

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Eberhard Kolb
Professor Eberhard Kolb (born 8 August 1933, Stuttgart) is one of Germany's foremost authorities on German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Eberhard Kolb studied at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn, and attained a doctorate 1960 at the University of Goettingen on the topic of the influence of workers' councils on German domestic politics.
He wrote his habilitation in 1969, and one year later became a professor of modern history at the University of Würzburg. He served as a professor at the University of Cologne from 1979 until his retirement in 1998. In 1981 he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Professor Kolb has published outstanding books on Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. His learned summary of research on the Weimar Republic is mandatory reading for all students of modern German history. It has been frequently revised and reissued since its publication in 1984, and was translated into English in 1988.

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Enrico Corradini
Enrico Corradini (July 20, 1865 — December 10, 1931) was an Italian novelist, essayist, journalist and nationalist political figure.
Corradini was born near Montelupo Fiorentino, Tuscany.
A follower of Gabriele D'Annunzio, he founded the right-wing newspaper Il Regno (1903-1905), together with intellectuals Giovanni Papini, Vilfredo Pareto, and Giuseppe Prezzolini. It quickly became a staple for irredentist and radical thought that was to blend into Fascism. In 1910, the Italian Nationalist Association (Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, ANI) was founded with the participation of Corradini, who was among the leaders. It made a name for itself after giving full support to Italian imperialism and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 - Corradini wrote two political essays on the matter (Il volere d'Italia - "Italy's Desire", and L'ora di Tripoli - "Tripoli's Moment"). He expanded such bellicose theories in the weekly L'Idea Nazionale, founded by him together with Alfredo Rocco and Luigi Federzoni.

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Eoin O'Duffy
Eoin O'Duffy (Irish: Eoin Ó Dubhthaigh; 30 October 1892 – 30 November 1944) was in succession a Teachta Dála (TD), the Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the second Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, leader of the Army Comrades Association and then the first leader of Fine Gael (1933–34), before leading the Irish Brigade to fight for Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He once proclaimed himself the "third most important man in Europe" after Adolf Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini.
Eoin O'Duffy was born Owen O'Duffy in Lough Egish, near Castleblayney, County Monaghan. O'Duffy did an apprenticeship as an engineer in Wexford before working as an engineer and architect in Monaghan. In 1919 he became an auctioneer. O'Duffy was a leading member of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ulster in the 1910s. A stand in a ground in Clones, County Monaghan, is named after him.
In 1917 O'Duffy joined the Irish Volunteers and took an active part in the Irish War of Independence. In February 1920, he (along with Ernie O'Malley) was involved in the first capture of a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks by the IRA in Ballytrain, in his native Monaghan. He came to the attention of Michael Collins, who enrolled him into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and supported his advancement in the Nationalist hierarchy.

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Erich Koch
Erich Koch (June 19, 1896 – November 12, 1986) was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 he was the Chief of Civil Administration (Chef der Zivilverwaltung) of Bezirk Bialystok. During this period, he was also the Reichskommissar in Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 until 1943. After the war, Koch stood trial in Poland and was convicted in 1959 of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment a year later.
Koch was born in Elberfeld, today part of Wuppertal, as the son of foreman Gustav Adolf Koch (1862 – 1932) and his wife Henriette, née Matthes (1863 – 1939). In World War I he served without distinction as a soldier from 1915 till 1918 and later fought as a member of Freikorps Rossbach in Upper Silesia. A skilled trader, Koch joined the railway service as an aspirant for the middle level of the civil service. He was dismissed from this position in 1926 for anti-republican activities.
Koch joined the NSDAP in 1922 {NSDAP # 90}. From 1922 he worked in various party positions in the NSDAP-Gau Ruhr. During the Occupation of the Ruhr, he was a member of Albert Leo Schlageter's group and was imprisoned several times by the French authorities. In 1927 he became Bezirksführer of the NSDAP in Essen and later the deputy Gauleiter of Gau Ruhr. Koch belonged to the left wing of the party and was a supporter of the faction led by Gregor Strasser.

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Erich Ludendorff
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (sometimes referred to as von Ludendorff) (9 April 1865 – 20 December 1937) was a German general, victor of Liège and of the Battle of Tannenberg. From August 1916 his appointment as Quartermaster general made him joint head (with Paul von Hindenburg), and chief engineer behind the management of Germany's effort in World War I until his resignation in October 1918.
After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader, and a promoter of the stab-in-the-back legend, convinced that the German Army had been betrayed by Marxists and Republicans in the Versailles Treaty. He took part in the unsuccessful coups d’état of Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 and the Beer Hall Putsch of Adolf Hitler in 1923, and in 1925 he ran for president against his former colleague, Paul von Hindenburg, who he claimed had taken credit for Ludendorff's victories against Russia. From 1924 to 1928 he represented the German Völkisch Freedom Party in the German Parliament. Consistently pursuing a purely military line of thought, Ludendorff developed, after the war, the theory of “Total War,” which he published as Der Totale Krieg (The Total War) in 1935, in which he argued that the entire physical and moral forces of the nation should be mobilized, because, according to him, peace was merely an interval between wars. Ludendorff was a recipient of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross and the Pour le Mérite.

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Ernst Röhm
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm, (November 28, 1887 – July 2, 1934) was a German officer in the Bavarian Army and later an early Nazi leader. He was a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung ("Storm Battalion"; SA), the Nazi Party militia, and later was its commander. In 1934, as part of the Night of the Long Knives, he was executed on Hitler's orders as a potential rival.
Ernst Röhm was born in Munich, the youngest of three children (older sister and brother). His father, a railway official, was described as "a harsh man". Although the family had no military tradition, Röhm entered the Royal Bavarian 10th Infantry Regiment Prinz Ludwig at Ingolstadt as a cadet on 23 July 1906. He obtained his commission on 12 March 1908. At the outbreak of war in August 1914, he was adjutant of the 1st Battalion, 10th Infantry Regiment König. The following month, he was seriously wounded in the face at Chanot Wood in Lorraine, and carried the scars for the rest of his life. He was promoted to senior lieutenant (Oberleutnant) in April 1915. During an attack on the fortification at Thiaumont, Verdun, on 23 June 1916, he sustained a serious chest wound. As a result, he spent the remainder of the war in both France and Romania as a staff officer. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class on 20 June 1916, just before he was wounded at Verdun, and was promoted to captain (Hauptmann) in April 1917. In October 1918, while serving on the Staff of the Gardekorps, he contracted the deadly Spanish influenza and was not expected to live; however, he survived and recovered after a long period of convalescence.

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Ernst Wilhelm Bohle
Ernst Wilhelm Bohle (July 28, 1903 – November 9, 1960) was the leader of the Foreign Organization of the German Nazi Party (NSDAP) from 1933 until 1945.
Bohle was born in Bradford, England, the son of Hermann Bohle (1877–1943), a college teacher and engineer who emigrated to England. In 1906 Bohle came to Cape Town, where his father was appointed to a professorship of electrical engineering, and attended a high school there. Bohle studied political sciences and business administration in Cologne and Berlin and graduated in business management at the Handelshochschule, Berlin, in December 1923. He married Gertrud Bachmann on November 14, 1925. Bohle was employed as branch manager and agent in the import-export business for several enterprises in the Rheinland from 1924 until 1930 and established and thereafter directed a large automotive firm in Hamburg from 1930 to June 1933.
Bohle joined the NSDAP on March 1, 1932 (membership number 999.185) and on September 13, 1933 he entered additionally the SS (membership number 276.915) at the rank of SS Major General (German: Brigadeführer). Bohle was promoted SS Lieutenant General (German: Gruppenführer) on April 20, 1937 and SS General (German: Obergruppenführer) on June 21, 1943.

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Ferenc Szálasi
Ferenc Szálasi (Szálasi Ferenc in Hungarian, Hungarian pronunciation: [saːlaʃi fɛrɛnts]) (6 January 1897 – 12 March 1946) was the leader of the National Socialist Arrow Cross Party – Hungarist Movement, the "Leader of the Nation" (Nemzetvezető), being both Head of State and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary's "Government of National Unity" (Nemzeti Összefogás Kormánya) for the final three months of Hungary's participation in World War II. During his brief rule, Szálasi's men murdered 10–15,000 Jews. After the war, he was executed by the Soviets for crimes against the state.
Born the son of a soldier in Kassa (now Košice in Slovakia) of mixed Armenian (the surname of his great-grandfather was Saloshyan), German, Hungarian (one grandparent), Slovak and Rusyn heritage.
Szálasi followed in his father's footsteps and joined the army at a young age. He eventually became an officer and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. Upon the dissolution and break-up of Austria-Hungary after the war, the Hungarian Democratic Republic and then the Hungarian Soviet Republic were briefly proclaimed in 1918 and 1919 respectively. The short-lived communist government of Béla Kun launched what was known as the "Red Terror" and ultimately involved Hungary in an ill-fated war with Romania. In 1920, the country went into a period of civil conflict with Hungarian anti-communists and monarchists violently purging the nation of communists, leftist intellectuals, and others they felt threatened by, especially Jews. This period was known as the "White Terror" and, in 1920, after the pullout of the last of the Romanian occupation forces, it led to the restoration of the Kingdom of Hungary (Magyar Királyság).

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Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, better known under the name of Franco, (Spanish: [fɾanˈθisko ˈfɾaŋko]; 4 December 1892 – 20 November 1975) was a Spanish general, dictator and the leader of the Nationalist military rebellion in the Spanish Civil War, and totalitarian head of state of Spain, from October 1936 (as a unified nation from 1939 onwards) until his death in November 1975. He came to power while recognizing the principles of the far-right Falange movement, although this was for propaganda reasons, as he belonged to no political party before becoming Head of State. As head of state, Franco used the titles Caudillo de España and Generalísimo, but also was called formally as His Excellency, The Head of State.
Franco was from a military family, and although originally intent on entering the Spanish Navy, he instead became a soldier. He participated in the Rif War in Morocco, becoming the youngest general in Europe by 1926. After returning to the Spanish mainland, he saw service suppressing an anarchist-led strike in 1934, defending the stability of Alcalá-Zamora's conservative government. Following the formation of a Popular Front government, made up of various left-wing factions, instability heightened. Violence between militant groups rose sharply with assassination of conservative parliamentary leader José Calvo Sotelo, in retaliation for the killing of José Castillo. Franco and his co-conspirators used Calvo's death as their pretext for war, as they had already initiated the plan for their rebellion.

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Franz Hofer
Franz Hofer (November 27, 1902 in Bad Hofgastein – February 18, 1975 in Mülheim an der Ruhr) was, in the time of the Third Reich, the Nazi Gauleiter of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg. As the Nazi party chief for the Tirol/Vorarlberg province he was the most powerful figure in the region. As the area's supreme Nazi, Hofer dealt directly with Hitler or with the Fuhrer's deputy, Martin Borman. Hofer was not only the party chief but the Reichskommsisar in charge of the Tirol-Vorarlberg defences. His region embraced much of the suspected National Redoubt. Indeed Hofer might well be considered the father of the Redoubt.<Piercing the Reich by Joseph Persico>
Born to a Bad Hofgastein hotelkeeper, Hofer went to the Volksschule-Realschule in Innsbruck and in 1922 began a career as a freelance salesman. In September 1931, he joined the NSDAP. He very quickly rose in the Party, becoming District Leader in April 1932, and in July of the same year acting Gauleiter of the Tyrol. Only four months later, on 27 November 1932 – Hofer's thirtieth birthday – he was promoted to Gauleiter of the Tyrol.

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Franz Schwede-Coburg
Franz Reinhold Schwede (5 March 1888 - 19 October 1960) was a Nazi German politician, Lord Mayor of Coburg and Gauleiter of Pomerania. An early supporter of Adolf Hitler in Coburg, Schwede used intimidation and propaganda to help elect the first Nazi-majority local government in Germany. This contributed to a personality cult surrounding Schwede and he became known as "Franz Schwede-Coburg". During World War II he ordered secret executions of the infirm and mass deportations of Jews. He also played a key role in abandoning the Pomeranian civilian population to the advancing Red Army, while escaping their fate himself. In 1945 he was captured by the British Army and in 1948 he was tried and convicted of war crimes.
Franz Schwede was born in the small town of Drawöhnen near Memel, East Prussia (now Dreverna near Klaipėda, Lithuania) in 1888, when it was part of the German Empire. He trained as a millwright and in 1907 joined the Imperial German Navy as a machinist. By the end of the First World War he had risen to the rank of technical deck officer. After the Scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919, Schwede wound up in British custody as a prisoner of war. Upon his release he joined the German Army in 1920, but was discharged after the 100,000-man limit imposed by the Versailles Treaty was reached in 1921. He then took a job as operations manager at a sawmill in Sankt Andreasberg, Lower Saxony before being hired as foreman at the Coburg Municipal Works in March 1922. During this period, Schwede became active in the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund, a "völkisch" anti-Semitic organization.

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Franz von Papen
Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen zu Köningen ( listen (help·info)) (29 October 1879 – 2 May 1969) was a German nobleman, General Staff officer and right-wing politician. He served as as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and as Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler in 1933–1934. He belonged to the group of close advisers to President Paul von Hindenburg in the late Weimar Republic. It was largely Papen, believing that Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, who persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in a cabinet not under Nazi Party domination. However, Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives, during which some of his confidants were killed by the Nazis.
Born to a wealthy and noble Catholic family in Werl, Province of Westphalia, son of Friedrich von Papen zu Köningen (1839 – 1906) and his wife Anna Laura von Steffens (1852 – 1939), Papen was educated as an officer, including a period as a military attendant in the Kaiser's Palace, before joining the German General Staff in March 1913. He entered diplomatic service in December 1913 as a military attaché to the German ambassador in the United States. He travelled to Mexico (to which he was also accredited) in early 1914 and observed the Mexican Revolution, returning to Washington, D.C. on the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. He married Martha von Boch-Galhau (1880 – 1961) on 3 May 1905.

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Franz Xaver Schwarz
Franz Xaver Schwarz (27 November 1875, Günzburg, Kingdom of Bavaria - 2 December 1947) was a German politician who served as Reichsschatzmeister (National Treasurer) of the Nazi Party during most of the Party's existence.
Schwarz was born in Günzburg, the seventh of eight children born to a master baker and his wife. He was educated to a high school level at the Günzburger vocational training school. Schwarz married Berta Breher on 26 August 1899. He was involved in the military and city government of Munich between 1900-1925. He began service by volunteering at the Günzburger District Court, and then worked as a notary.
Schwarz served in World War I as a second lieutenant in the infantry. Due to gastric troubles which afflicted him his entire life (he was considered 30 percent disabled in that war), he was spared field duty beginning in 1916.
Schwarz joined the Nazi party in 1922. His NSDAP membership number was six. Schwarz participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. With the re-establishment of the Nazi party in Germany on 27 February 1925, Schwarz became party member number six. On 21 March 1925 he became full-time treasurer of the Nazi party, rebuilding the financial and administrative functions. In April–May 1930 Schwarz negotiated the purchase of the party headquarters, the Brown House at 45 Brienner Straße in Munich.

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Friedrich Rainer
Friedrich W. Rainer (28 July 1903 – 19 July 1947) was an Austrian Nazi politician, Gauleiter as well as a State governor of Salzburg and Carinthia. He is the only Austrian governor who has ever held the same office in two separate states.
Rainer was a native of Sankt Veit an der Glan in Carinthia, the son of a vocational teacher at a municipal Bürgerschule (secondary school). Following his general education, Rainer studied law at the University of Graz and earned his living by working in a local banking institution or in general labor. After successfully completing his law examination, Rainer began working in a notary's office.
Prior to his graduation from law school in 1926, he joined the Austrian SA, and served as a member of organizations based in St. Veit that were propagating the political rhetoric of Nazism.
In October 1930, Rainer joined the Nazi Party establishing the local branch in Sankt Veit. Four years later, he joined the SS and took up a post at the office of Nazi Gauleiter Hubert Klausner in Klagenfurt. As the Nazi Party had been banned by the Austrian government under Engelbert Dollfuß in 1933, Rainer in August 1935 was sentenced to one year in police custody, presumably for high treason. He was released early for good behaviour the following March, nevertheless like Klausner and his deputy Odilo Globocnik he had to step down from his administrative role in the party, transferring sole leadership to the rivalling Austrian Nazi leader Josef Leopold. As Leopold soon fell out of favour with Adolf Hitler, Friedrich in May 1936 was again assigned to the Nazi Party's provincial body in Carinthia.

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Fritz Bracht
Fritz Bracht (18 January 1899 in Heiden, part of Lage near Detmold – 9 May 1945 in Bad Kudowa, now Kudowa Zdrój, Poland) was the Nazi Gauleiter of Upper Silesia. He was directly involved in the mass murder of Jews and Poles.
After training as a gardener, Bracht performed military service beginning in 1917, and was deployed at the front until the end of World War I. Thereafter, he found himself a prisoner of the British, until 1919.
On 1 April 1927, Bracht joined the Nazi Party and was appointed leader of the NSDAP district of Sauerland in November 1928. He held the same function as of 1 March 1931 in Altena.
Elected to the Prussian Landtag for the Nazis in 1932, he took on the post of acting Gauleiter of Silesia on 1 May 1935.
After Gauleiter Josef Wagner, in whose shadow Bracht had been standing for quite a while, fell out of favour with Adolf Hitler on 9 November 1941 and was removed from office and kicked out of the Party, Silesia was split into two Gaue, Upper and Lower Silesia, with Bracht taking an appointment as the new Gauleiter of the former. From February 1941, he was moreover given the function of High President (Oberpräsident) of the Province of Upper Silesia, and in November 1942 the office of Reich Defence Commissar in his Gau. In 1944, he was also promoted to SA Obergruppenführer. Within Bracht's jurisdiction was the extermination camp Auschwitz.

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Fritz Sauckel
Ernst Friedrich Christoph "Fritz" Sauckel (27 October 1894 – 16 October 1946) was a Nazi war criminal, who organized the systematic enslavement of millions from lands occupied by Nazi Germany. He was General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment from 1942 until the end of the war, after which he was tried and executed.
He was born in Haßfurt (Kingdom of Bavaria), the only child of a postman and a seamstress. Sauckel was educated at local schools and left early when his mother fell ill. He joined the merchant marine of Norway and Sweden when he was 15, first on a Norwegian three-masted schooner, and later on Swedish and German vessels. He went on to sail throughout the world, rising to the rank of Vollmatrose. At the outbreak of World War I, he was on a German vessel en route to Australia when the vessel was captured. He was subsequently interned in France from August 1914 until November 1919.
He returned to Germany, found factory work in Schweinfurt, and studied engineering in Ilmenau from 1922 to 1923. He joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1923 (member 1,395). In 1924 he married Elisabeth Wetzel, with whom he had ten children. He remained a party member over its dissolution and publicly rejoined in 1925. Sauckel was appointed party Gauleiter of Thüringia in 1927 and became a member of the regional government in 1929. Following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, he was promoted to Reich Regent of Thüringia and Reichstag member. He was also given an honorary rank of Obergruppenführer in the SA and the SS in 1934.

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Fritz Thyssen
Friedrich "Fritz" Thyssen (9 November 1873, Mülheim an der Ruhr – 8 February 1951, Buenos Aires) was a German businessman born into one of Germany's leading industrial families.
Thyssen was born in Mülheim in the Ruhr area. His father, August Thyssen (1842–1926), was head of the Thyssen mining and steelmaking company, which had been founded by his father Friedrich Thyssen and was based in the Ruhr city of Duisburg. Thyssen studied mining and metallurgy in London, Liège, and Berlin, and after a short period of service in the German Army he joined the family business. On 18 January 1900 in Düsseldorf he married Amelie Helle or Zurhelle (Mülheim am Rhein, 11 December 1877 – Puchdorf bei Straubing, 25 August 1965), daughter of a factory owner. Their only child, Anna (Anita), (later Anita Gräfin Zichy-Thyssen), was born in 1909. Thyssen again joined the army in 1914, but was soon discharged with a lung condition.
Thyssen was a political conservative and a German nationalist. In 1923, when France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr to punish Germany for not meeting its reparations payments in full, he took part in the nationalist resistance against the occupiers, leading the Ruhr steelmakers in refusing to co-operate in producing coal and steel for them. He was arrested, imprisoned and received a large fine for his activities, which made him a national hero. Through the 1920s the Thyssen companies continued to expand. Thyssen took over the Thyssen companies on his father's death in 1926, and in 1928 he formed United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG), controlling more than 75 percent of Germany's iron ore reserves and employing 200,000 people. He played a prominent role in German commercial life, as head of the German Iron and Steel Industry Association and the Reich Association of German Industry, and as a board member of the Reichsbank.

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Fritz Todt
Fritz Todt (4 September 1891, Pforzheim – 8 February 1942) was a German engineer and senior Nazi figure, the founder of Organisation Todt. He died in a plane crash during World War II.
Todt was born in Pforzheim to a father who owned a small factory. He studied engineering in Karlsruhe and the School for Advanced Technical Studies at the Technical University Munich.
In World War I, he initially served with the infantry and then as front line reconnaissance observer within the Luftstreitkräfte (the German Air Forces - DLSK), winning the Iron Cross. After his military service, he finished his studies in 1920 and joined at first the "Grün & Bilfinger AG, Mannheim" company and, later, the civil engineering company Sager & Woerner (1921).
He joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (better known as the Nazi Party) on 5 January 1922. In 1931, he became an Oberführer (a rank equivalent to senior Colonel) in the Sturmabteilung (SA), which was then commanded by Ernst Röhm: that year, Todt also completed his doctorate (on "Fehlerquellen beim Bau von Landstraßendecken aus Teer und Asphalt" – "Sources of defects in the construction of tarmac and asphalt road surfaces").

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Fumimaro Konoe
Prince Fumimaro Konoe (近衛文麿, Konoe Fumimaro^?, often Konoye, October 12, 1891 – December 16, 1945) was a politician in the Empire of Japan who served as the 34th, 38th and 39th Prime Minister of Japan and founder/leader of the Taisei Yokusankai.
Prince Fumimaro Konoe was born into the ancient Fujiwara clan, and was the heir of the princely Konoe family in Tokyo. This was a highly prestigious Japanese family, so lofty that the older and more powerful noble, Saionji Kinmochi, addressed the young student as "your Excellency" when he first met him. The Prince received a broad education, acquiring both German and English. He was particularly drawn to Socialist writings, he studied socialist philosopher Hajime Kawakami, and at age 23 translated and published Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Konoe’s father, Atsumaro, had been politically active, having organized the Anti-Russia Society in 1903. Atsumaro had been considered a potential candidate for Prime Minister, but died in 1904. That left Konoe with the title of Prince, plenty of social standing but not much money, and plenty of room for a mentor/father-figure. That mentor was Saionji. Even so, Konoe never fully embraced his mentor’s pro-Western attitudes.

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Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni dʒenˈtiːle]; May 30, 1875 – April 15, 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism (1932) for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.
Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.
He won the fierce competition and became one of the four exceptional students of the mythic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities.

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Gottfried Feder
Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was an economist and one of the early key members of the Nazi Party. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his lecture in 1919 that drew Hitler into the party.
Feder was born in Würzburg, Germany on 27 January 1883 as the son of civil servant Hanse Feder and Mathilde Feder (née Luz). After attending humanistic schools in Ansbach and Munich, he studied engineering in Berlin and Zürich (Switzerland); after graduating, he founded a construction company in 1908 that subsequently was particularly active in Bulgaria where it built a number of official buildings.
From 1917 on, Feder studied financial politics and economics on his own; he developed a hostility towards wealthy bankers during World War I and wrote a "manifesto on breaking the shackles of interest" ("Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft") in 1919. This was soon followed by the founding of a "task force" dedicated to those goals that demanded a nationalisation of all banks and an abolishment of interest.

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Gregor Strasser
Gregor Strasser (also Straßer, see ß) (31 May 1892 – 30 June 1934) was a German politician and prominent figure in the Nazi Party. He became a rival to Adolf Hitler, left the Party in late 1932, and was murdered in 1934, during the "Night of the Long Knives".
Gregor Strasser and his younger brother Otto were born into the family of a Catholic judicial officer who lived in the Upper Bavarian market town of Geisenfeld. He attended the local Gymnasium (grammar school) and after his final examinations, served an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in the Lower Bavarian village of Frontenhausen from 1910 until 1914.
In 1914 he began to study pharmacy at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, suspending his studies in the same year to enlist as a volunteer in the German Imperial Army. Strasser served in World War I, rising to the rank of First Lieutenant, and won the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. In 1918, he resumed his studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg. He passed his state examination in 1919 and in 1920 started work as a pharmacist in Landshut.

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Gustav Adolf Scheel
Gustav Adolf Scheel (November 22, 1907 in Rosenberg, Baden – March 25, 1979 in Hamburg) was a German physician and "multifunctionary" in the time of the Third Reich (SA and SS member, leader of the National Socialist Students' Federation, Organizer of the SD in the southwest, Superior SS and Police Leader in Salzburg, Gauleiter in Salzburg from November 1941). As the commander of the Security Police and the SD, he organized in October 1940 the deportation of Karlsruhe's Jews to the death camps in the east.
Born as an Evangelical minister's son in Rosenberg in North Baden, Scheel went to the Karl-Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Mannheim. Even while still a schoolboy he became involved in rightwing circles of the German Youth Movement.
Beginning in the summer semester of 1928, he studied law, political economy and theology in Heidelberg to become a minister. He intensified his coöperation in rightwing student circles and in the winter semester of 1928-29 he became a member of the Verein Deutscher Studenten (VDSt), a German Studentenverbindung. A year later he was the club's chairman.

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Gustav Simon
Gustav Simon (2 August 1900, Saarbrücken – 18 December 1945) was, as the Nazi Gauleiter in the Moselland Gau from 1940 until 1944, the Chief of the Civil Administration in Luxembourg, which was occupied at that time by Nazi Germany.
Gustav Simon's father was a railway official. His parents farmed small plots on the Hunsrück. Simon went to a Volksschule in Saarbrücken, and thereafter underwent training as a schoolteacher in Merzig. Although he got his diploma, he did not get a teaching job. He then decided to take his Abitur, and meanwhile he helped out on the railway and with customs. After his Abitur, he studied economics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, planning to become a teacher. After completing his studies in 1927, he taught in Völklingen. Before the year was even out, though, he left the school and began as his main occupation working for the National Socialist German Workers' Party – the Nazis.
By 1923, Simon was a member of a völkisch College Group (völkischen Hochschulgruppe) in Frankfurt. Already on 14 August 1925, he joined the NSDAP, membership number 17 017, thereby becoming one of the "Old Fighters" ("alte Kämpfer") who would later automatically be decorated with the "Golden Party Badge". Shortly after joining, Simon founded the Hochschulgruppe Frankfurt of the National Socialist German Students' League. In 1927, he was chosen by the majority of students to be the National Socialist President of the Students' Board.

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Gustavs Celmiņš

Gustavs Celmiņš (April 1, 1899 in Riga – April 10, 1968), was a Latvian politician. He was educated at the commerce school of the Riga Stock Exchange, and graduated in Moscow. In 1917, he began studies at the Riga Polytechnical Institute which had been evacuated to Moscow. After the October Revolution, he returned to Latvia.
In 1918, Celmiņš enlisted into the newly-created Latvian Army, and was promoted to lieutenant the following year, and was then appointed Latvian military attaché in Poland. In 1921, he was awarded the Order of Lāčplēsis.
Retired from army in 1924, he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1925 to 1927. Celmiņš became the secretary of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and subsequently worked in the Finance Ministry. On 24 January 1932, the Latvian nationalist group Ugunskrusts was founded, and Gustavs Celmiņš was elected as its leader. After Ugunskrusts was banned, he founded the organization Pērkonkrusts ("Thundercross"). Common for both organisations was that they advocated a national revolution for a radical re-organisation of society, politics, and the economy in Latvia. Following Kārlis Ulmanis' 15 May 1934 coup d'état, Celmiņš was arrested and imprisoned for three years. He was exiled from Latvia in 1937.

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Hans Frank
Hans Michael Frank (23 May 1900 – 16 October 1946) was a German lawyer who worked for the Nazi party during the 1920s and 1930s. After Hitler's accession to power in 1933, Frank became Nazi Germany's chief jurist and Governor-General of occupied Poland's 'General Government' territory. During his tenure (1939–1945), he instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population and became directly involved in the mass murder of Polish Jews. At the Nuremberg trials, he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and executed.
Frank was born in Karlsruhe to Karl Frank, a lawyer, and his wife, Magdalena (née Buchmaier). He had an older brother, Karl Jr., and a younger sister, Elisabeth. He joined the German army in 1917, during World War I. After the war he served in the Freikorps under Franz Ritter von Epp's command, and then joined the German Worker's Party (which soon evolved into NSDAP), in 1919. He was one of the party's earliest members.

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Hans Nieland
Hans Heinrich Nieland (October 3, 1900 in Hagen – August 29, 1976 in Reinbek near Hamburg) was a politician of the German Nazi-Party (NSDAP) and Lord Mayor of Dresden from 1940 until 1945.
Nieland was drafted into the Imperial Army in June 1918 just after his final examinations at modern grammar school. He remained a soldier until one month after the end of World War I (discharge in December 1918). From February 1919 he studied jurisprudence and economic science in Göttingen and Hamburg. After the end of his studies in July 1922 he worked as a commercial clerk for three years in two Hamburg export firms. Hereupon followed a job training in the local and provincial administration. Afterwards Nieland went to the small town Kirchhörde (which now forms part of Dortmund) as a candidate for the career of a Westphalian bailiff. His political career started as a head of the district authority in his native town Hagen, later on Nieland became district president in Münster. In June 1925 he completed his political science dissertation on the topic "The power as a governmental concept of law: at the same time an analysis of the German Reich's constitutional law situation under the rule of the Versailles Treaty" (German: "Die Macht als staatlicher Rechtsbegriff: Zugleich eine Untersuchung über die staatsrechtliche Stellung des Deutschen Reiches unter der Herrschaft des Versailler Vertrages").

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Hans Schemm
Hans Schemm (6 October 1891 in Bayreuth – 5 March 1935 in Bayreuth) was a Gauleiter in Nazi Germany.
Schemm, whose parents ran a shoemaker's shop, first went to a Volksschule for five years and then as of 1905 a teaching seminary. In 1915 he got married; in 1917 a son was born. As a teacher, he taught school beginning in 1910, first in Wülfersreuth, then as of 1911 in Neufang and from 1920 at the Altstadtschule ("Old Town School"), which was later named the Hans-Schemm-Schule, in Bayreuth. During the First World War he worked at a military epidemic hospital in Bayreuth where he became infected with tuberculosis.
In 1919 he belonged to the Freikorps Bayreuth, which took part in the struggles in Munich.
Schemm was then appointed as head of a bacteriological-chemical laboratory in Thale (Hubertusbad), which, however, closed by 1921 on financial grounds. Schemm, who had dealt with chemical-biological matters scientifically before, went back to teaching school. Between 1921 and 1928, he also moonlit at the folk high school.

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Heinrich Brüning
Heinrich Brüning ( listen (help·info)) (26 November 1885 – 30 March 1970) was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the Weimar Republic. He was the longest serving Chancellor of the Weimar Republic.
Soon after Brüning took power, he was confronted by an economic crisis caused by the Great Depression. Brüning responded with a tightening of credit and a rollback of all wage and salary increases. These policies made him very unpopular and lost him the support of the Reichstag. During much of Brüning's tenure, he based his administration on presidential emergency decree ("Notverordnung"). He coined the term "authoritative (or authoritarian) democracy" to describe this form of government based on the cooperation of the president and toleration of the parliament.
Brüning remains a controversial figure in German politics. His intentions were to protect the Republican government, but his policies contributed to the gradual demise of the Weimar Republic.
Born in Münster in Westphalia, Brüning lost his father when he was one year old and thus his elder brother Hermann Joseph played a major part in his upbringing. Although brought up as a devout Catholic, Brüning was also influenced by Lutheranism's concept of duty, since the Münster region was home to both Catholics, who formed a majority (especially in the western part) and some Prussian-influenced Protestants.

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Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (pronounced [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈluˑɪtˌpɔlt ˈhɪmlɐ] ( listen) 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). Serving as Reichsführer and later as Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary for the entire Reich's administration (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Verwaltung), Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the persons most directly responsible for the Holocaust.
As overseer of the concentration camps, extermination camps, and Einsatzgruppen (literally: task forces, often used as death squads operating to the rear of frontline troops to murder Jews, communists and 'untermensch' in occupied territories), Himmler coordinated the killing of some six million Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma, many prisoners of war, and possibly another three to four million Poles, as well as other groups whom the Nazis deemed unworthy to live, including people with physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the Confessing Church, and homosexuals. Shortly before the end of the war, he offered to surrender both Germany and himself to the Western Allies if he were spared prosecution. After being arrested by British forces on 22 May 1945, he committed suicide the following day before he could be questioned.

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Helmuth Brückner
Helmuth Brückner (1896–1954) was a Gauleiter of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from 1925 until 1934.
Helmuth Brückner was born on May 7, 1896 in Peilau (Prussia). He attended Volkschule in Peilau, Höhere Knabenschule in Langenbielau, and Kgl. Realgymnasium in Reichenbach. He then studied at Friederich-Wilhelm-Universität in Breslau.
In 1914, Brückner volunteered for the Army and was posted with the Feld-Artillerie-Regiment 88 where he won the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class as Leutnant der Reserve and Abteilung-Adjutant. On March 25, 1918, he was seriously wounded while in France. In 1921, he was Ib–Gruppe Nord with the Deutschen Selbstschutz (Freikorps) in Oberschlesien.
In 1924, Brückner joined the NS-Freiheitsbewegung (the NSDAP had been banned after the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923) and became editor of Schlesien Volksstimme. He also became Stadtverordneter in Breslau, a position he held until 1926.
Brückner organized the NSDAP in Silesia and on March 15, 1925, he officially joined the refounded NSDAP (number 2 023) and was appointed Gauleiter for Silesia. In September, 1930 he became a member of the Reichstag for Wroclaw (Wkr.8) and on April 24, 1932, he became a member of the Preußischen Lantags. On August 17, 1932 Brückner was named Kommissar Ost der NSDAP. It was at this time he also founded the publishing house NS-Schlesien which published the “Schlesischen Beobachters”.

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Herbert Albrecht
Dr. Herbert Albrecht (12 january 1900, Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen - 13 June 1945) was a Gauleiter of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from 1930 until 1931.
Dr. Albrecht was born in Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen on January 12, 1900. Protestant. He attended the Realgymnasium and in 1918 he was admitted as an army officer-Cadet in Anh.Infanterie-Regiment 93. In 1919 he took his final highschool examination in Halle, classes for war veterans, and was part of Freikorps Halle and Freikorps Anhalt.
In September 1919, Albrecht was assigned to Reichwehr Infanterie-Regiment 49 as officer candidate (Fahnenjunker-Gefreiter). He was a member of the Reichshammerbundes (Theodor Fritsch) and the Deutsche-Völk. Schutz-und Trutzbundes. Between 1919 and 1925, Albrecht was an agricultural worker, apprentice and a civil-servant in Holstein. He also was a student in Berlin, Rostock and Giessen.
In 1920, Albrecht helped organize the Deutsch Sozialen Partei in Berlin. Between 1923 and 1925 he was successively Gruppen-, Zugführer and Fahnenträger in the Nationsozialistische Hundertschaft Charlottenburg (later Sturm 33, Maikowski).

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Herbert Czaja
Dr. Herbert Czaja (November 5, 1914 – April 18, 1997) was a German Christian Democratic politician and advocate for Germans expelled after World War II. He was a Member of the Bundestag, the Parliament of West Germany, from 1953 to 1990, a long-time member of the Central Committee of German Catholics, and was President of the Federation of Expellees from 1970 to 1994.
Herbert Czaja was born in Teschen in Austria-Hungary to a German-speaking, Catholic family (the name Czaja has Polish origin). He became a Polish citizen at age four when part of Cieszyn Silesia became Polish, as part of the restored Polish Republic. Czaja studied German studies, History, and Philosophy in Vienna and Kraków. During the 1930, he was active in German student organisations in the Autonomous Silesian Voivodeship of Poland, as a member of Senator Eduard Pant's Deutsche Christliche Volkspartei, a Catholic party working for the interests of the German minority in Poland. At the same time, he worked as a teacher in eastern Upper Silesia. In 1939, before the start of World War II, he received his doctorate from the University of Kraków. Herbert Czaja was fluent in Polish and German.

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Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, (or Goering;German pronunciation: [ˈɡøːʁɪŋ] ( listen); 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader, and leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). A veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, he was a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "the Blue Max". He was the last commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, the fighter wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen, "the Red Baron".
A member of the NSDAP from its early days, Göring was wounded in 1923 during the failed coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He suffered from a lifelong addiction to morphine after being treated with the drug for his injuries. He founded the Gestapo in 1933. Göring was appointed commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe (air force) in 1935, a position he held until the final days of World War II. By 1940 he was at the peak of his power and influence; as minister in charge of the Four Year Plan, he was responsible for much of the functioning of the German economy in the build-up to World War II. Adolf Hitler promoted him to the rank of Reichsmarschall, a rank senior to all other Wehrmacht commanders, and in 1941 Hitler designated him as his successor and deputy in all his offices.

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Hermann Neubacher
Hermann Neubacher (June 24, 1893 – July 1, 1960) was an Austrian Nazi politician who held a number of diplomatic posts in the Third Reich. During the Second World War, he was appointed as the leading German official for the Balkans and Greece.
Born in Wels, he was educated in Kremsmünster and Vienna before seeing service in Italy in World War I. Initially connected to the Social Democratic Party of Austria through his friendship with a number of leading members whilst in charge of a housing project in Vienna, Neubacher became attracted to Pan-Germanism and in 1925 founded his own Österreichisch-Deutscher Volksbund as a society for this school of thought. He was also a member of the Deutsche Gemeinschaft secret society and in this group he built up friendships with fellow members Engelbert Dollfuß and Arthur Seyss-Inquart.
Neubacher became a member of the Nazi Party in Austria because he felt it was the best way to bring about Anschluss, although he was more in tune with the Anton Reinthaller-led moderate faction than the extremists under Theodor Habicht. After a spell as assistant to Josef Leopold he became Landesleiter of the Austrian Nazi party in 1935, attempting to restructure the banned group. His tenure came to an end the same year when he was imprisoned for distributing illegal material and upon his release he dropped out of politics to take up a role with IG Farben.

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Hinrich Lohse
Hinrich Lohse (September 2, 1896 – February 25, 1964) was a Nazi German politician, best known for his rule of the Baltic states during World War II.
Hinrich Lohse was born in the town of Mühlenbarbek in Province of Schleswig-Holstein. He was born into a small farming family. From 1903 to 1912 he attended the Volksschule in his hometown, and afterwards the higher trade school. In 1913 he worked as an employee at the Blohm & Voss Shipyard in Hamburg. During the First World War, he served in the Imperial German Army from 23 September 1915 until his discharge for war wounds on 30 October 1916.
From 1919, Lohse was first an associate at the Schleswig-Holstein Farmers' Association, and then as of 1920 General Secretary of the Schleswig-Holsteinische Bauern- und Landarbeiterdemokratie. In 1923 he joined the Nazi Party and became on 27 March 1925 the NSDAP Gauleiter for Schleswig-Holstein. In 1924, as a member of the Völkisch-Sozialer Block list, he became the only Nazi to be elected to the city representative college (Stadtverordnetenkollegium) of Altona/Elbe. During this time, he led various nationally-oriented farming associations in northern Germany, such as the Landvolkbewegung ("Country People's Movement"), into the Nazi Party. Between 1928 and 1929, Lohse also temporarily administered the Nazi Gau of Hamburg.

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Hitler
Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

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Hubert Klausner
Hubert Klausner (1 November 1892 in Raibl (today: Cave del Predil), Tarvisio in the Val Canale - 12 February 1939 in Vienna) was an NSDAP Gauleiter and a Landeshauptmann (premier) of Carinthia.
A minor official's son, he went to Gymnasium and completed his military service as an "Einjährigfreiwilliger" ("one-year volunteer"). Thereafter he served at the front between 1914 and 1918 in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded in 1915. When the war ended, Klausner was made a first lieutenant. Having served in the Volkswehr between 1919 and 1920, he joined the Austrian Federal Army in 1920. In 1922, he joined the Austrian Nazi Party, which he left in 1927, after the ill-fated Beerhall Putsch. In 1930 he was promoted to major – the highest rank that he would reach in the Austrian Army before he had to leave for health reasons in 1933.
In February 1931, he once again joined the NSDAP, which won influence in local council and provincial elections in Carinthia in 1931 and 1932. Klausner was appointed acting Nazi Gauleiter in January 1933 and four months later, in May 1933, he took over as Gauleiter the leadership of the still-outlawed Nazi Party in Carinthia. In the time of the Austrian Ständestaat, Klausner was interned in 1936 for a few months for political reasons, which did not, however, keep him from doing further work for the Nazi movement, nor even from joining the SS, in which he was given the rank of Oberführer.

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Hugo Jury
Hugo Jury (13 July 1887, Mährisch Rothmühl (now Moravská Radiměř, Radiměř, Czech Republic) – 8 May 1945, Zwettl, Lower Austria) was an Austrian Nazi.
Hugo Jury was a physician and a National Socialist politician. From 11 March to 13 March 1938, he was Minister for Social Administration in the Seyß-Inquart government. In May 1938, he became Gauleiter of the Gau of "Reichsgau Niederdonau" (Lower Austria). As of 1940 he was furthermore Reich Governor, and as of 1942 also Reich Defence Commissar, for this region.
He committed suicide at the end of World War II.
He was reputed to have been the lover of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

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Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw, FBA (born 29 April 1943) is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich. He is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his monumental biography of Hitler, which has been called "soberly objective."
He was the leading disciple of the late West German historian Martin Broszat, and (until his retirement) professor at the University of Sheffield. Kershaw has called Broszat an "inspirational mentor" who did much to shape his understanding of National Socialist Germany. Kershaw served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning From History and War of the Century. He taught a module entitled 'Germans against Hitler'.
His wife Dame Betty Kershaw was a Dean at Sheffield.

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Ikki Kita
Ikki Kita (北一輝, Kita Ikki^?, 3 April 1883 – 19 August 1937) was a Japanese author, intellectual and political philosopher who was active in early-Shōwa period Japan.
Born on Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Ikki Kita’s real name was Kita Terujirō (北輝次郎). He audited lectures at Waseda University in Tokyo, and while a student, was attracted to socialist ideas, meeting with many influential figures in the early socialist movement in Japan. This movement was, however, full of "opportunist" and other statist currents. The Shakai seisaku gakkai, or Japanese social-policy school, followed their authoritarian and statist, Bismarckian and von Schmollerian German forebears in arguing for, as well as being very practical in, their implementation of extending state controls from above—including the social insurance policies that were adopted by Bismarck to prevent any further expansion of the mass-revolutionary socialist party in late 19th-century Germany.
The socialism that Kita espoused in his early period was a nationalism brand of socialism (or right-wing Romantic anti-capitalism^{[clarification needed]}) that had nothing in common with any Marxian notions of "socialism from below".

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Imperial Germans
Imperial Germans is the common translation^{[citation needed]} of the German word Reichsdeutsche (adj. reichsdeutsch). It refers to German citizens, and by the word sense means people coming from the German Empire, i.e. Imperial Germany or Deutsches Reich, between 1871 and 1918 and again between 1933 and 1945 (and later when referring historically to these times)^{[citation needed]}.
The key problem with the terms reichsdeutsch, volksdeutsch, auslandsdeutsch, and related ones is that the usage of the words often depends on context, i.e. who uses them where and when. There are, in that sense, no general legal or "right" definitions, although during the 20th century, all terms acquired legal — yet also changing — definitions.
The reason for the differentiation is that there has been a historical shift in the meaning of what belonging to a nation means. Until the 19th century, a term such as German was not too meaningful, although the concept certainly existed. If anything, it was more seen as a cultural concept (including language, religion (in different forms), and already sometimes race in a vague sense). Only with the 1871 unification of Germany under Prussian leadership did some concepts acquire a legal-political meaning, which they have retained until now.

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Jef van de Wiele
Fredegardus Jacobus Josephus (Jef) van de Wiele (Deurne, Belgium, 20 July 1903 - Bruges, 4 September 1979) was a Belgian Flemish Nazi politician.
Van de Wiele was a staunch admirer of Adolf Hitler and in 1935 he set up the Duitschen-Vlaamsche Arbeidsgemeenschap (German-Flemish Labour Community, popularly known as Devlag) to campaign for the incorporation of Flanders into the Third Reich. This group used the Nazi eagle and swastika combined with the black lion of Flanders as its symbol. Van de Wiele had some contact with the Nazis before the invasion of Belgium and even claimed that Hitler had promised him that Flanders would be incorporated according to his wishes and that he had further been promised the position of Gauleiter.
Under the occupation he did enjoy some influence, although the complicated nature of Belgian politics meant that he did not gain the full influence he sought. He enjoyed a good relationship with Walloon leader Léon Degrelle and accompanied him on various public engagements. At home however he had struggled to gain influence from the far-right but pro-independence Flemish National Union and clashed repeatedly with its leaders Staf De Clercq and Hendrik Elias, who maintained ambiguous attitudes towards the Nazis. Van de Wiele however worked enthusiastically with the Nazis, advocating the full mobilisation of the region and, in 1943, turning the entirety of his youth movement over to the Hitler Youth. After the liberation of Belgium by the Allied forces he fled to Germany, and was designated the head of the theoretical "Reichsgau Flandern" in December of 1944.

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Josef Bürckel
Joseph Bürckel (30 March 1895, Lingenfeld, Germersheim—28 September 1944, Neustadt an der Weinstraße) was a German politician and a member of the German parliament (the Reichstag). He was an early member of the NSDAP party and was influential in the rise of the National Socialist movement.
Joseph Bürckel was born in Lingenfeld, in the Bavarian Palatinate, as the son of a tradesman. From 1909 to 1914 he studied to become a teacher in Speyer.
He took part in the First World War as a volunteer. After the war, he continued his training as a teacher and graduated in 1920. From 1921 onwards, he was engaged in nationalist groups, fighting separatism in the Palatinate.
An energetic organizer in National Socialist movement of the Saar-Palatinate since 1925, the former schoolmaster rose through the ranks to become Gauleiter (Nazi Party leader) for the region in 1934.
On 13 March 1938 Bürckel was appointed acting head of the Party to carry out the referendum on the Anschluss (Austria's absortion into Germany). From 23 April 1938 to 31 March 1940 he worked as Reichskommissar for the union of Austria with the German Reich, in charge of fully integrating it as the Ostmark politically, economically and culturally into the latter. He declared: "This is a revolution. The Jews may be glad that it is not of the French or Russian pattern." Saying Vienna was "overfilled with Jews" he stated his aim to leave them with no more than five percent of their property.

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Josef Leopold
Josef Leopold (born 18 February 1889 in Langenlois - died 24 June 1941 in Volhynia) was a leading member of the Nazi Party in Austria. He was the Landesleiter of the party from 1935 to 1938 and the head of the Sturmabteilung in Austria. He belonged to the pro-independence tendency within Austrian Nazism and insisted that Adolf Hitler was only a spiritual leader rather than a future Austrian leader.
Leopold was a native of the rural Waldviertel and, with little formal education, was expected to devote his life working his peasant father's small farm. Leopold however followed a military career, joining the 49th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army on 7 October 1910. He left the army in 1913, having reached the rank of sergeant but returned following the outbreak of the First World War. Leopold saw action on the Eastern Front until 1915 when he was captured by the Russians. He was sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war and remained in a camp until February 1918 when he escaped, returning to Austria. Soon after this he saw service with the Volkswehr and following the reorganisation of the military after the establishment of the republic he was retained in the new Austrian Army as an instructor of new recruits.

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Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele (help·info) (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈʁuːdɔlf ˈmɛŋɡələ], March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979), also known as the Angel of Death (German: Todesengel) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the "Angel of Death". Mengele wrote, "I personally have not killed, injured or caused bodily harm to anyone."
In 1940, he was placed in the reserve medical corps, after which he served with the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking in the Eastern Front. In 1942, he was wounded at the Soviet front and was pronounced medically unfit for combat, and was then promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) for saving the lives of three German soldiers. He survived the war, and after a period living incognito in Germany he fled to South America, where he became an abortionist and evaded capture for the rest of his life despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.

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Josef Terboven
Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven (23 May 1898 – 8 May 1945) was a Nazi leader, best known as the Reichskommissar for Norway during the German occupation of Norway.
Terboven was born in Essen, the son of minor landed gentry. He served in the German field artillery and nascent air force in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and political science at the universities of Munich and Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics.
Dropping out of the university in 1923, Terboven joined the NSDAP with member number 25247 and participated in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When the NSDAP was subsequently outlawed, he found work at a bank for a few years before he was laid off in 1925.
He then went to work full-time for the Nazi party. Terboven helped establish the party in Essen and became Gauleiter there in 1928. From 1925 on was part of the Sturmabteilung, in which he reached the rank of Obergruppenführer by 1936. On 29 June 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, Joseph Goebbels' former secretary and mistress. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor at the wedding. Terboven was made Oberpräsident der Rheinprovinz in 1935 and developed a reputation as a petty and ruthless tyrant.

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Joseph Goebbels
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels (help·info) (German: [ˈɡœbəls]; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism.
Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921, writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century romantic drama; he then went on to work as a journalist and later a bank clerk and caller on the stock exchange. He also wrote novels and plays, but they were rejected by publishers. Goebbels came into contact with the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party in 1923 during the French occupation of the Ruhr and became a member in 1924. He was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin. In this position, he put his propaganda skills to full use, combating the local socialist and communist parties with the help of Nazi papers and the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts). By 1928, he had risen in the party ranks to become one of its most prominent members.

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Joseph Grohé
Josef Grohé (6 November 1902 - 3 January 1988), German Nazi Party official, was born in Gemünden im Hunsrück as the son of a shopkeeper. He finished secondary school in 1919 and worked as a clerk in the hardware industry. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922, and was co-founder of the Nazi organization in Cologne and founder of its newspaper, the Westdeutscher Beobachter. In 1931 he was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Cologne-Aachen, and in 1932 he was elected to both the Reichstag and the Prussian Staatsrat (State Council). In late 1944, in addition to these posts, he was made the Reichskommissar in German-occupied Belgium and Northern France, although these areas were already being overrun by the Allies. He was arrested by the British occupation authorities in Cologne in 1945 and imprisoned until 1950.
After the war, Grohé remained dedicated to the Nazi cause for the rest of his life.

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Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later held the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While the office of the General Secretary was officially elective and not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to consolidate more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and gradually put down all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Whereas Trotsky was an exponent of permanent revolution, it was Stalin's concept of socialism in one country that became the primary focus of Soviet politics.

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Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher (12 February 1885 – 16 October 1946) was a prominent Nazi prior to World War II. He was the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. His publishing firm also released three anti-Semitic books for children, including the 1938 Der Giftpilz ("The Toadstool" or "The Poison-Mushroom"), one of the most widespread pieces of propaganda, which purported to warn about insidious dangers Jews posed by using the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly mushroom. After the war, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed.
Streicher was born in Fleinhausen, Kingdom of Bavaria, one of nine children of the teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna (née Weiss). He worked as an elementary school teacher like his father, and in 1909 he began his political career, joining the German Democratic Party. He would later claim that because his political work brought him into contact with German Jews, he “must therefore have been fated to become later on a writer and speaker on racial politics.” In 1913 Streicher married Kunigunde Roth, a baker's daughter, in Nuremberg. They had two sons, Lothar (born 1915) and Elmar (born 1918).

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Karl Gerland
Karl Gerland (14 July 1905, Gottsbüren – 21 April 1945) was a Nazi Gauleiter of Kurhessen. On 21 April 1945 Gerland was killed during the fighting against the Soviet Red Army at Frankfurt (Oder).
Gerland was born in Gottsbüren (now a part of Trendelburg) near Kassel. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929. As of 1930, he was district leader in Kreis Hofgeismar, and beginning in 1932, he was acting propaganda leader in the Gau of Kurhessen. From 1933 he was leader of the provincial post in Kurhessen of the Propagandaministerium and worked as office leader from October 1934 in the Party Chancellery.
In 1936, Gerland was a member of the Reichstag, and from 1 June 1938 until 1941, he was acting Gauleiter in Niederdonau. In 1943, he became an SS Brigadeführer.
From 13 December 1943, until 1945, Gerland was Gauleiter in Kurhessen. He succeeded the former Gauleiter Karl Weinrich, who had been removed from his post. From 1944 to 1945, Gerland was also High President of Kurhessen. In the spring of 1945, Gerland was highly regarded by Joseph Goebbels. In his diary entry of 2 April 1945, Goebbels noted that Gerland was conducting himself "superbly," adding, "I would have expected this from [him] anyway." Later that month, Gerland was killed at Frankfurt (Oder) during fighting on the Eastern Front.

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Karl Hanke
Karl August Hanke (24 August 1903 - 8 June 1945) was an official of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party or NSDAP). He served as governor (Gauleiter) of Lower Silesia from 1941 to 1945 and as the final Reichsführer-SS for a few days in 1945.
Hanke was born in Lauban (Lubań) in Silesia, on 24 August 1903, the son of a locomotive engineer. His older brother was killed in World War I. Hanke was too young for service in the war himself. He did, however, serve in the Reichswehr as a Zeitfreiwilliger (temporary volunteer) in the 19th Infantry Regiment at Frankfurt/Oder in the early 1920s.
Hanke obtained an education as a milling engineer by attending the German Milling School at Dippoldiswalde. He then decided to obtain a year's practical experience as a railway workshop apprentice before returning to milling. From 1921 to around 1926, Hanke mainly worked in the milling industry, serving as a business manager for mills in the vicinities of Silesia, Bavaria, and Tyrol. He later attended the Berufspädagogischen Institut in Berlin. In 1928 he received a degree that qualified him to teach milling at vocational schools. Later that year, he worked in Berlin-Steglitz as a master miller. After this he became a vocational instructor at a technical school in Berlin.

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Karl Harrer
Karl Harrer (8 October 1890 - 5 September 1926) was a German journalist and politician, one of the founding members of the "Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" ("German Workers' Party", DAP) in 1919, the party that soon would become the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).
Harrer was also a member of the Thule Society, which gave him the task of founding a "Politischer Arbeiterzirkel" ("political workers' union"), an order he carried out together with Anton Drexler in October 1918. On January 5, 1919, the DAP was formed, in which not only Harrer and Drexler but also Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart were involved.

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Karl Mayr
Captain Karl Mayr (January 5, 1883 in Mindelheim – February 9, 1945 in Buchenwald concentration camp) was a General Staff officer and Adolf Hitler's immediate superior in an army Intelligence Division in the Reichswehr, 1919-1920. Mayr was particularly known as the man who introduced Hitler to politics. In 1919, Mayr directed Hitler to write the Gemlich letter, in which Hitler first expressed his anti-semitic views in writing.
Mayr later became Hitler's opponent, and wrote in his memoirs that General Erich Ludendorff had personally ordered him to have Hitler join the Nazi Party and build it up. As far as it is known, his last rank was major. In 1933, he fled to France after the Nazis rose to power. Mayr was tracked down by the Gestapo, arrested, imprisoned, and later murdered at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in 1945.
A fact-based portrayal of Mayr is dramatized in the 2002 film Max, a fictional account of Hitler's life in Munich just prior to joining the Nazi Party.
Mayr was the son of a magistrate. After graduating from high school, he was enrolled on 14 July 1901 in the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Munich as a cadet. Well regarded by his superiors, he made rapid progress, becoming Leutnant in 1903 and Oberleutnant in 1911. From August 1914 Mayr was with the 1st Bayerischen Jägerbattailon. During the First World War he was in combat in Lorraine and Flanders and involved in early 1915 with the German Alpine Corps. On 1 June 1915 Mayr was promoted to Hauptmann (captain). In 1917, he was named on the General Staff of the Alpine Corps. On 13 March 1918 he was appointed commander of the 1st Bavarian Jägerbattailon, with whom he served in the Eastern Army Group in Turkey from 20 July to 15 October 1918.

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Karl Wahl
Karl Wahl (24 September 1892 – 18 February 1981) was the Nazi Gauleiter of Swabia from the Gau inception in 1928 until the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.
Karl Wahl was born as the thirteenth child of a boilerman in Aalen, then in the Kingdom of Württemberg, in 1892.
Upon finishing his schooling, he wished to join the Kaiserliche Marine but his father would not allow him. Instead, he entered the Bavarian Army in Aschaffenburg in 1910, signing on as a volunteer for two years. He became a paramedic in the army and was promoted to sergeant.
He served in the First World War as a paramedic but was wounded in 1915. After the war, he became a civil servant at the Augsburg city council, where he remained until 1933. His first position was at the city slaughterhouse.
Wahl joined the SA (Storm troopers) and the NSDAP in 1922 and became the leader of the SA in Swabia in 1923. In 1928, he became a member of the Bavarian Landtag, the state parliament, a seat he held until 1933, when he was elected to the German Reichstag.

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Karl Weinrich
Karl Weinrich (2 December 1887 in Molmeck – 22 July 1973 in Hausen) was NSDAP Gauleiter of Kurhessen.
Karl Weinrich was a member of the Nazi Party from August 1922. From 1925 to 1927 he was the NSDAP's Gau Treasurer. From 1930 to 1933 he was a member of the Prussian Landtag, and as of 12 November 1933 a member of the Reichstag for the electoral district of Hesse-Nassau. He was from 1928 to 1943 Gauleiter of Kurhessen. Shortly after the bomb attack of 22 October 1943 on Kassel, which destroyed the whole inner city, he was stripped of his office. His successor was Karl Gerland.

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Konrad Heiden
Konrad Heiden (7 August 1901 – 18 June 1966) was an influential journalist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi eras, most noted for the first influential biographies of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Often, he wrote under the pseudonym "Klaus Bredow."
Heiden was born in Munich, Germany, on 7 August 1901, and graduated from the University of Munich in 1923. His father was a union organizer, his mother had a Jewish background. At the university, he organized a republican and democratic student body and became a member of the Social Democratic Party.
Heiden was one of the first critical observers of the rise of National Socialism in Germany after he attended a party's meeting in 1920. He worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Vossischen Zeitung, but became a freelancer in 1932. A year later, he went into exile; first to Saarland, then to Switzerland, then to France, and finally to the United States.
Heiden's book, "The New Inquisition", published jointly by Modern Age Books, Inc. and Alliance Book Corporation, in New York in 1939, with a translation from German by Heinz Norden, includes a series of personal, but necessarily anonymous accounts by German Jews of violent persecution under the Nazi regime accelerating from the time of the fall of 1938 and an eerie and accurate prediction of the Final Solution planned by the Nazi regime:

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Konrad Henlein
Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein (May 6, 1898 – May 10, 1945) was a leading Sudeten German politician in Czechoslovakia. Upon the German occupation he joined the Nazi Party as well as the SS and was appointed Reichsstatthalter of the Sudetenland in 1939.
The son of an accounts clerk was born in Maffersdorf (present-day Vratislavice nad Nisou), in what was then the Bohemian crown land of Austria-Hungary. In light of his being a leader of the Sudeten German movement, Henlein's origin was not without problems. His mother, Hedvika (Hedwig) Anna Augusta Dvořáček, was the daughter of a German-speaking mother but her father was of Czech origin. As Henlein after 1938 pursued a Germanisation policy against mixed marriages, he was forced to change his still-living mother's name from Dvořáček to the more German spelling of Dworatschek, which would be thus more comfortable for Henlein's career as a high Nazi official.
He attended business school in Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou). From 1916 he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the Italian Front of World War I, becoming a POW in November 1917. He was held in Italian captivity at Asinara Island, where he spent his time studying the history of the German Turner (gymnastics) movement of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Returned home after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1919, Henlein worked as a bank clerk in Gablonz, now part of the newly established Czechoslovakian state. Influenced by the German national movement, he became a gym teacher of the gymnastics club in Asch (Aš) in 1925, which, similar to the Czech Sokol movement, took an active part in Sudeten German communal life.

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Kurt von Schleicher
Kurt von Schleicher ( Kurt von Schleicher (help·info), 7 April 1882 – 30 June 1934) was a German general and the last Chancellor of Germany during the era of the Weimar Republic. Seventeen months after his resignation, he was assassinated by order of his successor, Adolf Hitler, in the Night of the Long Knives.

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List of SS personnel
Between 1925 and 1945, the German SS grew from a mere eight members to over a quarter of a million Waffen-SS and over a million Allgemeine-SS members. The following list of SS personnel gives the names of persons who are counted among the organization's most famous, influential, and notorious members.
Prior to 1934 the SS were nominally under the command of the Sturmabteilung and so it could be said that both Adolf Hitler as Oberster SA-Führer and Ernst Röhm as Stabschef SA outranked the most senior SS position of Reichsführer. Following the Night of the Long Knives Hitler "raised the SS, hitherto subordinate to the SA, to the rank of an independent organisation". Hitler also was considered SS Member #1, Emil Maurice (considered the founder of the SS) was Member #2, while Himmler was SS Member #168. Based on the seniority system of SS membership number, this made Hitler senior in the SS to all other members even if not by rank.
After the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS became independent from the SA, Hitler was listed on SS officer rolls as Member #1 and considered supreme commander of the entire SS by virtue of his position as the Führer of Germany. There is no photographic record of Hitler ever wearing an actual SS uniform nor was there a special SS insignia for Hitler above that worn by Himmler

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Léon Degrelle
Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle (15 June 1906 – 31 March 1994) was a Walloon Belgian politician, who founded Rexism and later joined the Waffen SS (becoming a leader of its Walloon contingent) which were front-line troops in the fight against the Soviet Union. After World War II, he was a prominent figure in neo-nazi movements.
After studying at a Jesuit college and successfully studying for a law doctorate at the Université catholique de Louvain, Degrelle worked as a journalist for the conservative Roman Catholic periodical Christus Rex. During his time at this publication, he became attracted to the ideas of Charles Maurras and French Integralism. Until 1934, Degrelle worked as a correspondent for the paper in Mexico, during the Cristero War. He led a militant tendency inside the Catholic Party, which he formed around the Éditions de Rex he founded. The Éditions drew its name from the battle cry of the Cristeros: Viva Cristo Rey y Santa María de Guadalupe, alluding to Christ the King.

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Marcel Déat
Marcel Déat (7 March 1894, Guérigny, France – 5 January 1955, near Turin, Italy) was a French Socialist until 1933, when he initiated a spin-off from the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) along with other right-wing 'Neosocialists'. He then founded the collaborationist National Popular Rally (RNP) during the Vichy regime. In 1944, he became "Minister of Labor and National Solidarity" in Pierre Laval's government, before escaping to Sigmaringen along with Vichy officials after the Allied landings in Normandy. Condemned in absentia for collaborationism, he died while still in hiding in Italy.
Marcel Déat was raised in a modest environment, which shared republican and patriotic values. After brilliant studies, he entered in 1914 the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) after having been the student of Alain, a philosopher who was active in the Radical Party and who would write a deeply anti-militarist book after World War I. The same year, Déat joined the SFIO.
While he attended the ENS and worked to get a philosophy degree, World War I broke out. He joined the French Army as a private and saw active duty, winning the Légion d'honneur and five bravery citations. By the war's end, Déat had achieved the rank of captain. Under the pseudonym of Taëd, he then published Cadavres et maximes, philosophie d'un revenant (approximately translated by "Corpses and Maxims, Philosophy of a Ghost"), in which he expressed his horror of trenches, strong pacifist views, as well as his fascination for collective discipline and war camaraderie. When the war ended in 1918, he finished his studies at the École Normale and passed his agrégation of philosophy, and oriented himself towards sociology under the direction of Célestin Bouglié, a friend of Alain and also member of the Radical Party. In the meanwhile, Déat taught philosophy in Reims.

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Martin Bormann
Martin Ludwig Bormann (17 June 1900 – 2 May 1945?) was a prominent Nazi official. He became head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. He gained Hitler's trust and derived immense power within the Third Reich by controlling access to the Führer and by regulating the orbits of those closest to him.
Born in Wegeleben (now in Saxony-Anhalt) in the Kingdom of Prussia in the German Empire, Bormann was born to a Lutheran family, the son of Theodor Bormann (1862–1903), a post office employee, and his second wife, Antonie Bernhardine Mennong. He had two half-siblings (Else and Walter Bormann) from his father's earlier marriage to Louise Grobler, who died in 1898. Antonie Bormann gave birth to three sons, one of whom died in infancy. Martin (born 1900) and Albert (born 1902) survived to adulthood.
Bormann dropped out of school to work on a farm in Mecklenburg. He served in an artillery regiment in the last days of World War I, but never saw action. He then became an estate manager in Mecklenburg, which brought him into contact with the Freikorps residing on the estate. He took part in their activities, mostly in assassinations and the intimidation of trade union organisers.^{[better reference needed]}

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Martin Mutschmann
Martin Mutschmann (9 March 1879 – 14 February 1947) was the Nazi Region Leader (Gauleiter) of the state of Saxony (Gau Sachsen) during the time of the Third Reich.
Born in Hirschberg on the Saale in the Principality of Reuss Younger Line, Mutschmann moved while he was young with his family to Plauen in Saxony. He studied commerce, and eventually opened his own lace factory in Plauen. During the World War I he served on the Western Front until 1916, when he was discharged for medical reasons. After the war he was an early participant in the nationalist and anti-semitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund. He was a founding member of the local branch (Ortsgruppe) of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in Plauen and made personal donations of capital to the Nazi Party.
Mutschmann lost his lace business in the Great Depression. But he continued to solicit donations from other businesses. His fundraising skills found favour with the Nazi Party.
Mutschmann was made Gauleiter of Saxony in 1925. He was to maintain this position until the end of World War II. Generally his political activity concentrated on Saxony rather than on Germany as a whole. Mutschmann was passionately interested in the preservation of Saxon arts and crafts.

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Max Amann
Max Amann (24 November 1891 – 30 March 1957) was a German Nazi official with the honorary rank of SS-Obergruppenführer, politician and journalist.
Amann was born in Munich on 24 November 1891. During World War I he was Adolf Hitler's sergeant.
He joined the NSDAP in October 1921, as the Party's business manager After 1922, he also led the Nazis' publishing house, Eher Verlag, which, among other things, published the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps.In 1924 he was elected as a NSDAP candidate to the Munich city council and in 1933 became a Nazi member of the Reichstag for the electoral district of Upper Bavaria/Swabia. Perhaps Amann's most notable contribution to history was persuading Hitler to retitle his first book from Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice to Mein Kampf, which he also published, and became a major source of Eher-Verlag's income. He lost his left arm in an accident with a firearm while hunting with Franz Ritter von Epp on 4 September 1931 .

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Oswald Menghin
Oswald Menghin (born 19 April 1888, Meran, Tyrol; died 29 November 1973, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was an Austrian Prehistorian and University professor. He established an international reputation before the War, while he was professor at the University of Vienna. His work on race and culture was serviceable to the German nationalist movement of the 1930s. At the time of the Anschluss he served as Minister of Education in the cabinet formed by Arthur Seyß-Inquart. He avoided indictment as a war criminal and resumed his career in Argentina after the war.
Menghin qualified for inauguration as an academic lecturer in 1913, for his work Urgeschichte des Menschen (The Proto-History of Mankind). After the death of Moritz Hoernes he emerged as university professor of the Protohistorical Institute of the University of Vienna from 1917 until 1945, and furthermore he was from 1930 to 1933 professor at the University of Cairo.
From 1919 to 1926 Menghin was a member of Secret Nazi Society Deutsche Gemeinschaft (the German Fellowship), in which he got to know Arthur Seyß-Inquart.

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Oswald Mosley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980) was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a Member of Parliament for Harrow from 1918 to 1924 and for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–1931.
Mosley was the eldest of three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, of Ancoats (29 December 1873 - 21 September 1928), and wife Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), the second child of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote of Market Drayton, Shropshire. Mosley's family were Anglo-Irish. His branch were prosperous landowners in Staffordshire, seated at Rolleston Hall, near Burton-on-Trent. Through the intermarriage common among the British upper classes, the 5th Baronet was the third cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, which would eventually make Oswald Mosley, the 6th baronet, fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the Earl of Strathmore's daughter, and fourth cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II.

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Otto Hellmuth
Otto Hellmuth (July 22, 1896 - April 20, 1968) was a member of the Nazi Party.
Born at Markt Einersheim, he was Gauleiter of the German region of Lower Franconia (Unterfranken) from 1928 to 1945. His home and office were in Würzburg, the capital of the Gau Mainfranken. By 1935, Hellmuth had his Gau renamed as Mainfranken. After World War II, the region's original name was reinstated.
Over most of his term as Gauleiter, Hellmuth was not an impressive personality. Joseph Goebbels saw him as "a most retiring unassuming Gauleiter in whom one had not too much confidence." However, Hellmuth defended his Gau vigorously in the spring of 1945, as Goebbels noted in his diary on April 2.
In 1947, Hellmuth was accused of complicity in the murders of Allied aircraft pilots. He was tried at Dachau and sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1955.
Hellmuth died in Reutlingen in 1968.

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Otto Telschow
Otto Telschow (27 February 1876, Wittenberge, Brandenburg - 31 May 1945), German Nazi Party official, was born in Wittenberge and became a police official in Hamburg. He joined the Nazi Party in 1925, and was the founder of the regional Nazi newspaper, the Niedersachsen-Stürmer. In October 1928, Telschow was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of the Nazi party's regional subsection Gau Eastern Hanover, a post he retained until the end of World War II. Telschow gained more influence after 1935, when the Nazi-party Gaue usurped the functions of the streamlined German states. In 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag for the Ost-Hannover electoral district, and remained a member until 1945. He was taken prisoner by the British Army at Lüneburg and committed suicide in prison by slashing his wrists.

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Otto von Bismarck
Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a conservative German statesman who dominated European affairs from the 1860s to his dismissal in 1890. After a series of short victorious wars he unified numerous German states into a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership, then created a "balance of power" that preserved peace in Europe from 1871 until 1914.
As Minister President of Prussia 1862–90, Bismarck provoked wars that made Prussia dominant over Austria and France, and lined up the smaller German states behind Prussia. In 1867 he also became Chancellor of the North German Confederation. Bismarck designed and created the German Empire in 1871, becoming its first Chancellor and largely controlling its affairs until he was removed by Kaiser (Emperor) William II in 1890. His diplomacy of Realpolitik and powerful rule gained him the nickname the "Iron Chancellor". As Henry Kissinger has noted, "The man of 'blood and iron' wrote prose of extraordinary directness and lucidity, comparable in distinctiveness to Churchill's use of the English language."

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Paul Giesler
Paul Giesler (15 June 1895, Siegen, Westphalia – 8 May 1945) was a member of the NSDAP, from 1941 NSDAP Gauleiter of Westphalia-South (Westfalen-Süd) and as of 1942 also acting Gauleiter of the Gau Munich-Upper Bavaria (Gau München-Oberbayern). He was from 2 November 1942 to 28 April 1945 the Premier (Ministerpräsident) of Bavaria.
The trained architect was from 1924 a Party speaker, an SA leader, and leader of an NSDAP local (Ortsgruppenleiter). During the Night of the Long Knives he only narrowly missed being arrested and murdered. He served in the Poland and France campaigns. Only from August 1941 did Giesler once again take up important Party functions, at Martin Bormann's instigation, first becoming NSDAP Gauleiter of Westphalia-South in 1941, and then as of April 1942 Adolf Wagner's successor as acting Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria. After Ludwig Siebert's death on 1 November 1942, he was also appointed acting Ministerpräsident of Bavaria. As the war continued, he took up more and more ministerial posts, especially after Wagner's death.

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Paul von Hindenburg
Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg ( listen (help·info)), known universally as Paul von Hindenburg (German: [ˈpaʊl fɔn ˈhɪndənbʊɐ̯k] ( listen); 2 October 1847 – 2 August 1934) was a Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and politician, and served as the second President of Germany from 1925 to 1934.
Hindenburg enjoyed a long career in the Prussian Army, retiring in 1911. He was recalled at the outbreak of World War I, and first came to national attention, at the age of 66, as the victor at Tannenberg in 1914. As Germany's Chief of the General Staff from 1916, he and his deputy, Erich Ludendorff, rose in the German public's esteem until Hindenburg came to eclipse the Kaiser himself.^{[citation needed]} Hindenburg retired again in 1919, but returned to public life one more time in 1925 to be elected as the second President of Germany.
Though 84 years old and in poor health, Hindenburg was persuaded to run for re-election in 1932, as he was considered the only candidate who could defeat Adolf Hitler. Hindenburg was re-elected in a runoff. Although he was opposing Hitler, the deteriorating political stability of the Weimar Republic let him play an important role in the Nazi Party's rise to power. He dissolved the parliament twice in 1932 and eventually appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. In February, he issued the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended various civil liberties, and in March he signed the Enabling Act, in which the parliament gave Hitler's administration legislative powers. Hindenburg died the following year, after which Hitler declared the office of President vacant and, as "Führer und Reichskanzler", made himself head of state.

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Paul Wegener
Paul Wegener (11 December 1874 – 13 September 1948) was a German actor, writer and film director known for his pioneering role in German expressionist cinema.

At the age of 20 Wegener decided to end his law studies and concentrate on acting, touring the provinces before joining Max Reinhardt's acting troupe in 1906. In 1912, he turned to the new medium of motion pictures and appeared in the 1913 version of The Student of Prague. It was while making this film that he first heard the old Jewish legend of the Golem and proceeded to adapt the story to film, co-directing and co-writing the script with Henrik Galeen. His first version of the tale The Golem (1915, now lost) was a success and firmly established Wegener's reputation. In 1917, he made a parody of the story called Der Golem und die Tänzerin, but it was his reworking of the tale, The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) which stands as one of the classics of German cinema and helped to cement Wegener's place in cinematic history. Another of his early films was Der Yoghi (1916), in which he played the role of a yogi and young inventor, and which provided him with the opportunity to accommodate three of his interests, trick photography (it was one of the first films to feature invisibility), the supernatural and Eastern mysticism.

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Philipp Bouhler
Philipp Bouhler (11 September 1899 – 19 May 1945) was a senior Nazi Party official who was both a Reichsleiter (English: National Leader) and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP. He was also an SS-Obergruppenführer in the Allgemeine SS who was responsible for the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program that killed more than 70,000 handicapped adults and children in Nazi Germany.
Bouhler was captured and arrested on 10 May 1945 by American troops. He committed suicide on 19 May 1945 while in the US internment camp at Zell-am-See near Dachau in Bavaria.
Bouhler was born in Munich to a retired colonel and spent five years in the Royal Bavarian Cadet Corps. He took part in the First World War and was badly wounded. From 1919 to 1920, he studied philosophy for four semesters and in 1921 became a contributor in the publishing house that put out the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter.
He joined the NSDAP in July 1922 with membership number 12. By autumn 1922 he had become deputy manager of the NSDAP. After the failed Beerhall Putsch in Munich and the subsequent refounding of the Party in 1925, he became Reich Secretary of the NSDAP. After the seizure of power in 1933, he became a Reich Leader and Member of the Reichstag for Westphalia. He joined the SS on 20 April 1933 with membership number: 54,932.

wn.com/Philipp_Bouhler
Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈplĩnju sawˈɡadu]; January 22, 1895 – December 8, 1975) was a Brazilian politician, writer, journalist, and theologian. He founded and led the Brazilian Integralist Action, a far-right political party inspired on the Italian Fascist movement.
Initially a supporter of the dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas, he was later persecuted and exiled in Portugal for promoting uprisings against the government. After his return, he launched the Party of Popular Representation, and was elected to represent Paraná in the Chamber of Deputies in 1958, being re-elected in 1962, this time to represent São Paulo. He was also a candidate in the 1955 presidential election, securing 8.28% of the votes. After the 1964 coup d'état, which led to the extinction of political parties, he joined the National Renewal Alliance Party, obtaining two terms in the Chamber of Deputies. He retired from politics in 1974, just a year before his death.
Born in the small conservative town of São Bento do Sapucaí in the São Paulo state, Plínio Salgado was the son of Colonel Francisco das Chagas, a local political leader, and Ana Francisca Rennó Cortez, a teacher. A very active child at school, he had special interest for mathematics and geometry. After the loss of his father, at the age of 16 – a fact that is said to have made him a bitter young man –, his interests shifted towards psychology and philosophy.

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Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (help·info) (7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German Nazi official during World War II, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. He was SS-Obergruppenführer (General) and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, and Kripo) and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy Reich-Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia. In August 1940 he was appointed and served as President of Interpol (the international law enforcement agency). Heydrich chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which laid out plans for the final solution to the Jewish Question—the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory.
Historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite; Hitler christened him "the man with the iron heart". He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an intelligence organisation tasked with seeking out and neutralising resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and killings. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of co-ordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938. The attacks, which were carried out by SA stormtroopers and civilians, presaged the Holocaust. Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance.

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Robert Ley
Robert Ley (German pronunciation: [ˈlaɪ]; 15 February 1890 – 25 October 1945) was a Nazi politician and head of the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945. He committed suicide while awaiting trial for war crimes.
Ley was born in Niederbreidenbach (now a part of Nümbrecht) in the Rhine Province, the seventh of 11 children of a heavily indebted farmer, Friedrich Ley, and his wife Emilie (née Wald). He studied chemistry at the Universities of Jena, Bonn, and Münster. He volunteered for the army on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and spent two years in the artillery before training as an aerial artillery spotter with Field Artillery Detachment 202. In July 1917 his aircraft was shot down over France and he was taken prisoner. It has been suggested that he suffered brain injury in the crash; for the rest of his life he spoke with a stammer and suffered bouts of erratic behaviour, aggravated by heavy drinking.
After the war Ley returned to university, gaining a doctorate in 1920. He was employed as a food chemist by a branch of the giant IG Farben company, based in Leverkusen in the Ruhr. Enraged by the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1924, Ley became an ultra-nationalist and joined the Nazi Party soon after reading Adolf Hitler's speech at his trial following the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. By 1925 he was Gauleiter of the Southern Rhineland district and editor of a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper, the Westdeutsche Beobachter. Ley proved unswervingly loyal to Hitler, which led the party leader to ignore complaints about his arrogance, incompetence and drunkenness.

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Roger Griffin
Roger D. Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism. He has also translated works by Norberto Bobbio and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
Griffin's theory of fascism suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe.

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Romani people
The Romani are an ethnic group living mostly in Europe, who trace their origins to the Indian Subcontinent. Romani are widely known in the English-speaking world by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies).
They are known collectively in the Romani language as Romane or Rromane (depending on the dialect concerned) and also as Romany, Romanies, Romanis, Roma or Roms.
Romani are widely dispersed, with their largest concentrated populations in Europe, especially the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, followed by the Kale of Iberia and Southern France.
The Americas are also home to large numbers of Romani. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States; 800,000 in Brazil, to which Kale were deported by the government of Portugal during the colonial era; and in more recent migrations, Romani have also moved to other parts of the New World.
The Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two.

wn.com/Romani_people
Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, also spelled Heß (26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987), was a prominent Nazi politician who was Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party during the 1930s and early 1940s. On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom, where he was arrested and became a prisoner of war. Hess was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison, Berlin, where he died in 1987. After World War II Winston Churchill wrote of Hess, "He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded."
On 27–28 September 2007, British news services published descriptions of disagreement between his Western and Soviet captors over his treatment and how the Soviet captors were steadfast in denying his release. In July 2011, the remains of Hess were exhumed from a grave in Bavaria after it became a focus of a pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.
Hess, the eldest of four children, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Fritz H. Hess, a prosperous German Lutheran importer/exporter from Bavaria, and Clara Hess (née Münch). The family lived in luxury on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, and visited Germany often during the summers, allowing the Hess children to learn the German language and to absorb German culture. The family moved back to Germany in 1908, where Hess enrolled as a boarder at the Protestant School in Bad Godesberg. Hess showed aptitude in science and mathematics, and expressed interest in becoming an astronomer. However, his father wished him to continue the family business, Hess & Co., and in 1911 convinced Hess to study business for a year in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce.

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Rudolf Jordan
Rudolf Jordan (21 June 1902 – 27 October 1988) was a Nazi Gauleiter in Halle-Merseburg and Magdeburg-Anhalt in the time of the Third Reich.
Jordan was born in Großenlüder, Hesse-Nassau. His family's background was in farming, although his father was also a salesman. After finishing Volksschule, Jordan became a worker in the armament industry between 1916 and 1918. He earned so much money doing this that after the First World War, he found himself able to begin training as a teacher in Fulda. He nevertheless got involved in the military, serving from 1920 to 1922 as a temporary volunteer in the Reichswehr. In 1922, Jordan became a member of the Freikorps Oberland, and alongside this service ended his teacher training in 1924. At 22, he was already a Volksschule teacher.
The high joblessness rate in Germany at this time, however, kept him from finding a teaching job, leading him to take such jobs as workman, office worker or freelancer, among others, at publishing houses and in advertising to keep his head above water financially. Only in 1927 could he break into teaching, and he worked as a teacher at, among other schools, the "Army Vocational School for Economics and Administration" ("Heeresfachschule für Wirtschaft und Verwaltung") in Fulda.

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Rudolf Jung
Rudolf Jung (16 April 1882 - 11 December 1945) was an instrumental force and agitator of German-Czech National Socialism and, later on, became a member of the German Nazi Party.
Rudolf Jung was born in Plasy and went to school in Jihlava, a town fractured by national antagonisms. He was a civil engineer employed by the national railways of the Austro-Hungary. His party work took him from Vienna, to Bohemia. In 1909, he joined the German Workers Party (DAP) (later in Czechoslovakia, DNSAP) and became an ardent party agitator. Because of his party provocations, Jung was fired but his party put him on their payroll and he devoted himself to theoretical work. Along with Dr. Walter Riehl, he drafted the Jihlava party program of 1913 "which contained a more detailed comparison of international Marxism and national socialism and a more pointed attack on capitalism, Democracy, alien peoples, and Jews. Here, anti-semitism ranked behind anti-Slavism, anti-clericalism and anti-capitalism." ³ It is noted that Nazi ideology does not oppose capitalist relations or production, just the excesses of capitalism. In 1919, he completed his theoretical work Der Nationale Sozialismus. Jung expressed the hope in his introduction that his book would play the same role for national socialism that Das Kapital did for Marxian socialism. It is he that convinced Hitler to use the term "National Socialist" for the DAP's counterpart in Germany; Hitler originally wanted to rename the German DAP into the "Social Revolutionary Party". ²

wn.com/Rudolf_Jung
Rudolf Much
Rudolf Much (born 7 September 1862 and died 8 March 1936 in Vienna), the son of archaeologist Matthäus Much, was an Austrian Germanist, considered one of the founding fathers of Germanic studies.
His 1887 dissertation On the Prehistory of Germany (Zur Vorgeschichte Deutschlands) reflects the interest in Germanic antiquity Much shared with his teacher Wilhelm Tomaschek, whose special field of interest was the tribal territories of the Germanic peoples in antiquity. In 1906, Much became professor at the newly founded chair of Germanic Antiquity (Germanische Altertumskunde und Sprachgeschichte) in Vienna, which he held until his retirement in 1932.
Much was sympathetic towards German nationalism and the interwar period calls for a Großdeutschland prohibited by the Allies. He also became a member of the Catholic-German nationalist Deutsche Gemeinschaft secret society. Much cannot, however, be described as sympathetic towards the rise of the Nazi Party, and he was careful to put scholarship before ideology, and his recensions often expressed disdain for ideologically motivated bad scholarship. Much is nevertheless treated critically in more recent assessment, his German nationalism in retrospect appearing as a precursor to Nazi ideology.

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Sadao Araki
Baron Sadao Araki (荒木貞夫, Araki Sadao^?, 26 May 1877 – 2 November 1966) was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army before World War II. A charismatic leader and one of the principal nationalist right-wing political theorists in the late Japanese Empire, he was regarded as the leader of the radical faction within the politicized Japanese Army and served as Minister of War under Prime Minister Inukai. He later served a Minister of Education during the Konoe and Hiranuma administrations.
Araki was born in Komae, Tokyo; his father was an ex-samurai retainer of the Hitotsubashi branch of the Tokugawa family. Araki graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in November 1897; and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June of the following year.
Promoted to lieutenant in November 1900 and promoted to captain in June 1904, Araki served as company commander of the 1st Imperial Regiment during the Russo-Japanese War.
After the war, Araki returned to graduate from the Army Staff College at the head of his class. He served on the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff in April 1908, and served as a language officer stationed in Russia from November 1909 to May 1913, when he was made military attaché to Saint Petersburg during World War I. He was promoted to major in July 1918 and was assigned to the Kwantung Army.

wn.com/Sadao_Araki
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. The war began after a pronunciamiento (declaration of opposition) by a group of generals under the leadership of José Sanjurjo against the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic, at the time under the leadership of President Manuel Azaña. The rebel coup was supported by a number of conservative groups including the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, monarchists such as the religious conservative Carlists, and the Fascist Falange. The uprising was authoritarian and anti-separatist in inspiration; anti-Basque and anti-Catalan feeling marked the Nationalist zone.
Following the only partially successful coup, Spain was left militarily and politically divided. From that moment onwards, general Francisco Franco began a protracted war of attrition against the established government for the control of the country. The rebel forces received the support of Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, as well as neighbouring Portugal, while the Soviet Union and Mexico intervened in support of the Republican government or loyalist side.

wn.com/Spanish_Civil_War
Theodor Vahlen
Karl Theodor Vahlen (June 30, 1869, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary – November 16, 1945, in Prague, Czechoslovakia) was an Austrian-born mathematician who was an ardent supporter of the Nazi Party. He was a member of both the SA and SS.
Vahlen studied in Berlin from 1889 and received his doctorate there in 1893.
From 1883, Vahlen was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the Königsberg Albertina University. In 1904, he began teaching at the University of Greifswald, and in 1911 he became an ordinarius professor there. Vahlen had joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1922. From 1924, he was the first Pomeranian district leader of the NSDAP. In 1924, Vahlen incited a crowd at the University against the Weimar Republic, which resulted in taking down flags of the Republic. The University placed him on leave for political abuse of his function, and in 1927 he was dismissed without a pension.
Upon his dismissal, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott increased the funding Vahlen had been receiving for his work for the German Navy since 1922. Vahlen worked briefly as an assistant in Johannes Stark’s private physics laboratory. In 1930 Vahlen returned to his birthplace and became a lecturer of mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Wien.

wn.com/Theodor_Vahlen
Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling (Norwegian: [ˈʋɪdkʉn ˈkʋɪʃlɪŋ] (listen); 18 July 1887 – 24 October 1945) was a Norwegian politician. On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he seized power in a Nazi-backed coup d'etat.
From 1942 to 1945 he served as Minister-President, working with the occupying forces. His government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling, the party he had founded in 1933. The collaborationist government participated in Germany's Final Solution. Quisling was put on trial during the post-war legal purge in Norway and found guilty of charges including embezzlement, murder and high treason. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945. During World War II, quisling became a synonym for traitor.
The son of a Church of Norway pastor, Quisling blended Christian fundamentals, scientific developments and philosophy into a new theory he called Universism. Before going into politics, he proved himself in the military, joining the General Staff in 1911 and specialising in Russian affairs. He was posted to Russia in 1918, and worked with Fridtjof Nansen during the 1921 famine in the Ukraine, returning to Russia to work with Frederik Prytz in Moscow. When Prytz left in 1927, Quisling stayed on as the Norwegian diplomat responsible for managing British diplomatic affairs. For these services he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by King George V, though the honour was later rescinded. He returned to Norway in 1929, and served as Minister of Defence during the Agrarian governments (1931–33). Although Quisling achieved some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party never polled well and was little more than peripheral at the time of his 1940 coup.

wn.com/Vidkun_Quisling
Vihtori Kosola
Iisakki Vihtori Kosola (10 July 1884 – 14 December 1936) was the leader of the Finnish right-wing radical Lapua Movement.
Kosola was born in Ylihärmä, Southern Ostrobothnia. His family's farmhouse burnt down the next year, and the family moved to Lapua. His formative years were spent in farming and cattle-breeding.
Kosola was an active recruiter of Finnish Jäger troops to Germany from autumn 1915, and was incarcerated in 1916. He was imprisoned in Helsinki, then at the Shpalernaya prison in St. Petersburg among other Finnish activists. He was released after the Russian Revolution and eagerly took part in the Finnish Civil War against the Red Guards and the Russians. After the war Kosola led the Lapua White Guard.
In the 1920s he organized Vientirauha, a strikebreakers' organisation, in Southern Ostrobothnia. He made a speech at the first meeting of the anti-communist Lapua Movement as it was organized in 1929, and was chosen as its leader as the movement radicalized in the following year. He took part of the abortive Mäntsälä Rebellion of 1932 that ended with the dissolution and banning of the Lapua Movement and the brief imprisonment of Kosola.

wn.com/Vihtori_Kosola
Wilhelm Cuno
Wilhelm Carl Josef Cuno (July 2, 1876 – January 3, 1933) was a German politician who was the Chancellor of Germany from 1922 to 1923. He was born in Suhl, Prussian Saxony. Cuno's government is best known for its passive resistance of the French occupation of the Ruhr Area (1922–1923). Cuno's government was also responsible for its poor handling of economic problems. In order to pay off the state's debts, the government under Cuno printed vast amounts of money, leading to hyperinflation which peaked in the summer of 1923. A wave of strikes began in August 1923 and on Cuno and his cabinet resigned on August 12, 1923.
Cuno received education as a lawyer in Berlin and Heidelberg. He was employed by the Reich Treasury Department in 1907. During World War I Cuno was involved in arrangements for food supplies for the German army, but quit civil service to join the Hapag shipping company in 1917. In December 1918 Cuno was promoted to the Hapag's general director. As an economic expert Cuno participated in the post-war negotiations on reparations and peace terms. The importance of his position as Hapag executive increased after the company became one of the leading shippers of goods between the U.S. and Germany.

wn.com/Wilhelm_Cuno
Wilhelm Grimm
Wilhelm Carl Grimm (also Karl; 24 February 1786 – 16 December 1859) was a German author, the younger of the Brothers Grimm.
He was born in Hanau, Hesse-Kassel and in 1803 he started studying law at the University of Marburg, one year after his brother Jacob started there. The whole of the lives of the two brothers was passed together. In their school days, they had one bed and one table in common. As students, they had two beds and two tables in the same room. They always lived under one roof, and had their books and property in common.
In 1825 Wilhelm married a pharmacist's daughter; Henriette Dorothea Wild, also known as Dortchen, at age 39. Wilhelm's marriage in no way disturbed the harmony of the brothers. As Richard Cleasby said, “they both live in the same house, and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property.” Together, Wilhelm and Henriette had four children: Jacob Grimm (3 April 1826–15 December 1826), Herman Friedrich Grimm (6 January 1828–16 June 1901), Rudolf Georg Grimm (31 March 1830–13 November 1889), and Barbara Auguste Luise Pauline Marie (21 August 1832–9 February 1919).

wn.com/Wilhelm_Grimm
Wilhelm Karpenstein
Wilhelm Karpenstein (born 24 May 1903 in Frankfurt am Main - died 2 May 1968 in Lauterbach, Hesse) was a German Nazi Party politician. He served as Gauleiter of Pomerania during the early days of the Third Reich.
Karpenstein was elected to the Reichstag in the 1930 election and served as a Nazi Party deputy until the end of the Second World War. He was appointed the party's Gauleiter in Pomerania in 1931.
Immediately after the Nazis came to power a significant amount of autonomy lay with the gauleiters and their radicalism threatened to disrupt the relationship between Adolf Hitler and the middle classes that had helped to ensure his election. Karpenstein was one of the few who did not offer this problem as he was conservative and pro-middle class. Nevertheless he did not miss the opportunity to increase his personal power in the early days of Nazism and sought to make all of the churches, government officials and media outlets in Pomerania answerable to him directly.
Karpenstein however, despite not holding left-wing economic ideas, was too weak to control the dissident sentiments emerging from the Sturmabteilung in Pomerania, which was one of their power bases. As a result Karpenstein was one of those to be purged during the Night of the Long Knives, although his lack of direct involvement with the SA meant that he was not killed but rather sacked in favour of Franz Schwede-Coburg. Ostensibly however Karpenstein was dismissed for his supposed links to Gregor Strasser and his failure to work with Hermann Goering.

wn.com/Wilhelm_Karpenstein
Wilhelm Kube
Wilhelm Kube (13 November 1887 - 22 September 1943) was a German politician and Nazi official. He was an important figure in the German Christian movement during the early years of Nazi rule. During the war he became a senior official in the occupying government of the Soviet Union, achieving the rank of Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (Belarus). He was assassinated in Minsk in 1943, triggering brutal reprisals against the citizens of Minsk.
Kube was born in Glogau (today's Głogów), Prussian Silesia, and studied history, economics and theology. He was active in the Völkisch movement as a student, and was an early member of the Nazi Party. In 1924 he was one of the first group of Nazi members elected to the Weimar Republic Reichstag. In 1928 he was appointed Gauleiter of Brandenburg and speaker of the tiny Nazi party fraction (6 seats) in the Prussian Landtag (Prussian state legislature).

wn.com/Wilhelm_Kube
Wilhelm Murr
Wilhelm Murr (16 December 1888 in Esslingen am Neckar – 14 May 1945 in Egg, Vorarlberg, Austria ) was a Nazi German politician. From 1928 until his death he was Gauleiter of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, and from early 1933 held the offices of State President and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Württemberg. During World War II he also rose to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer in addition to his Party posts. At war's end he committed suicide with poison while in French custody.
Murr grew up in Esslingen in poverty and lost both parents at the age of 14. He attended the Volksschule up to the 7th class. After commercial training, he completed military service from 1908 to 1910 and then worked as a salesman at the Maschinenfabrik Esslingen. During the First World War he served on all fronts, advanced to the rank of Vize-Feldwebel (Staff Sergeant) and spent the end of the war in 1918 injured in a military hospital in Cottbus.
Murr became deeply involved in the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband ("German National Trade Assistants' Union"; DHV), a völkisch, rightwing, anti-Semitic employees' union that he had joined even before the war. There he came into contact with the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch's writings and was greatly influenced by them. He joined the NSDAP in the summer of 1923, and after the Party was temporarily banned, he joined it again in August 1925. He eagerly recruited new members to the party at his workplace. A workers' newspaper criticized him in September 1927, saying that Murr's only job there was "to smuggle Hakenkreuzler ('crooked-cross devotees') into the works". It was also at this time that Murr got to know Richard Drauz, the later Nazi Kreisleiter of Heilbronn, whom Murr often patronized.

wn.com/Wilhelm_Murr
Willi Stöhr
Willi Stöhr (6 November 1903 - date of death unknown), German NSDAP official, was born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. He joined the NSDAP in 1923. In 1932 he was made a senior official of the Hitler Youth movement, and in 1933, when the National Socialist movement came to power, he was appointed to administrative position in Frankfurt am Main, and also adjutant to Jakob Sprenger, Gauleiter (regional party head) of Hesse-Nassau. In 1937 he became head of the party's propaganda organisation in Hesse-Nassau. In October 1944, he was appointed head of the civil administration of German-occupied Lorraine, although the area was already being over-run by the Allied armies. In February 1945 he was made Gauleiter of the Gau Westmark, based in Saarbrücken, and was in charge of the defence of the city, which fell to the Americans on 20 March. After a period of imprisonment he emigrated to Canada, where he was still living in 1995: his date of death is unknown.

wn.com/Willi_Stöhr
World War I
World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.

wn.com/World_War_I
Zoltán Böszörmény
Zoltán Böszörmény (5 January 1893-?) was a leading exponent of Fascism in Hungary before the Second World War.
The son of a bankrupt landowner, he initially worked a series of odd jobs, ranging from a labourer to a porter. He first flirted with politics in 1919 when he became involved in activity against Béla Kun, albeit on a very minor scale. Whilst studying at the University of Budapest he became leader of the state student movement and a supporter of Gyula Gömbös. Whilst at University he also became a poet, writing largely patriotic verses published by two agents who would later become involved in the organisation of his political movement.
He formed the National Socialist Party of Work in 1931, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler that same year convinced him further of the benefits of Nazism. The group followed Hitler's lead closely, adopting the brown shirt and swastika whilst publishing a newspaper National Socialist. As the Scythe Cross, Böszörmény's movement grew to have some 20,000 followers at its peak, although Gömbös, fearing the growing power of the movement, suppressed it. As lead of the movement Böszörmény insisted on the title vezér or 'great leader' in imitation of Hitler's Führer. A word-for-word translation of the Nazi Party's National Socialist Program served as the founding document for the Scythe Cross.

wn.com/Zoltán_Böszörmény

Die NSDAP - Hitlers politische Bewegung

Im Februar 1920 in München als Nachfolgeorganisation der "Deutschen Arbeiterpartei" gegrün...

published: 15 Jun 2012

author: GeschichteWelt

1937 - Reichsparteitag Der NSDAP

Hitler was the greatest man to set foot upon the earth. A savior of man, child, woman and ...

published: 06 Jan 2010

author: communistcrusher3

Hitlerjugend durch Nürnberg marschiert --- NSDAP Partei Congress

Clip from "Der Marsch zum Führer" ("The March to the Führer") (1940; c.45 min), a Third Re...

published: 23 Oct 2012

author: jaava44

DJ 1933 - NSDAP

National Socialist techno/trance Track #10, Album: DJ 1933 - One People, One Reich, One Le...

published: 26 Feb 2012

author: jimmijamez22

Rolf Hochhuth in "Kulturzeit" zu NSDAP-Mitgliedschaften

Großartiges "Interview" in Kulturzeit auf 3sat zu der leidigen Debatte um NSDAP-Mitgliedsc...

published: 17 Jul 2007

author: oerschauer

POgańskie korzenie NSDAP

"Czciciele Czarnego Słońca" tytuł oryg.: "Schwarze Sonne - Kultorte und Esoterik des III R...

published: 12 Mar 2012

author: sosenkowski

Festival Nuremberg - National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) pt1

Festival Nuremberg - The National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) - Part 1...

published: 29 Mar 2008

author: Trev1er02

Festival Nuremberg - National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) pt2

Festival Nuremberg - The National Party Day of NSDAP (1937) - Part 2...

published: 29 Mar 2008

author: Trev1er02

Word and Act - The 90-th anniversary of NSDAP

I uploaded this famous Third Reich video -"Wort und Tat" (for first time with English subt...

published: 24 Feb 2010

author: Propagandaleiter

Der Reichsparteitag der NSDAP in Nürnberg

Der Reichsparteitag der NSDAP in Nürnberg (30er Jahre)...

published: 20 Jan 2012

author: svwmannheim

HITLER & NSDAP - 1

HITLER & NSDAP...

published: 20 Sep 2008

author: Peken73

HIMNO DEL NSDAP -HORST WESSEL- ESPAÑOL Y ALEMÁN.wmv

...

published: 28 May 2010

author: IntJewryWonWW2

NSDAP Triumphmarsch

A video for the NSDAP Triumphmarsch....

published: 19 Nov 2007

author: Einherjar318

Reichsparteitage.der.NSDAP ( 1 - 5 )

Die Reichsparteitage von 1933 bis 1938 in Deutschland.Schwarzweiß und in Farbe auf Deutsch...

published: 25 Oct 2007

author: v1skie

Second question for the NSDAP

published: 12 Mar 2012

author: Daniel Luna

Action Francaise, Narodowa Partia Faszystowska, NSDAP- doc. Józef Kossecki

published: 26 Feb 2012

author: Jasiu Kowalski

Nazi-Germany footage in color

Nazi-Germany footage...

published: 21 May 2007

author: frogsta

Die Deutsche Wochenschau 1942 - German Newsreel 1942

German Newsreel 1942...

published: 29 Jun 2007

author: dsfsdfsdfdsf

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photo: AP / Carolyn Kaster

FILE - In this June 26, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks in Atlanta. The presidential race enters the sultry summer _ a final lull before a sprint to Election Day _ with President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney neck and neck and no sign that either can break away. Both sides have money concerns _ for all the flood of cash _ as well as political worries.

Obama promises gun control early next year

Sowetan Live

20 Dec 2012

Obama held a White House news conference on Wednesday to announce that Vice President Joe Biden will lead an interagency effort to craft new gun policies. The group is expected to offer its proposals in January. “We know this is a complex issue that stirs deeply held passions and political divides,” Obama said. “But the fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing.” ... WAKE-UP CALL ... ....(size: 6.1Kb)

photo: AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking during the his visit to the Disaster Operation Center of the Red Cross National Headquarter to discuss superstorm Sandy

Obama backs bill to ban assault weapons

The Star

19 Dec 2012

WASHINGTON. US President Barack Obama backs a new bill to revive an assault weapons ban and other new gun laws, the White House said Tuesday, fleshing out his nascent response to a shocking school massacre. Obama also called an ardently pro-gun senator who has shifted his position on firearms laws since Friday's carnage in Connecticut and has begun meeting top cabinet officials to consider his options, his spokesman Jay Carney said ... ....(size: 4.9Kb)

photo: AP / Charles Krupa

Police officers cross the road after searching a strip mall near an elementary school, which was in a lockdown, in Ridgefield, Conn., Monday, Dec. 17, 2012, after a suspicious person was seen near a train station close by.

Gunspicuous Consumption and Bio-Cultures of Violence

WorldNews.com

18 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. "Most people reason dramatically, not quantitatively." -Oliver Wendell Holmes. On the same day that a 20-year-old, described as brilliant but remote, walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and massacred 26 children and adults, the school where I teach went on "lock-down." Four students with a handgun were arrested ... That morning before school, he had posted on Twitter and Facebook....(size: 14.0Kb)

photo: Creative Commons / Joachim Huber

Etosha's elephants belong to the group of elephants in northwestern Nambia and southern Angola.

Stupider and Still Developing an Extermination Gene

WorldNews.com

18 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. When a Stanford geneticist, Gerald Crabtree, published a provocative and controversial new view on evolutionary change, namely that humans are actually getting dumber, he should have also added that humans are still developing an extermination gene ... Paleontologist Tim Flannery would more than likely agree with Crabtree ... Strange strings of gravel also overlaid some bones ... (1) Kane, Alex ... 195....(size: 9.4Kb)

photo: AP / Narciso Contreras

In this Monday, Dec. 17, 2012 photo, a man runs between debris after a mortar shell hit a street killing several people in the Bustan Al-Qasr district of Aleppo, Syria.

U.N. seeks $1.5 billion to address Syria crisis

The Star

19 Dec 2012

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations appealed on Wednesday for $1.5 billion (920.1 million pounds) to provide life-saving aid to Syrians suffering from a "dramatically deteriorating" humanitarian situation ... "The magnitude of this humanitarian crisis is indisputable," said Radhouane Nouicer, U.N ... Inside Syria, U.N ... ....(size: 1.5Kb)

timeline:
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UIDAI launches public data portal for Aadhaar

Newstrack India

09 Nov 2012

Tweet. New Delhi, Nov 9 (ANI). The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has launched its 'public data portal' for the Aadhaar project in line with the national data sharing and accessibility policy (NSDAP) 2012 ... The Government of India notified the national data sharing and accessibility policy (NSDAP) 2012 on March 17, 2012 ... Data sets are available in human and machine-readable formats ... (ANI). Post comments.. ) .. ).. Comments. ... ....(size: 3.1Kb)

Growing Concern in Israel as Tymoshenko's Party Forms Electoral Alliance with the National Socialist Svoboda All-Ukrainian Union in Ukraine

PR Newswire

26 Oct 2012

  Google. , October 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ... According to the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Svoboda is a fascist party, and its full name - the Social-National Party of - was chosen in association with the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) ... Svoboda, which was formed as a Nationalist Socialist Party by Oleh Tiahnybok, has also been repeatedly criticized by the Ukrainian Jewish Committee ... SOURCE Jewish Ukraine Monitor . ....(size: 3.7Kb)

Alpine club examines historical ties to Nazis

Deutsche Welle

02 Sep 2012

Because it was the first major sporting group to exclude Jews in the 1930s, the German Alpine Association examined its role in Nazi Germany and how climbing feats became fodder for Hitler's propaganda machine. Four days were enough to turn the simple mountaineer Heinrich Harrer into a hero ... A few months earlier, Harrer had become a member of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) ... Heinrich Harrer's second life ... ....(size: 5.1Kb)

Islamophobia in America

CounterPunch

24 Aug 2012

19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism. The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihad watch.org” and “Atlasshrugged” ... According to the Jihadwatch website. ... intelligence community. Stealth Jihad ... () ... government ... * Shots Fired On Mosque ... In this election the NSDAP (The Nationalist Socialist German workers Party) came out as the second strongest party with 18,3% of the votes....(size: 22.0Kb)

photo: White House / Pete Souza

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Combatant Commanders and senior military leadership in the Cabinet Room of the White House, May 15, 2012.

The discrediting of reason

Asia Times

14 Aug 2012

By Martin Hutchinson ... Only in resource economies, where good policies can become disjointed from good results, can the electorate become confused between what works and what doesn't; thus democracy is a more fragile flower in Argentina, Brazil or Peru than in Western Europe or Asia ... Foolishly, he called an election before his austerity policies had produced any benefits and allowed Hitler's NSDAP to become a major Reichstag force ... 1. 2....(size: 20.8Kb)

The myth of Hitler's role in building the German autobahn

Deutsche Welle

04 Aug 2012

Many people still believe that the Nazis invented the famous German autobahn, and that the construction work helped eradicate mass unemployment in Germany ... This was quite a turnaround. Only a few years earlier, many members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) - the Nazis - collaborated with the German Communist Party in sabotaging the construction of ‘car-only roads', as these concrete runways were initially called....(size: 6.3Kb)

Russian Press - Behind the Headlines, June 26

Novosti

26 Jun 2012

Gazeta.ru. Authorities Consider Fines for Publishing Links to Extremist Materials. The Russian Communications Ministry has drafted a law prohibiting online resources and the print media from publishing links to extremist materials ... The harshest punishment is a 90-day suspension ... The same goes for publishing materials by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the National Fascist Party of Italy (PNF) ... Nezavisimaya Gazeta....(size: 9.3Kb)

Constant Forward Movement: Taylor Parkes On Can's Lost Tapes

The Quietus

18 Jun 2012

Fifteen, twenty years ago, it would have been natural to respond to The Lost Tapes not just with astounded applause but with a rather lofty prescription. any group could learn a lot from close, repeated listening. It's still true, of course, but in 2012 it seems a bit out of touch ... Kiesinger, formerly a NSDAP propagandist, was only the most visible link between the country's new establishment and the horrors of the recent past ... amazing ... ....(size: 20.1Kb)

Europe’s Jews And The Future They Face – An Interview With Dr. Clemens Heni

The Inquisitr

15 Jun 2012

Posted. June 14, 2012. The recent news out of Europe has been quite disturbing ... Certainly, branding a boy because his father is from Israel puts a dramatic end to that particular lie ... Dr ... He received a B.A ... Dr ... DR. HENI. ... He was not just a member of the Nazi party (NSDAP), his philosophy introduced National Socialism into philosophical thinking, as French philosopher Emmanuel Faye argued convincingly a few years ago in an important study ... Dr ... ....(size: 44.2Kb)

Fundamentals

Deccan Chronicle

26 May 2012

General V.K. Singh is among the most controversial army chiefs in our post independence defence history. As he prepares to bow out and General Bikram Singh is set to take over, we take a look at some of India’s army chiefs since independence ... Army Chiefs. 1 ... Name both. 2 ... Who and who was the ‘Sweetie’?. 3 ... Identify. 4. General S ... 5 ... 6 ... 7 ... 8 ... How do you better know the NSDAP or National Socialist German Workers Party? ... D in NSDAP stands for Deutsche ... ....(size: 3.7Kb)

Leon Trotsky and the defense of historical truth

Axis of Logic

24 Apr 2012

Editor's Introduction. Why you should read David North's "In Defense of Leon Trotsky" ... By David North ... The KPD, following the instructions it received from Stalin, pursued the mindless policy of âsocial fascism.â That is, the KPD declared that there existed no significant differences between the Social Democracy, a mass party of the working class, and the NSDAP (Nazis), the mass party of the reactionary German petty-bourgeoisie ... ....(size: 49.3Kb)

German Pirate Party: We're Growing As Fast As The Nazis Did

Business Insider

23 Apr 2012

Such success is unusual, and it can be hard to find something to compare it to ... Speaking to Der Spiegel in an article published today, Delius said, "The rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the NSDAP between 1928 and 1933." ... ....(size: 2.1Kb)

German Pirates in hot water over Nazi comparison

DNA India

23 Apr 2012

"The ascent of the Pirate Party is proceeding as swiftly as the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazis) between 1928 and 1933," Martin Delius told Monday's edition of the weekly news magazine Spiegel. He then tweeted his remark. The 29-year-old former software designer later apologised and withdrew from an election for the Pirates' executive board, but resisted calls to quit his post in the Berlin city assembly ... ....(size: 3.4Kb)

timeline:
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For the ideology, see Nazism.

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National Socialist German Workers' Party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

Leader	Karl Harrer 1919–1920 Anton Drexler 1920–1921 Adolf Hitler 1921–1945 Martin Bormann 1945 (last)
Founded	1920
Dissolved	1945
Preceded by	German Workers' Party (DAP)
Succeeded by	None (banned) Ideologies continued with neo-Nazism
Headquarters	Munich, Germany^[1]
Newspaper	Völkischer Beobachter
Youth wing	Hitler Youth
Paramilitary wing	Sturmabteilung (SA)
Membership	Less than 60 in 1920 8.5 million by 1945
Ideology	Nazism
Political position	Far right (widespread scholarly identification)^[2]^[3]^[4] Syncretic (official position, supported by some scholars)^[5]^[6]
International affiliation	None
Official colors	Black, white, red (Imperial Germany's colors); brown
Party flag

Politics of Germany Political parties Elections

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (help·info), abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known in English in short form as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party (DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The term Nazi is German and stems from Nationalsozialist,^[7] due to the pronunciation of Latin -tion- as -tsion- in German (rather than -shon- as it is in English), with German Z being pronounced as 'ts' as well.

The party was founded out of the current of the far-right racist völkisch German nationalist movement and the violent anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture that fought against the uprisings of communist revolutionaries in post-World War I Germany.^[8] The party was created by Anton Drexler as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.^[9] Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although such aspects were later downplayed in order to gain the support of industrial entities, and in the 1930's the party's focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.^[10]

The party's last long-term leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime^[11]^[12]^[13]^[14] known as the Third Reich. Following the defeat of the Third Reich at the conclusion of World War Two in Europe, the party was "completely and finally abolished and declared to be illegal" by the Allied occupying powers.

Nazi ideology denounced many political and economic ideologies and systems as being associated with "parasitical Jewry", such as: democracy, socialism, Marxism, the Enlightenment, liberalism, capitalism, parliamentary politics, industrialisation, and trade unionism.^[15] To maintain the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate or impose exclusionary segregation upon "degenerate" and "asocial" groups that included: Jews, homosexuals, Romani, blacks, the physically and mentally handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.^[16] The persecution reached its climax when the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and six million other people from the other targeted groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

The Nazis were presented by Hitler and other proponents and viewed by some scholars as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but politically syncretic.^[5]^[6]^[17]^[18] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying: "Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms."^[19] However, a majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far-right form of politics.^[20]

1 Etymology
2 History
- 2.1 Origins and early existence: 1918–1923
- 2.2 Rise to power: 1925–1933
  - 2.2.1 Ascension and consolidation
  - 2.2.2 Federal election results
3 Political program
4 Party composition
5 Regional administration
6 Membership
7 Party symbols
8 Slogans and songs
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 External links

Etymology [link]

The term Nazi derives from the first two syllables of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, Nazi Party).^[21] The German term Nazi parallels the term Sozi (pronounced /zoːtsi/), an abbreviation of Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany).^[22]^[23]

The term Nazi was originally used by southern German opponents of the NSDAP, and may have been influenced by the Bavarian term Nazi, which was a familiar form of the name Ignatz, which was used colloquially to mean a "clumsy or awkward person". The earlier term Inter-Nazi, which was a German abbreviation of Internationale, may have also contributed to the adoption of the term.^[24]

Members of the NSDAP referred to themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), rarely as Nazis. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power of the German government, usage of the term Nazi diminished in Germany, although Austrian anti-Nazis continued to use the term as an insult.^[23] Many Neo-Nazis still refer to themselves as National Socialists. According to Joseph Goebbels in an official explanation of Nazism, the synthesis of the words nationalism and socialism was to "counter the Internationalism of Marxism with the nationalism of a German Socialism".^[25]

History [link]

Origins and early existence: 1918–1923 [link]

Nazism
Part of a series on

Organizations Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL) National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) Sturmabteilung (SA) Schutzstaffel (SS) Hitler Youth (HJ) League of German Girls (BDM) National Socialist Women's League (NSF)
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Ideology (non-racial) Fascism Anti-democratic thought Gleichschaltung Hitler's political views Mein Kampf Militarism National Socialist Program New Order Propaganda Proletarian nation Religious aspects Syncretic Politics Women in the Third Reich
Racial ideology Aryan race Blood and soil Eugenics Greater Germanic Reich Heim ins Reich Lebensraum Master race Racial policy of Nazi Germany Völkisch equality
Final Solution Concentration camps Deportations Doctors' Trial Extermination camps Genocide Ghettos Labour camps Human experimentation Pogroms Racial segregation
People Adolf Hitler Heinrich Himmler Hermann Göring Joseph Goebbels
Beyond Germany American Nazi Party Arrow Cross Party (Hungary) German American Bund Greyshirts (South Africa) Hungarian National Socialist Party Nasjonal Samling (Norway) Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (Netherlands) National Movement of Switzerland (NBS) National Socialist Bloc (Sweden) National Socialist League (UK) Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile National Socialist Movement (United States) National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark National Unity Party (Canada) Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Argentina) Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (India) Ossewabrandwag (South Africa) Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement (Independent State of Croatia)
Lists Books by or about Adolf Hitler Nazi ideologues Nazi Party leaders and officials Nazi Party members Former Nazi Party members Speeches given by Adolf Hitler SS personnel
Related topics Antisemitism Fascism Glossary of Nazi Germany The Holocaust Neo-Nazism Strasserism Völkisch movement

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The party grew out of smaller political groups with a nationalist orientation that formed in the last years of World War I. In the early months of 1918, a party called the Freier Ausschuss für einen deutschen Arbeiterfrieden ("Free Committee for a German Workers' Peace") was created in Bremen, Germany. On 7 March 1918, Anton Drexler, an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league in Munich called the Committee of Independent Workmen.^[26] Drexler was a local locksmith in Munich who had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party^[27] during World War I, and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and to the revolutionary upheavals that followed in its wake. Drexler followed the typical views of militant nationalists of the day, such as opposing the Treaty of Versailles, having antisemitic, anti-monarchist and anti-Marxist views, as well as believing in the superiority of Germans whom nationalists claimed to be part of the Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk), but he also accused international capitalism of being a Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I.^[28] Drexler saw the situation of political violence and instability in Germany as the result of the new Weimar Republic being out-of-touch with the masses, especially the lower classes.^[28] Drexler emphasized the need for a synthesis of völkisch nationalism, a strong central government movement, with economic socialism in order that a popular, centrist nationalist-oriented workers movement might be created that could challenge the rise of Communism, as well as the internationalist left and right in general.^[29]

On 5 January 1919, Drexler created a new political party based on the political principles which he endorsed by combining his Committee of Independent Workmen with a similar group, The Political Worker's Circle, led by newspaper reporter Karl Harrer.^[26]^[30] Drexler proposed that the party be named the German Socialist Worker's Party, but Harrer objected to using the term "socialist" in the name; the issue was settled by removing the term from the name, and it was agreed that the party be named the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP).^[31] To ease concerns among potential middle-class nationalist supporters, Drexler made clear that unlike Marxists, the party supported middle-class citizens, and that the party's socialist policy was meant to give social welfare to German citizens deemed part of the Aryan race.^[28] They became one of many völkisch movements that existed in Germany at the time. Like other völkisch groups, the DAP advocated the belief that through profit-sharing instead of socialisation Germany should become a unified "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft) rather than a society divided along class and party lines.^[32] This ideology was explicitly antisemitic as it declared that the "national community" must be judenfrei ("free of Jews").^{[citation needed]} As early as 1920, the party was raising money by selling a tobacco called Anti-Semit.^[33]

From the outset, the DAP was opposed to non-nationalist political movements, especially on the left, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Members of the DAP saw themselves as fighting against "Bolshevism" and anyone considered to be part of or aiding so-called "international Jewry". The DAP was also deeply opposed to the Versailles Treaty.^[26] The DAP did not attempt to make itself public, and meetings were kept in relative secrecy, with public speakers discussing what they thought of Germany's present state of affairs, or writing to like-minded societies in Northern Germany.^[32]

The DAP was a comparatively small group with fewer than 60 members.^[32] Nevertheless, it attracted the attention of the German authorities, who were suspicious of any organisation that appeared to have subversive tendencies. A young corporal, Adolf Hitler, stationed in Munich,^[34] was sent by Captain Mayr, head of press and propaganda in the Bavarian section of the army, to investigate the DAP.^[35] While attending a party meeting on September 12, 1919, where Gottfried Feder was speaking on 'How and by what means is capitalism to be eliminated?', Hitler got involved in a heated political argument with a visitor who questioned the soundness of Feder's arguments and who proposed that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a new South German nation with Austria. In vehemently attacking the man's arguments he made an impression on the other party members with his oratory skills and, according to Hitler, the "professor" left the hall acknowledging unequivocal defeat.^[26]^[32] According to August Kubizek, Drexler was so impressed that he whispered to a neighbour, "My he's got a gift of the gab. We could use him."^[32] He was invited to join, and after some deliberation, chose to accept. Among the party's earlier members were Ernst Röhm of the Army's District Command VII; well-to-do journalist Dietrich Eckart; student at the University of Munich and later deputy of the party Rudolf Hess;^[36] Freikorps soldier Hans Frank; and Alfred Rosenberg, often credited as the philosopher of the movement. All of the above were later prominent in the Nazi regime.^[34]

Hitler became the DAP's 55th member and received the number 555, as the DAP added '500' to every member's number to exaggerate the party's strength.^[37] He later claimed to be the seventh party member (he was in fact the seventh executive member of the party's central committee;^[38] he would later wear the Golden Party Badge number one). Hitler's first speech was held in the Hofbräukeller, where he spoke in front of 111 people as the second speaker of the evening. He later declared that this was when he realised he could really "make a good speech".^[32] At first Hitler only spoke to relatively small groups on behalf of the party, but in early 1920 he took over propaganda work and began to take a more prominent role in organisation; consequently, his public speaking began to attract larger audiences.^[39] Hitler began to make the party much more public, and he organised the party's biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people, for 24 February 1920 in the Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München. Such was the significance of this particular move in publicity that Harrer resigned from the party in disagreement.^[40] It was in this speech that Hitler, for the first time, enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Worker's Party's manifesto that had been drawn up by Drexler, Feder, and Hitler.^[41] Through these points he gave the organisation a much bolder stratagem^[39] with a clear foreign policy (abrogation of Versailles, a Greater Germany, Eastern expansion, exclusion of Jews from citizenship), and among his specific points were: confiscation of war profits, abolition of unearned incomes, the State to share profits of land, and land for national needs to be taken away without compensation.^[42] In general, the manifesto was antisemitic, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, and anti-liberal.^[43] On 24 February 1920^{[dubious – discuss]}, the party also added "National Socialist" to its official name, in order to appeal to both nationalists and socialists, becoming the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, or Nazis for short), although Hitler earlier suggested the party to be renamed the "Social Revolutionary Party"; it was Rudolf Jung who persuaded Hitler to follow the NSDAP naming.^[44] Hitler quickly became the party's most active orator, and he appeared in public as a speaker thirty-one times within the first year after his self-discovery. Hitler always spoke about the same subjects: the Treaty of Versailles and the Jewish question.^[43] This deliberate technique and effective publicising of the party contributed significantly to his early success,^[43] about which a contemporary poster wrote 'Since Herr Hitler is a brilliant speaker, we can hold out the prospect of an extremely exciting evening'.^[45] Over the following months, the DAP continued to attract new members,^[38] while remaining too small to have any real significance in German politics.^[46] By the end of 1920, the party numbered 3,000,^[43] many of whom Hitler and Röhm had brought into the party personally, or for whom Hitler's oratory had been their reason for joining.^[47]

Hitler discovered that he had talent as an orator, and his ability to draw new members, combined with his characteristic ruthlessness, soon made him the dominant figure. Drexler recognized this, and Hitler became party chairman on 28 July 1921. When the party had been established, it consisted of a leadership board elected by the members, which in turn elected a chairman. Hitler scrapped this arrangement. He acquired the title Führer ("leader") and, after a series of sharp internal conflicts, it was accepted that the party would be governed by the Führerprinzip ("leader principle"): Hitler was the sole leader of the party, and he alone decided its policies and strategy.^{[citation needed]} Hitler at this time saw the party as a revolutionary organization, whose aim was the violent overthrow of the Weimar Republic, which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the "November criminals" who had betrayed the German soldiers in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921, and began violent attacks on other parties.

File:Mein Kampf.png

Mein Kampf in its most common cover.

For Hitler the twin goals of the party were always German nationalist expansionism and antisemitism. These two goals were fused in his mind by his belief that Germany's external enemies – Britain, France and the Soviet Union – were controlled by the Jews, and that Germany's future wars of national expansion would necessarily entail a war against the Jews.^[48] For Hitler and his principal lieutenants, national and racial issues were always dominant. This was symbolised by the adoption as the party emblem of the swastika or Hakenkreuz, at the time widely used in the western world. In German nationalist circles, the swastika was considered a symbol of an "Aryan race"; it symbolized the replacement of the Christian Cross with allegiance to a National Socialist State.

During 1921 and 1922, the Nazi Party grew significantly, partly through Hitler's oratorical skills, partly through the SA's appeal to unemployed young men, and partly because there was a backlash against socialist and liberal politics in Bavaria as Germany's economic problems deepened and the weakness of the Weimar regime became apparent. The party recruited former World War I soldiers, to whom Hitler as a decorated frontline veteran could particularly appeal, as well as small businessmen and disaffected former members of rival parties. Nazi rallies were often held in beer halls, where downtrodden men could get free beer. The Hitler Youth was formed for the children of party members, although it remained small until the late 1920s. The party also formed groups in other parts of Germany. Julius Streicher in Nuremberg was an early recruit, and became editor of the racist magazine Der Stürmer. Others to join the party around this time were WW I flying ace Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler. In December 1920 the party acquired a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, of which NSDAP ideological chief Alfred Rosenberg became editor.

In 1922, a party with remarkably similar policies and objectives came into power in Italy, the National Fascist Party under the leadership of the charismatic Benito Mussolini. The Fascists, like the Nazis, promoted a national rebirth of their country; opposed communism and liberalism; appealed to the working-class; opposed the Treaty of Versailles; and advocated the territorial expansion of their country. The Italian Fascists used a straight-armed Roman salute and wore black-shirted uniforms. Hitler was inspired by Mussolini and the Fascists, borrowing their use of the straight-armed salute as a Nazi salute. When the Fascists came to power in 1922 in Italy through their coup attempt called the "March on Rome", Hitler began planning his own coup which would materialize one year later.

In January 1923 France occupied the Ruhr industrial region as a result of Germany's failure to meet its reparations payments. This led to economic chaos, the resignation of Wilhelm Cuno's government, and an attempt by the German Communist Party (KPD) to stage a revolution. The reaction to these events was an upsurge of nationalist sentiment. Nazi Party membership grew sharply, to about 20,000.^[49] By November, Hitler had decided that the time was right for an attempt to seize power in Munich, in the hope that the Reichswehr (the post-war German military) would mutiny against the Berlin government and join his revolt. In this he was influenced by former General Erich Ludendorff, who had become a supporter—though not a member—of the Nazis.

On the night of 8 November, the Nazis used a patriotic rally in a Munich beer hall to launch an attempted putsch (coup d'état). This so-called Beer Hall Putsch attempt failed almost at once when the local Reichswehr commanders refused to support it. On the morning of 9 November the Nazis staged a march of about 2,000 supporters through Munich in an attempt to rally support. Troops opened fire, and 16 Nazis were killed. Hitler, Ludendorff and a number of others were arrested, and were tried for treason in March 1924. Hitler and his associates were given very lenient prison sentences. While Hitler was in prison, he wrote his semi-autobiographical political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle").^[50]

The Nazi Party was banned, though with support of the nationalist Völkisch-Social Bloc (Völkisch-Sozialer Block), continued to operate under the name of the "German Party" (Deutsche Partei or DP) from 1924 to 1925.^[51] The Nazis failed to remain unified in the German Party, as in the north, the right-wing Volkish nationalist supporters of the Nazis moved to the new German Völkisch Freedom Party, leaving the north's left-wing Nazi members, such as Joseph Goebbels retaining support for the party.^[52]

Rise to power: 1925–1933 [link]

Hitler with Nazi Party members in 1930

Further information: Adolf Hitler's rise to power

Adolf Hitler was released in December 1924. In the following year he re-founded and reorganized the Nazi Party, with himself as its undisputed Leader. The new Nazi Party was no longer a paramilitary organization, and disavowed any intention of taking power by force. In any case, the economic and political situation had stabilized and the extremist upsurge of 1923 had faded, so there was no prospect of further revolutionary adventures. The Nazi Party of 1925 was divided into the "Leadership Corps" (Korps der politischen Leiter), appointed by Hitler, and the general membership (Parteimitglieder). The party and the SA were kept separate, and the legal aspect of the party's work was emphasized. In a sign of this, the party began to admit women. The SA and the SS (founded in April 1925 as Hitler's bodyguard, commanded by Himmler) were described as "support groups", and all members of these groups had first to become regular party members.

The party's nominal Deputy Leader was Rudolf Hess, but he had no real power in the party. By the early 1930s the senior leaders of the party after Hitler were Himmler, Goebbels and Göring. Beneath the Leadership Corps were the party's regional leaders, the Gauleiters, each of whom commanded the party in his Gau ("region"). There were 98 Gaue for Germany and an additional seven for Austria, the Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia), Danzig and the Territory of the Saar Basin (then under French occupation).^{[citation needed]} Joseph Goebbels began his ascent through the party hierarchy as Gauleiter of Berlin-Brandenburg in 1926. Streicher was Gauleiter of Franconia, where he published his antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. Beneath the Gauleiter were lower-level officials, the Kreisleiter ("county leaders"), Zellenleiter ("cell leaders") and Blockleiter ("block leaders"). This was a strictly hierarchical structure in which orders flowed from the top, and unquestioning loyalty was given to superiors. Only the SA retained some autonomy. Being composed largely of unemployed workers, many SA men took the Nazis' socialist rhetoric seriously. At this time, the Hitler salute (borrowed from the Italian fascists) and the greeting "Heil Hitler!" were adopted throughout the party.

File:1930-election.jpg

NSDAP election poster in Vienna in 1930. Translation: "We demand freedom and bread".

The Nazis contested elections to the national parliament, the Reichstag, and to the state legislatures, the Landtags, from 1924, although at first with little success. The "National-Socialist Freedom Movement" polled 3% of the vote in the December 1924 Reichstag elections, and this fell to 2.6% in 1928. State elections produced similar results. Despite these poor results, and despite Germany's relative political stability and prosperity during the later 1920s, the Nazi Party continued to grow. This was partly because Hitler, who had no administrative ability, left the party organization to the head of the secretariat, Philipp Bouhler, the party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and business manager Max Amann. The party had a capable propaganda head in Gregor Strasser, who was promoted to national organizational leader in January 1928. These men gave the party efficient recruitment and organizational structures. The party also owed its growth to the gradual fading away of competitor nationalist groups, such as the DNVP. As Hitler became the recognized head of the German nationalists, other groups declined, or were absorbed.

The party expanded in the 1920s beyond its Bavarian base. Catholic Bavaria maintained its right-wing nostalgia for a Catholic monarch; and Westphalia, along with working-class "Red Berlin", were always the Nazis' weakest areas electorally, and even during the Third Reich itself. The areas of strongest Nazi support were in rural Protestant areas such as Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia. Depressed working-class areas such as Thuringia also gave a strong Nazi vote, while the workers of the Ruhr and Hamburg largely remained loyal to the SPD, the KPD, or the Catholic Centre Party. Nuremberg remained a party stronghold, and the first Nuremberg Rally was held there in 1927. These rallies soon became massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power, and attracted many recruits. The Nazis' strongest appeal was to the lower middle-class – farmers, public servants, teachers, small businessmen – who had suffered most from the inflation of the 1920s, so who feared Bolshevism more than anything else. The small business class were receptive to Hitler's antisemitism, since they blamed Jewish big business for their economic problems. University students, disappointed at being too young to have served in World War I and attracted by the Nazis' radical rhetoric, also became a strong Nazi constituency. By 1929, the party had 130,000 members.^[53]

Despite these strengths, the Nazi Party might never have come to power had it not been for the Great Depression and its effects on Germany. By 1930 the German economy was beset with mass unemployment and widespread business failures. The SPD and KPD parties were bitterly divided and unable to formulate an effective solution: this gave the Nazis their opportunity, and Hitler's message, blaming the crisis on the Jewish financiers and the Bolsheviks, resonated with wide sections of the electorate. At the September 1930 Reichstag elections the Nazis won 18.3% of the vote, and became the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the SPD. Hitler proved to be a highly effective campaigner, pioneering the use of radio and aircraft for this purpose. His dismissal of Strasser and appointment of Goebbels as the party's propaganda chief was a major factor. While Strasser had used his position to promote his own leftish version of national socialism, Goebbels was totally loyal to Hitler, and worked only to burnish Hitler's image.

The 1930 elections changed the German political landscape by weakening the traditional nationalist parties, the DNVP and the DVP, leaving the Nazis as the chief alternative to the discredited SPD and the Zentrum, whose leader, Heinrich Brüning, headed a weak minority government. The inability of the democratic parties to form a united front, the self-imposed isolation of the KPD, and the continued decline of the economy, all played into Hitler's hands. He now came to be seen as de facto leader of the opposition, and donations poured into the Nazi Party's coffers. Some major business figures such as Fritz Thyssen were Nazi supporters and gave generously,^[54] and some Wall Street figures were allegedly involved,^[55] but many other businessmen were suspicious of the extreme nationalist tendencies of the Nazis, and preferred to support the traditional conservative parties instead.^[56]

During 1931 and into 1932, Germany's political crisis deepened. In March 1932 Hitler ran for President against the incumbent President Paul von Hindenburg, polling 30.1% in the first round and 36.8% in the second against Hindenburg's 49 and 53%. By now the SA had 400,000 members, and its running street battles with the SPD and KPD paramilitaries (who also fought each other) reduced some German cities to combat zones. Paradoxically, although the Nazis were among the main instigators of this disorder, part of Hitler's appeal to a frightened and demoralised middle class was his promise to restore law and order. Overt antisemitism was played down in official Nazi rhetoric, but was never far from the surface. Germans voted for Hitler primarily because of his promises to revive the economy (by unspecified means), to restore German greatness and overturn the Treaty of Versailles, and to save Germany from communism.

On 20 July 1932, the Prussian government was ousted by a coup—the Preussenschlag, and a few days later at the July 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis made another leap forward, polling 37.4% and becoming the largest party in the Reichstag by a wide margin. Furthermore, the Nazis and the KPD between them won 52% of the vote and a majority of seats. Since both parties opposed the established political system, and neither would join or support any ministry, this made the formation of a majority government impossible. The result was weak ministries governing by decree. Under Comintern directives, the KPD maintained its policy of treating the SPD as the main enemy, calling them "social fascists", thereby splintering opposition to the Nazis.^[57] Later, both the SPD and the KPD accused each other of having facilitated Hitler's rise to power by their unwillingness to compromise.

Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, hoping to find a way out of this impasse. The electoral result was the same, with the Nazis and the KPD winning 50% of the vote between them and more than half the seats, rendering this Reichstag no more workable than its predecessor. But support for the Nazis had fallen to 33.1%, suggesting that the Nazi surge had passed its peak – possibly because the worst of the Depression had passed, possibly because some middle-class voters had supported Hitler in July as a protest, but had now drawn back from the prospect of actually putting him into power. The Nazis interpreted the result as a warning that they must seize power before their moment passed. Had the other parties united, this could have been prevented, but their shortsightedness made a united front impossible. Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher, and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues that eventually persuaded President Hindenburg it was safe to appoint Hitler Reich Chancellor at the head of a cabinet including only a minority of Nazi ministers—which he did on 30 January 1933.

Ascension and consolidation [link]

Reichsparteitag (Nuremberg Rally): NSDAP-leader Adolf Hitler and SA-leader Ernst Röhm, August 1933.

The votes that the Nazis received in the 1932 elections established the Nazi Party as the largest parliamentary faction of the Weimar Republic government. Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 was Adolf Hitler’s raison d’état for suppressing his political opponents. The following day, 28 February, he persuaded Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg to grant him, as German Chancellor, an emergency-powers decree suspending civil liberties and the governments of the German federal states. On 23 March, with an Enabling Act (four-year Presidential decree-law power circumventing the Reichstag), the Reichstag conferred dictatorial powers to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who subsequently personally managed the political emergencies of the German State, by decree. Moreover, then possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control; they abolished labour unions and political parties, and imprisoned their political opponents, first at wilde Lager, improvised camps, then in concentration camps. Nazism had been established, yet the Reichswehr remained impartial: Nazi power over Germany remained virtual, not absolute.

Federal election results [link]

Nazi Party election results^[58]
Date	Total votes	Votes, percentage	Reichstag seats	Notes
01924-05-01May 1, 1924May 1924	&100000000019183000000001,918,300	&100000000000000065000006.5	&1000000000000003200000032	Hitler in prison
01924-12-01December 1, 1924December 1924	&10000000000907300000000907,300	&100000000000000030000003.0	&1000000000000001400000014	Hitler released from prison
01928-05-01May 1, 1928May 1928	&10000000000810100000000810,100	&100000000000000026000002.6	&1000000000000001200000012
01930-09-01September 1, 1930September 1930	&100000000064096000000006,409,600	&1000000000000001830000018.3	&10000000000000107000000107	After the financial crisis
01932-07-01July 1, 1932July 1932	&1000000001374500000000013,745,000	&1000000000000003729999937.3	&10000000000000230000000230	After Hitler was candidate for presidency
01932-11-01November 1, 1932November 1932	&1000000001173700000000011,737,000	&1000000000000003310000033.1	&10000000000000196000000196
01933-03-01March 1, 1933March 1933	&1000000001727718000000017,277,180	&1000000000000004389999943.9	&10000000000000288000000288	During Hitler's term as Chancellor of Germany

Political program [link]

Main article: National Socialist Program

The National Socialist Program was a formulation of the policies of the party. It contained 25 points and is thus also known as the '25 point plan' or the '25 point program'. It was the official party program, with minor changes, from its proclamation as such by Hitler in 1920, when the party was still the German Workers' Party, until its dissolution.

Party composition [link]

Command structure [link]

Top leadership [link]

At the top of the Nazi Party was the party chairman ("Der Führer"), who held absolute power and full command over the party. All other party offices were subordinate to his position and had to depend on his instructions. In 1934, Hitler founded a separate body for the chairman, Chancellery of the Führer, with its own sub-units.

Below the Führer's chancellery was first the "Staff of the Deputy Führer" (headed by Rudolf Hess from April 21, 1933 to May 10, 1941) and then the "Party Chancellery" (Parteikanzlei) headed by Martin Bormann.

Reichsleiters [link]

Directly subjected to the Führer were the Reichsleiters ("Reich Leader"), whose number was gradually increased to eighteen. They held power and influence comparable to the Reich Ministers' in Hitler's Cabinet. The eighteen Reichsleiters formed the "Reich Leadership of the Nazi Party" (Reichsleitung der NSDAP), which was established at the so-called Brown House, in Munich. Unlike the Gauleiters, the Reichsleiters did not have individual geographic areas under their command, but were responsible for specific spheres of interest.

Political leadership corps [link]

The political leadership corps of the Nazi Party were those persons who were most often associated as being "Nazis" in the stereotypical sense of the word, as it was these individuals who wore brown paramilitary Nazi uniforms, enforced Nazi doctrine, and ran local government affairs in accordance with instructions from the Nazi Party.^[59]

The political leadership corps encompassed a vast array of paramilitary titles at the top of which were the Gauleiters, who were Party leaders of large geographical areas. From the Gauleiters extended downwards through Nazi positions encompassing county, city, and town leaders, all of whom were unquestioned rulers in their particular areas and regions.^[60]

To the very end of its existence, the Nazi Party claimed to respect the traditional government of Germany and, to that end, local and state governments were allowed to exist side-by-side with regional Nazi leaders. However, by 1936, the local governments had lost nearly all power to their Nazi counterparts or were now controlled by persons who held both government and Nazi titles alike. This led to the continued existence of German titles such as Bürgermeister, as well as the existence of German state legislatures (Landesrat), but without any real power to speak of.^[61]

Party membership [link]

The general Nazi Party membership were known by the title of Parteimitglieder. This generic term was applied to any member of the Party who did not otherwise hold a political leadership position. Translated simply as "Party Member", the Parteimitglieder could (and did) hold positions in other Nazi groups, such as the SS or Sturmabteilung. The only insignia for the Parteimitglieder was a Nazi Party lapel pin and there was no uniform designed for Nazi Party members who were not political leaders. Such persons, however, often wore uniforms of other Nazi groups, uniforms of German government agencies, and could also serve in the German armed forces.

NSDAP offices [link]

This section requires expansion.

The Nazi Party had a number of party offices dealing with various political and other matters. These included:

Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (RPA): "NSDAP Office of Racial Policy"
Außenpolitische Amt der NSDAP (APA): "NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs"
Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (KPA): "NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy"
Wehrpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (WPA): "NSDAP Office of Military Policy"
Amt Rosenberg (ARo): "Rosenberg Office"

Paramilitary groups [link]

In addition to the NSDAP proper, several paramilitary groups existed which "supported" Nazi aims. All members of these paramilitary organizations were required to become regular Nazi Party members first and could then enlist in the group of their choice. A vast system of Nazi party paramilitary ranks developed for each of the various paramilitary groups.

The major Nazi Party paramilitary groups were as follows:

Schutzstaffel (SS): "Protection Squadron" (both Allgemeine SS and Waffen-SS)
Sturmabteilung (SA): "Storm Division"
Nationalsozialistisches Fliegerkorps (NSFK): "National Socialist Flyers Corps"
Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps (NSKK): "National Socialist Motor Corps"

The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary group divided into an adult leadership corps and a general membership open to boys aged fourteen to eighteen. The League of German Girls was the equivalent group for girls.

Affiliated organizations [link]

Certain nominally independent organizations had their own legal representation and own property, but were supported by the Nazi Party. Many of these associated organizations were labor unions of various professions. Some were older organizations that were nazified according to the Gleichschaltung policy after the 1933 takeover:

Reich League of German Officials (union of civil servants, predecessor to German Civil Service Federation)
German Labor Front (DAF)
National Socialist German Physicians' League (NSDÄB)
National Socialist League for the Maintenance of the Law (NSRB, 1936–1945, earlier National Socialist German Lawyers' League)
National Socialist War Victim's Care (NSKOV)
National Socialist Teachers League (NSLB)
National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV)
Reich Labor Service (RAD)
German Faith Movement
German Colonial League (RKB)
German Red Cross
Kyffhäuser League
Technical Emergency Relief (TENO)
Reich's Union of Large Families
Reichsluftschutzbund (RLB)
Reichskolonialbund (RKB)
Bund Deutscher Osten (BDO)

Regional administration [link]

NSDAP Gaue 1926,1928,1933 and 1937

Administrative units of the NSDAP in 1944.

For the purpose of centralization in the Gleichschaltung process a rigidly hierarchal structure was established in the Nazi Party, which it later carried through in the whole of Germany in order consolidate total power under the person of Hitler (Führerstaat). It was regionally sub-divided into a number of Gaue (singular: Gau) headed by a Gauleiter, who received their orders directly from Hitler. The name (originally a term for sub-regions of the Holy Roman Empire headed by a Gaugraf) for these new provincial structures was deliberately chosen because of its mediaeval connotations. The term is approximately equivalent to the English shire.

After the Anschluss a new type of administrative unit was introduced called a Reichsgau. In these territories the Gauleiters also held the position of Reichsstatthalter, thereby formally combining the spheres of both party and state offices. The establishment of this type of district was subsequently carried out for any further territorial annexations of Germany both before and during World War II.

The Gaue and Reichsgaue (state or province) were further sub-divided into Kreise (counties) headed by a Kreisleiter, which were in turn sub-divided into Zellen (cells) and Blocken (blocks), headed by a Zellenleiter and Blockleiter respectively.

A reorganization of the Gaue was enacted on 1 October 1928. The given numbers were the official ordering numbers. The statistics are from 1941, for which the Gau organization of that moment in time forms the basis. Their size and populations are not exact; for instance according to the official party statistics the Gau Kurmark/Mark Brandenburg was the largest in the German Reich.^[62]

The table below uses the organizational structure that existed before its dissolution in 1945. More information on the older Gaue is in the second table.

[edit] Nazi Party Gaue

Nr.	Gau	Headquarters	Area (km²)	Inhabitants (1941)	Gauleiter (exl. deputies)
01	Baden-Elsaß	Karlsruhe, after 1940 Strasbourg	23,350	2,502,023	Robert Heinrich Wagner, from 1925 (later also Reichsstatthalter)
02	Bayreuth, renaming of Gau Bayerische Ostmark (Bavarian Eastern March)	Bayreuth	29,600	2,370,658	Fritz Wächtler from 2 June 1942 to 19 April 1945, then from 19 April 1945 Ludwig Ruckdeschel.
03	Groß-Berlin	Berlin	884	4,338,756	Ernst Schlange from 1925 to 1926, then from 1 November 1926 to 30 April 1945 Joseph Goebbels
04	Danzig-Westpreußen	Danzig	26,057	2,287,394	Hans Albert Hohnfeldt from 1926 to 1928, then from 1928 to 1930 Walter Maass, then from 15 October 1930 onwards Albert Forster
05	Düsseldorf	Düsseldorf	2,672	2,261,909	Friedrich Karl Florian from 1 January 1930
06	Essen	Essen	2,825	1,921,326	Josef Terboven (Oberpräsident) from 1928
07	Franken	Nuremberg	7,618	1,077,216	from 1929 to 1940 Julius Streicher ("Frankenführer"), then from 16 February 1940 to 1942 Hans Zimmermann, then from 19 March 1942 Karl Holz
08	Halle-Merseburg	Halle an der Saale	10,202	1,578,292	from 1925 to 30 July 1926 Walter Ernst 1 August 1926 to 1927, then from 1927 to 1930 Paul Hinkler, then from 1930 to 20 April 1937 Rudolf Jordan, then from 20 April 1937 Joachim Albrecht Eggeling
09	Hamburg	Hamburg	747	1,711,877	Joseph Klant from 1925 to 1926, then from 1927 to 1928 Albert Krebs, then from 1928 to 15 April 1929 Hinrich Lohse, then from 15 April 1929 Karl Kaufmann
10	Hessen-Nassau	Frankfurt	15,030	3,117,266	Jakob Sprenger from 1933
11	Kärnten	Klagenfurt	11,554	449,713	Hans vom Kothen from February 1933 to July 1934, then Peter Feistritzer from October 1936 to 20 February 1938, then from 1938 to 1939 Hubert Klausner, then from 1940 to 1941 Franz Kutschera, then from 1942 to 1944 Friedrich Rainer
12	Köln-Aachen	Köln	8,162	2,432,095	Joseph Grohé from 1931
13	Kurhessen	Kassel	9,200	971,887	Walter Schultz from 1926 to 1927, then from 1928 to 1943 Karl Weinrich, then from 1943 Karl Gerland
14	Magdeburg-Anhalt	Dessau	13,910	1,820,416	from 1927 onwards, with a short-lived replacement by Paul Hofmann in 1933, to 23 October 1935 Wilhelm Friedrich Loeper, then from 1935 to 1937 Joachim Albrecht Leo Eggeling, then from 1937 Rudolf Jordan
15	Mainfranken, renaming of Gau Unterfranken	Würzburg	8,432	840,663	Otto Hellmuth from 3 September 1928
16	Mark Brandenburg	Berlin	38,278	3,007,933	Wilhelm Kube from 6 March 1933 to 7 August 1936, then Emil Stürtz
17	Mecklenburg	Schwerin	15,722	900,427	Friedrich Hildebrandt from 1925 onwards with a short-lived replacement by Herbert Albrecht from July 1930 to 1931
18	Moselland, renaming of Gau Koblenz-Trier in 1942	Koblenz	11,876	1,367,354	Gustav Simon from 1 June 1931
19	München-Oberbayern,	Munich	16,411	1,938,447	Adolf Wagner von 1933 to 1944, then from April 1944 Paul Giesler
20	Niederdonau	Nominal capital: Krems, District Headquarters: Vienna	23,502	1,697,676	From 12 March 1938 to 24 May 1938 Roman Jäger, then from 24 May 1938 to 8 May 1945 Hugo Jury
21	Niederschlesien	Breslau	26,985	3,286,539	Karl Hanke from 1940
22	Oberdonau	Linz	14,216	1,034,871	Andreas Bolek from June 1927 to 1 August 1934, then from March 1935 August Eigruber
23	Oberschlesien	Kattowitz	20,636	4,341,084	Fritz Bracht from 27 January 1941]
24	Ost-Hannover (also known as Hannover-Ost)	Harburg, then Buchholz, after 1 April 1937 Lüneburg	18,006	1,060,509	from 1 October 1928 Otto Telschow
25	Ostpreußen	Königsberg	52,731	3,336,777	Bruno Gustav Scherwitz from 1925 to 1927, then from 1928 Erich Koch
26	Pommern	Stettin	38,409	2,393,844	Theodor Vahlen from 1925 to 1927, then from 1928 to 1931 Walter von Corswant, then from 1931 to 1934 Wilhelm Karpenstein, then from 1935 Franz Schwede-Coburg
27	Sachsen	Dresden	14,995	5,231,739	Albert Wierheim around 1925/1926, Martin Mutschmann from 1925
28	Salzburg	Salzburg	7,153	257,226	Leopold Malina from 1926 to ??, then Karl Scharizer from 1932 to 1934, then from 1939 to 1941 Friedrich Rainer, then from 1941 Gustav Adolf Scheel
29	Schleswig-Holstein	Kiel	15,687	1,589,267	Hinrich Lohse from 1925
30	Schwaben	Augsburg	10,231	946,212	Karl Wahl from 1928
31	Steiermark	Graz	17,384	1,116,407	Walther Oberhaidacher from 25 November 1928 to 1934, then Sepp Helfrich from 1934 to 1938, then from 22 May 1938 Siegfried Uiberreither
32	Sudetenland, until 1939 known as Gau Sudetengau	Reichenberg	22,608	2,943,187	Konrad Henlein from 1939
33	Südhannover-Braunschweig	Hannover	14,553	2,136,961	from 1 October 1928 to November 1940 Bernhard Rust, then from November 1940 Hartmann Lauterbacher
34	Thüringen	Weimar	15,763	2,446,182	Artur Dinter from 1925 to 1927, then from 1927 Fritz Sauckel
35	Tirol-Vorarlberg	Innsbruck	13,126	486,400	Franz Hofer from 1932
36	Wartheland, until 29 January 1940 known as Gau Warthegau)	Posen	43,905	4,693,722	Arthur Karl Greiser from 21 October 1939
37	Weser-Ems	Oldenburg	15,044	1,839,302	Carl Röver from 1929 to 1942, then from 1942 Paul Wegener
38	Westfalen-Nord	Münster	14,559	2,822,603	Alfred Meyer from 1932
39	Westfalen-Süd	Bochum	7,656	2,678,026	Josef Wagner from 1932 to 1941, Paul Giesler from 1941 to 1943/44, then from 1943/44 Albert Hoffmann
40	Westmark, renaming of Gau Saar-Pfalz (also known as Saarpfalz)	Neustadt an der Weinstraße, after 1940 Saarbrücken	14,713	1,892,240	Josef Bürckel from 1935 to 28 September 1944, then from 28 September 1944 Willi Stöhr
41	Wien	Vienna	1,216	1,929,976	Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld from 1932 to 1938, then from May 1938 to January 1939 Odilo Globocnik, then from 1939 to 1940 Josef Bürckel, and then from 1940 Baldur von Schirach
42	Württemberg-Hohenzollern	Stuttgart	20,657	2,974,373	Eugen Mander from 1925 to 1928, then from 1928 Wilhelm Murr
43	Auslandsorganisation (also known as NSDAP/AO)	Berlin			Hans Nieland from 1930 to 1933, then from 8 May 1933 Ernst Wilhelm Bohle

Later Gaue:

Flanders, existed from 15 December 1944 (Gauleiter in German exile: Jef van de Wiele)
Wallonia, existed from 8 December 1944 (Gauleiter in German exile: Léon Degrelle)

[edit] Former Gaue dissolved before 1945

Simple re-namings of existing Gaue without territorial changes is marked with the initials RN in the column "later became". The numbering is not based on any official former ranking, but merely listed alphabetically.

Nr.	Gau	consisted of	later became	... together with	Gauleiter
01	Anhalt		Magdeburg-Anhalt (1927)	Elbe-Havel	Gustav Hermann Schmischke
02	Baden		Baden-Elsaß (22 March 1941) RN		see above
03	Bayerische Ostmark	Oberfranken & Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (II) (19 January 1933)	Bayreuth (2 Juni 1942) RN		Hans Schemm from 19 January 1933 to 5 March 1935, then from 5 March 1935 Fritz Wächtler
04	Berlin	Berlin-Brandenburg (1. Oktober 1928)	Groß-Berlin RN		Dr. Joseph Goebbels
05	Berlin-Brandenburg		Berlin & Brandenburg (1 October 1928)		Ernst Schlange from 1925 to 1926, then from 1 November 1926 Joseph Goebbels
06	Brandenburg	Berlin-Brandenburg (1 October 1928)	Kurmark (6 March 1933)	Ostmark	from 1 October 1928 to 1932 Emil Holtz and from 18 October 1932 to 16 March 1933 Dr. Ernst Schlange
07	Braunschweig		Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig (1 Oktober 1928)	Hannover-Süd	from 1925 to 30 September 1928 Ludolf Haase (perhaps also only for Hannover-Süd)
08	Danzig		Danzig-Westpreußen (1939) RN		see above
09	Elbe-Havel		Magdeburg-Anhalt (1927)	Anhalt	from 25 November 1925 to 1926 [?] Alois Bachschmidt
10	Groß-München ("Traditionsgau")		München-Oberbayern (1933)	Oberbayern	[?]
11	Hannover-Süd		Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig (1 October 1928)	Braunschweig	from 1925 to 30 September 1928 Ludolf Haase (perhaps also only Braunschweig)
12	Hessen-Darmstadt		Hessen-Nassau (1933)	Hessen-Nassau-Süd	from 1 March 1927 to 9 January 1931 Friedrich Ringshausen, then only in 1931 Peter Gemeinder, then from 1932 to 1933 Karl Lenz
13	Hessen-Nassau-Nord		Kurhessen (1934)		[?]
14	Hessen-Nassau-Süd		Hessen-Nassau (1933)	Hessen-Darmstadt	from 1925 to 1926 Anton Haselmayer, then from 1926 to 1927 Dr. Walter Schultz, then from 1927 to 1933 Jakob Sprenger
15	Koblenz-Trier	Rheinland-Süd (1931)	Moselland (1942) merger		[?]
16	Kurmark	Ostmark & Brandenburg ([?])	Mark Brandenburg (1938) RN		see above
17	Lüneburg-Stade		Ost-Hannover (1928) RN		from 22 March 1925 to 30 September 1928 Bernhard Rust
18	Mittelfranken		Franken (1929)	Nuremberg-Forth-Erlangen	Julius Streicher ("Frankenführer")
19	Niederbayern	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (I) (1 Oktober 1928)	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (II) (1 April 1932)	Oberpfalz	from 1 October 1928 to 1929 Gregor Strasser, then from 1929 to 1 April 1932 Otto Erbersdobler
20	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (I)		Oberpfalz & Niederbayern (1 Oktober 1928)		from 1925 to 30 September 1928 Gregor Strasser
21	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (II)	Oberpfalz & Niederbayern (1 April 1932)	Bayerische Ostmark (19 January 1933)	Oberfranken	from 1 April 1932 to 19 January 1933 Franz Mayerhofer
22	Niederösterreich		Niederdonau ([?]) RN [??]		from 1927 to 1937 Josef Leopold [possibly Lücke from 1937 to 1939, since he is the first Gauleiter for Niederdonau who is actually known]
23	Nuremberg-Forth-Erlangen		Franken (1929)	Mittelfranken	from 3 September 1928 Wilhelm Grimm
24	Oberbayern		München-Oberbayern (1933)	Groß-München	[?]
25	Oberfranken		Bayerische Ostmark (19 January 1933)	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (II)	from 1928 Hans Schemm
26	Oberösterreich		Oberdonau ([?]) RN		[precise moment of leader designation unknown, see also "Oberdonau"]
27	Oberpfalz	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (I) (1 October 1928)	Niederbayern-Oberpfalz (II) (1 April 1932)	Niederbayern	from 1 October 1928 to 1 April 1932 Franz Mayerhofer
28	Ostmark		Kurmark (6 March 1933)	Brandenburg	from 2 January 1928 to 1933 Wilhelm Kube
29	Rheinland		Saar-Pfalz (1935)	Saar(land)	from 1926 Josef Bürckel (from 1 March 1933 also administrator of Saarland)
30	Rheinland-Nord		Ruhr (1926)	Westfalen	from 1925 to 1926 Karl Kaufmann
31	Rheinland-Süd	[?Koblenz-Trier also autonomous before 1931?]	Köln-Aachen & Koblenz-Trier (1931)		1925 Heinrich Haake (also known as "Heinz Haake"), then from 1925 to 1931 Robert Ley
32	Ruhr	Rheinland-Nord & Westfalen (1926)	Westfalen-Nord & Westfalen-Süd (1932)	Düsseldorf (1930) partially; creation of Düsseldorf nicht gesichert	from 1926 to 1929 Karl Kaufmann, then from 1929 to 1931 [?not 1932?] Josef Wagner
33	Saarland, also merely Saar		Saar-Pfalz (1935)	Rheinland	from August 1929 to 28 February 1933 Karl Brück, from 1 March 1933 Josef Bürckel (also administrator of Rheinland)
34	Saar-Pfalz, also Saarpfalz	Rheinland & Saar(land) (1935)	Westmark (1937) RN		see above
35	Schlesien		Niederschlesien & Oberschlesien (1940)		from 15 March 1925 to 25 December 1935 (possibly until only 12 December 1934) Helmuth Brückner, then to 1940 Josef Wagner
36	Sudetengau		Sudetenland (1939) RN		[?]
37	Unterfranken		Mainfranken (1935) RN		see above
38	Warthegau		Wartheland (29 January 1940) RN		see above
39	Westfalen		Ruhr (1926)	Rheinland-Nord	from 1925 to 1926 Franz Pfeffer von Salomon

Associated organizations abroad [link]

[edit] Gaue in Switzerland

The illegal Swiss branch of the NSDAP also established a number of Party Gaue in that country, most of them named after their regional capitals. These included Gau Basel-Solothurn, Gau Schaffhausen, Gau Luzern, Gau Bern and Gau Zürich.^[63]^[64]^[65] The cantons of St. Gallen, Thurgau und Appenzell were administered under Gau Ostschweiz (East Switzerland).^[66]

[edit] Gaue of the German American Bund

Mimicking the regional administrative subdivision of the Nazi Party, the German American Bund divided the United States in the three Gaue: Gau Ost (East), Gau West, and Gau Midwest.^[67] Together the three Gaue had 69 Ortsgruppen, with 40 of them being in Gau Ost (17 in New York), 10 in Gau West and 19 in Gau Midwest.^[67] Each Gau had its own Gauleiter and staff to direct the Bund operations in the region in accordance with the Führerprinzip.^[67]

Membership [link]

General membership [link]

Main article: List of Nazi Party members

The general membership of the Nazi Party, known as the Parteimitglieder, mainly consisted of the urban and rural lower middle classes. 7% belonged to the upper class, another 7% were peasants, 35% were industrial workers and 51% were what can be described as middle class. In early 1933, just before Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship, the party showed an under-representation of "workers", who made up 29.7% of the membership but 46.3% of German society. Conversely, white-collar employees (18.6% of members and 12% of Germans), the self-employed (19.8% of members and 9.6% of Germans), and civil servants (15.2% of members and 4.8% of the German population) had joined in proportions greater than their share of the general population.^[68] These members were affiliated with local branches of the party, of which there were 1,378 throughout the country in 1928. In 1932, the number had risen to 11,845, reflecting the party's growth in this period.^[69]

When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party had over 2 million members. In 1939, the membership total rose to 5.3 million with 81% being male and 19% being female. It continued to attract many more and by 1945 the party reached its peak of 8 million with 63% being male and 37% being female.^[70] Many of these were nominal members who joined for careerist reasons,^{[citation needed]} but the party had an active membership of at least a million, including virtually all the holders of senior positions in the national government.

Military membership [link]

Nazi members with military ambitions were encouraged to join the Waffen-SS, but a great number enlisted in the Wehrmacht and even more were drafted for service after World War II began. Early regulations required that all Wehrmacht members be non-political, and therefore any Nazi member joining in the 1930s was required to resign from the Nazi Party.

This regulation was soon waived, however, and there is ample evidence that full Nazi Party members served in the Wehrmacht in particular after the outbreak of World War II. The Wehrmacht Reserves also saw a high number of senior Nazis enlisting, with Reinhard Heydrich and Fritz Todt joining the Luftwaffe, and Major Ronald von Brysonstofen of the Waffen-SS, as well as Karl Hanke who served in the Army.

Student membership [link]

In 1926, the NSDAP formed a special division to engage the student population, known as the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB). A group for university lecturers, the National Socialist German University Lecturers' League, (NSDDB) existed until July 1944.

Female membership [link]

The National Socialist Women's League was the women's organization of the party. By 1938 it had approximately 2 million members.

Membership outside of Germany [link]

Party members who lived outside of Germany were pooled into the Auslands-Organisation (NSDAP/AO, "Foreign Organization"). The organization was limited only to so-called "Imperial Germans"; "Ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche) who did not hold German citizenship were not permitted to join.

Deutsche Gemeinschaft [link]

Deutsche Gemeinschaft was a branch of the Nazi Party founded in 1919, created for Germans with Volksdeutsche status.^[71] It is not to be confused with the post-war right-wing Deutsche Gemeinschaft (see de:Deutsche Gemeinschaft) party founded in 1949.

Notable members included:

Oswald Menghin (Vienna)
Herbert Czaja (Province of Silesia inside Prussia)
Hermann Neubacher who was responsible for invading Yugoslavia.
Rudolf Much (Vienna)
Arthur Seyß-Inquart (Vienna)

^[72]

Party symbols [link]

Nazi flags: The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden ("blood and soil"). Another definition of the flag describes the colours as representing the ideology of National Socialism, the swastika representing the Aryan race and the Aryan nationalist agenda of the movement; white representing Aryan racial purity; and red representing the socialist agenda of the movement. Black, white and red were in fact the colors of the old North German Confederation flag (invented by Otto von Bismarck, based on the Prussian colours black and white and the red used by northern German states). In 1871, with the foundation of the German Reich, the flag of the North German Confederation became the German Reichsflagge ("Reich's flag"). Black, white and red became the colours of the nationalists through the following history (for example World War I and the Weimar Republic).
German eagle: The Nazi party used the traditional German eagle, standing atop of a swastika inside a wreath of oak leaves. It is also known as the Iron Eagle. When the eagle is looking to its left shoulder, it symbolises the Nazi party, and was called the Parteiadler. In contrast, when the eagle is looking to its right shoulder, it symbolises the country (Reich), and was therefore called the Reichsadler. After the Nazi party came to power in Germany, they forced the replacement of the traditional version of the German eagle with their modified party symbol throughout the country and all its institutions.

The Parteiadler representing the Nazi party
The Reichsadler during the time of Nazi rule, representing Nazi Germany as a national insignia (Hoheitszeichen)
5-Reichsmark coins before (1936) and after adding the Nazi swastika (1938)

Slogans and songs [link]

Nazi slogan: "Sieg Heil!"

Nazi slogan: "Heil Hitler"

Nazi anthem: Horst-Wessel-Lied

Notes [link]

^ Rick Steves. Rick Steves' Snapshot Munich, Bavaria & Salzburg. Berkeley, California, USA; New York, New York, USA: Avalon Travel, 2010. p. 28. "Though the Nazis eventually gained power in Berlin, they remembered their roots, dubbing Munich "Capital of the Movement". The Nazi headquarters stood near today's obelisk on Brienner Strasse..."
^ Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Eatwell, Roger, Fascism, A History, Viking/Penguin, 1996, pp. xvii–xxiv, 21, 26–31, 114–140, 352. Griffin, Roger. 2000. "Revolution from the Right: Fascism," chapter in David Parker (ed.) Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560–1991, Routledge, London.
^ Blum, George, The Rise of Fascism in Europe (Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 9
^ Nazi, New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press Inc., 2005.
^ ^a ^b Adolf Hitler, Max Domarus, Patrick Romane (ed). The essential Hitler: speeches and commentary. Waulconda, Illinois, USA: Bolchazi-Carducci Publishers, Inc., 2007 p. 170.
^ ^a ^b Rudy Koshar. Social life, local politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880-1935. University of North Carolina Press, 1986. p. 190.
^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nazi. Retrieved 2010-11-12.
^ Thomas D. Grant. Stormtroopers and Crisis in the Nazi Movement: activism, ideology and dissolution. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 2004. pp. 30-34, 44.
^ Otis C. Mitchell. Hitler's stormtroopers and the attack on the German Republic, 1919-1933. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008. p. 47.
^ Frank McDonough. Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Party. Pearson/Longman, 2003. p. 64.
^ Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London; New York; San Diego:Harvest Book. p. 306
^ Curtis, Michael. 1979 Totalitarianism. New Brunswick (US); London: Transactions Publishers. p. 36
^ Burch, Betty Brand. 1964 Dictatorship and Totalitarianism: Selected Readings. p. 58
^ Bruhn, Jodi; Hans Maier. 2004. Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships. Routledge: Oxon (U.K.); New York. p. 32.
^ Bendersky, Joseph W. A history of Nazi Germany: 1919-1945. 2nd ed. Burnham Publishers, 2000. p. 24.
^ Simone Gigliotti, Berel Lang. The Holocaust: a reader. Malden, Massachusetts, USA; Oxford, England, UK; Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 14.
^ Thomas Childers. The Formation of the Nazi constituency, 1919-1933. Barnes & Noble Books, 1986. p. 26.
^ Cyprian Blamires. World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2006. p. 14. (Speaks of Nazism having a syncretic mix of left-wing and right-wing positions outside of the traditional linear left-right spectrum).
^ Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. Bottom of the Hill Publishing, 2010. p. 287.
^ Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Eatwell, Roger, Fascism, A History, Viking/Penguin, 1996, pp. xvii-xxiv, 21, 26–31, 114–140, 352. Griffin, Roger. 2000. "Revolution from the Right: Fascism," chapter in David Parker (ed.) Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560-1991, Routledge, London.
^ , pronounced German pronunciation: [natsjoˈnaːlzotsiaːˌlistiʃə ˈdɔytʃə ˈarbaitɐparˌtai]
^ or Sozialdemokrat (pronounced /zo'tsjaːldemoˌkraːt/) (social democrat).
^ ^a ^b Franz H. Mautner (1944). "Nazi und Sozi". Modern Language Notes (Modern Language Notes, Vol. 59, No. 2) 59 (2): 93–100. DOI:10.2307/2910599. JSTOR 2910599.
^ "Oxford English Dictionary". Nazi. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. Retrieved 30 May 2011.
^ Goebbels, Joseph. The Nazi-Sozi: Questions & Answers for National Socialists. Landpost Press, 1999. Pp. 19.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.33
^ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.34
^ ^a ^b ^c Spector, Robert, World Without Civilization: Mass Murder and the Holocaust, History, and Analysis (University of America Press, 2004), p.137
^ Griffen, Roger (ed). 1995. Fascism. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 105.
^ Carlsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. University of California Press. Pp. 91
^ Carlsten, Pp. 91
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Fest, Joachim, The Face of the Third Reich (Penguin books, 1979), pp 37-38
^ Dan van der Vat: The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, page 30. George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997 ISBN 0-297-81721-3
^ ^a ^b T. L. Jaman, The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany (New York University Press, 1956), pg. 88
^ Rees, Laurence, The Nazis - A Warning from History (BBC Books, 2 March 2006), pg. 21
^ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.43
^ Toland, John, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1 October 2008), pg.131
^ ^a ^b Rees, Laurence, The Nazis - A Warning from History (BBC Books, 2 March 2006), pg. 23
^ ^a ^b T. L. Jaman, The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany (New York University Press, 1956), pg. 89
^ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.36
^ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.37
^ Johnson, Paul, A History of the Modern World: From 1917 to the 1980s (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 13 September 1984), pg. 133
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Fest, Joachim, The Face of the Third Reich (Penguin books, 1979), pg.42
^ Heiden 1933, p. 821.
^ Franz-Willing, Die Hilterbewegung
^ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books Ltd (2 May 1991), p.38
^ Fest, Joachim, The Face of the Third Reich (Penguin books, 1979), pg.40
^ Hakim, Joy (1995). A History of Us: War, Peace and all that Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509514-6
^ Kershaw 2008, p. 110.
^ Hitler 1998.
^ Jablonsky, David. 1989. The Nazi Party in Dissolution: Hitler and the Verbotzeit, 1923–1925. Routledge. Pp. 57
^ Jablonsky, Pp. 57
^ Kershaw 2008, p. 194.
^ Evans 2005, p. 372.
^ Sutton, Antony C.: Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976, 1999)
^ Kershaw 2008, pp. 224.
^ "Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. ... These organisations (ie Fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins." (J.V. Stalin: Concerning the International Situation (September 1924), in Works, Volume 6, 1953; p.294.) This later led Otto Wille Kuusinen to conclude that "The aims of the fascists and the social-fascists are the same." (Report To the 10th Plenum of ECCI, in International Press Correspondence, Volume 9, no.40, (20 August 1929), p.848.)
^ Kolb, Eberhard (2005) [1984]. The Weimar Republic. London; New York: Routledge. pp. 224–225. ISBN 978-0-415-34441-8.
^ Zentner, Christian Ed; Bedürftig, Friedemann Ed (1991). "The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich". New York: Macmillan. p 631
^ Deutsche Uniformen, National Socialist German Workers Part (1938)
^ Speer, Albert (1970). Inside the Third Reich. New York and Toronto: Macmillan
^ Buchquelle zur Gaugröße Kurmarks/Mark-Brandenburgs. Books.google.com. 1995. ISBN 978-3-05-002508-7. http://books.google.com/?id=D64GY0T8_M4C&pg=PA633&lpg=PA633&dq=%22gau+kurmark%22. Retrieved 2010-11-12.
^ Walter Wolf (1969). Faschismus in der Schweiz. Flamberg, p 121, 253, 283. (in German) [1]
^ Alan Morris Schom. "Examples of NSDAP and National Front meetings and agendas in northern Switzerland, 1935, 1937". A Survey of Nazi and Pro-Nazi Groups in Switzerland: 1930-1945. Simon Wiesenthal Center. http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4441393. Retrieved 17 October 2010.
^ Historischer Verein des Kantons Bern (1973). Archiv des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Bern, vol 57–60. Stämpfliche Verlagshandlung. p. 150.
^ Beat Glaus (1969). Die Nationale front. Zürich. p. 147.
^ ^a ^b ^c Cornelia Wilhelms (1998). Bewegung oder Verein?: nationalsozialistische Volkspolitik in den USA. Franz Steiner Verlag. p. 167. ISBN 3-515-06805-8. http://books.google.com/?id=ExcoTn8e97UC&pg=PA167&dq=%22Gau+Midwest%22#v=onepage&q=%22Gau%20Midwest%22&f=false.
^ Panayi, P. Life and Death in a German Town: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War II and Beyond. New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. p 40.
^ Panayi 2007, p. 40.
^ McNab, Chris (2011). Hitler's Master Plan, Amber Books Ltd. pp 22, 23. ISBN 1-907446-96-6
^ Fakty wypaczone przez Erikę Steinbach Bogdan Musiał 24-06-2009 Rzeczpospolita
^ Wolfgang Rosar: Deutsche Gemeinschaft. Seyss-Inquart und der Anschluß. Europa-Verlag, Wien 1971. ISBN 3-203-50384-0.

References [link]

Evans, R. J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-7139-9649-8.
Heiden, Konrad (15 September 1933-09-15). "Les débuts du national-socialisme" (in French). Revue d'Allemagne 7 (71).
Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-06757-2.

External links [link]

Text of Mein Kampf
Program of the NSDAP, the Nazi "Manifesto"
(German) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) 1920–1933 at Lebendiges Museum Online.
(German) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) 1933–1945 at Lebendiges Museum Online.
Organisationsbuch NSDAP An encyclopedic reference guide to the Nazi party, organisations, uniforms, flags etc. published by the party itself

v t e Political parties in Germany in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933)

Communist	Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) Communist Party Opposition (KPO)

Socialist Social Democratic	Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD)

Catholic	Bavarian People's Party (BVP) Centre Party (Zentrum)

Agrarian	Bavarian Peasants' League (BB) Agricultural League Schleswig-Holsteinische Bauern- und Landarbeiterdemokratie (SHBLD) Christian National Peasants' and Farmers' Party (CNBL) German Farmers' Party (DBP)

Liberal	German Democratic Party (DDP) German People's Party (DVP) German State Party (DStP)

Conservative	German National People's Party (DNVP) People's Right Party (VRP) Christian Social People's Service (CSVD) Conservative People's Party (KVP)

Völkische and Nazist	German Workers' Party (DAP) German Socialist Party (DSP) National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB)

Miscellaneous	German-Hanoverian Party (DHP) Economic Party (WP)

v t e Nazism

Organizations	Nazi Party (NSDAP) Sturmabteilung (SA) Schutzstaffel (SS) Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) Hitler Youth (HJ) National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise (NSRL) League of German Girls (BDM) National Socialist Women's League (NSF)

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Rolf Hochhuth, 2009

Rolf Hochhuth (born 1 April 1931, in Eschwege) is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy and remains a controversial figure for his plays and other public comments, such as his insinuation of Pope Pius XII's sympathies for Hitler's extermination of the Jews^{[citation needed]} in the 1963 play The Deputy and his 2005 defense of Holocaust denier David Irving.

1 Life and career
2 Works
3 References
4 Bibliography
5 External links

Life and career [link]

Youth [link]

Rolf Hochhuth is descended from an old-established Hessian burgess family. During World War II, he was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk. In 1948 he did an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Between 1950 and 1955 he worked in bookshops in Marburg, Kassel and Munich. At the same time he attended university lectures as a guest student and began with early attempts at writing fiction. Between 1955 and 1963 he was a lector at a major West-German publishing house.

[edit] The Deputy

Rolf Hochhuth (right) at the awards ceremony of the Berliner Kunstpreis 1963 (from left to right: Klaus Kammer, Fritz Kortner, Rolf Hochhuth)

Hochhuth's plays include his 1963 drama Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, translated by Richard & Clara Winston, 1964), that caused controversy because of its criticism of Pope Pius XII's role in World War II. The play was subsequently published in the UK in Robert David MacDonald's translation as The Representative (1965).

Although the play has never received serious praise as either literature or history,^{[citation needed]} its publisher Ed Keating and journalist Warren Hinckle, who themselves considered it "dramaturgically flawed," organized a committee to defend the play as a matter of free speech.^[1] In 2007, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian spymaster, alleged that the play was part of a KGB campaign to discredit Pius XII.^[2] A leading German newspaper opined "that Hochhuth did not require any KGB assistance for his one-sided presentation of history.^[3]^[4]

The unedited version of the play is over five hours long and includes the true story of Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein, a devout Protestant and later a member of the SS, wrote an eyewitness report about the gas chambers and, after the war, died as a POW.^[5]

The play was first performed in Berlin on 20 February 1963 under the direction of Erwin Piscator. It received its first English production in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1963 in a translation by Robert David MacDonald. It was directed by Clifford Williams with Alan Webb or Eric Porter as Pius XII, Alec McCowen as Father Fontana and Ian Richardson. In the United Kingdom it has since been revived at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, in 1986, and at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2006.

An abridged version opened on Broadway on 26 February 1964 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, with Emlyn Williams as Pius XII and Jeremy Brett as Father Fontana. The play ran for 316 performances.

The Deputy was made into a film Amen by Costa Gavras in 2002, which focused more on the story of Kurt Gerstein.^[5]

[edit] Soldiers

Hochhuth's next play, Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva (1967), alleged that Winston Churchill was responsible for the death of the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski, in an airplane crash in 1943, contradicting the official version of events as an accident, and claiming that General Sikorski had been murdered on Churchill's orders. Unbeknownst to Hochhuth, the pilot of the plane was still alive and he won a libel case that seriously affected the London theater which staged the play.^[6]

That aspect of the play has overshadowed Hochhuth's conceit, that the play would contribute to a debate on the ethics of the area bombing of civilian areas by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, with particular reference to Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force raids on Hamburg in 1943, and culminating in a lengthy and invented debate between Winston Churchill and the pacifist George Bell, Bishop of Chichester.

The play partially drew on the work of a young British author David Irving, who later became notorious as a Holocaust denier. Since that time, Irving and Hochhuth have been close friends.

Controversy arose in Britain in 1967 when the mooted premiere at Britain's National Theatre was cancelled, due to the intervention of the National Theatre board, despite the support for the play of Laurence Olivier, under pressure from his wife, and Kenneth Tynan. At the time of the controversy in Britain, Irving was the only historian who gave "unequivocal" support for Hochhuth's thesis, others consulted by Tynan considered it highly improbable.^[7] Despite this setback, the play was produced soon after in the West End with John Colicos in the cast. The English translation was again by Robert David MacDonald. In the UK, the play was seen on tour in the early 1990s and was revived most recently at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2004.

[edit] A Love in Germany and the Filbinger Affaire

Hans Filbinger (centre) had to resign in 1978 as Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg after it became public via Hochhuth's novel A Love in Germany that he was responsible for death sentences as a Navy judge at the end of World War II

In 1978, his novel A Love in Germany about an affair between a Polish POW and a German woman in World War II stirred up a debate about the past of Hans Filbinger, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg who had been a Navy lawyer and judge at the end of World War II. The affair culminated in Filbinger's resignation.

For A Love in Germany, Hochhuth was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 1980. In 1983 Andrzej Wajda, the latter Oscar winner, made the story into a film "Miłość w Niemczech".

[edit] Alan Turing

His 1987 drama Alan Turing featured one of the fathers of modern computer science, who had made significant contributions to breaking German ciphers during World War II. The play also covered Turing's homosexuality.

McKinsey controversy [link]

Rolf Hochhuth after a reading of his book „McKinsey is Coming“ in Duisburg, 2005.

In 2004, he again caused controversy with the play McKinsey is Coming, which raises the questions of unemployment, social justice and the "right to work". A passage in which he put the chairman of the Deutsche Bank in one line with leading businessmen who had been murdered by left-wing terrorists and also with Gessler, the villainous bailiff killed by William Tell, was widely seen as advocating, or at least excusing, violence against leading economic figures. Hochhuth vigorously denied this.

Anti-Semitism allegations [link]

Rolf Hochhuth, on the right, pictured beside David Irving.

In March 2005, Hochhuth became embroiled in controversy when, during an interview with the German weekly Junge Freiheit, he defended David Irving, describing him as a "pioneer of modern history who has written magnificent books" and an "historian to equal someone like Joachim Fest".^[8] When asked about Irving’s statement that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz", Hochhuth dismissed it as provocative black humour.^[9]

Paul Spiegel, President of the Central Jewish Council in Germany, argued that with these statements Hochhuth himself was denying the Holocaust. After weeks of uproar, Hochhuth issued an apology.^[10]

In 2008 Irving self-published Banged Up, an account of his recent imprisonment in Austria, in which he writes "Since January 1965 a close friendship has bonded me with... Rolf Hochhuth" and describes a phone conversation between them in 2005.^[11]

Works [link]

Plays

The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy (1962)
Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva (1967)
Guerrillas (1970)
The Midwife (1972)
The Survivor (1981)
Alan Turing (1987)
Wessis in Weimar (1993)
McKinsey is Coming (2004)

Novels

A Love in Germany (1978)

Hochhuth has also collaborated with scripts for cinema and television:

Berliner Antigone (1968)
Élo Antigoné (1968)
Ärztinnen (1984)
Effis Nacht (1998)
A Love in Germany (1983)

References [link]

^ Warren Hinckle, "The Year They Tried To Block "The Deputy" (Excerpt from If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 1974), The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, Volume XIII, Number 3, Fall, 1997.
^ Ion Mihai Pacepa, Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican, National Review Online, 25 January 2007.
^ http://www.perlentaucher.de/feuilletons/2007-04-26.html (German)
^ Thomas Brechenmacher, Hochhuths Quellen. War der 'Stellvertreter' vom KGB inspiriert?, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 April 2007 (German)
^ ^a ^b http://www.kurt-gerstein.de (German)
^ "The End of the Pius Wars", Joseph Bottum, First Things Magazine, April 2004, retrieved 1 July 2009
^ Nicholas de Jongh Politics, Prudery and Perversity, 2000, Methuen, p169-61, 160.
^ Die Würde des Ortes respektieren. Writer Rolf Hochhuth on his proposal for a museum of war bombings, David Irving and Winston Churchill. Interview with Rolf Hochhuth in Junge Freiheit, 18 February 2005. (German)
^ Karl Pfeifer, Rolf Hochhuth: Lob für einen notorischen Holocaustleugner, Hagalil 21-02-2005. The columnist on the Hagalil website notes that Irving made the remark not in response to a "tremendous provocation" but to a paying audience. The speech was screened in a video during the London libel trial. Richard Rampton, counsel for the defendant Deborah Lipstadt, commented [quote back-translated from German]: "Ridicule alone is not enough. You must also be tasteless. You must say things such as: More women died in the backseat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car in Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers of Auschwitz." (German)
^ Wie ein Blinder von der Farbe - Hochhuth hatte keine Ahnung, N-TV, 25. Februar 2005 (German)
^ Banged Up, David Irving, online publication, 2008, accessed 8 March 2009

Bibliography [link]

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein: The devil, the saints, and the church: reading Hochhuth's The deputy. New York: P. Lang, 2004.
Eric Bentley: The storm over The deputy. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Lucinda Jane Rennison: Rolf Hochhuth's interpretation of history, and its effect on the content, form and reception of his dramatic work. Durham: University of Durham, 1991.
Kathleen Tynan: The file on 'Soldiers': historical notes on Rolf Hochhuth's play. London: Battley Bros., [1968].
Margaret E. Ward: Rolf Hochhuth. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Rolf Hochhuth

Official website (German)

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Name	Hochhuth, Rolf
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Date of birth	1 April 1931
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Hochhuth

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