The NSDAP/AO was the Foreign Organization branch of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). AO is the abbreviation of the German compound word Auslands-Organisation (English: Foreign Organization). Although it would be correctly written in one word, the Nazis chose an obsolete spelling with a hyphen.

The party members who lived outside the German Reich were pooled in this special NSDAP department. On May 1, 1931 the new organizational unit was founded on the initiative of Reich Organization Leader (German: Reichsorganisationsleiter) Gregor Strasser and its management was assigned to Dr. Hans Nieland. But Nieland resigned from office already on May 8, 1933, because he had become head of the Hamburg police authorities in the meantime and later on a member of the Hamburg provincial government. Hereupon Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was appointed director of the "AO", which served as the 43rd and only non-territorial Gau of the NSDAP. Only actual citizens of the German Reich - Imperial Germans (German: Reichsdeutsche) - with a German passport could become members of the AO. Persons of German descent, so called ethnic Germans (German: Volksdeutsche), who possessed the nationality of the country in which they lived, were refused access to the Nazi Party.

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, 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. The party was created by Anton Drexler as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. 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.

Einar Riis, (October 19, 1922, Oslo, Norway – May 30, 2006 in Arvika, Sweden) was a former Special Operations Executive agent during World War II, fighter pilot, consul and husband of Amelia Riis.

Einar Riis grew up in Ljan, the 3rd of 4 brothers. During the war he was active in the Norwegian Resistance Movement, and participated in several famous sabotage actions gainst the German occupying forces. Among these the temerarious sinking of German military ships in the harbor of Oslo (Operation Mardonius), mentioned in the Resistance hero Max Manus' book "Det vil helst gaa godt" and in the movie "Max Manus". The front cover of the book shows a drawing of Riis and Manus during the sabotage operation at the harbor.

In the later stages of the war, Riis fled to Canada via Sweden. At Little Norway Riis trained to become a Spitfire pilot.

After the war, Riis moved to France then Italy. He served as an honorary consul for Norway in Rome and Olympic attache' for the Norwegian Team in the Rome Olympics in 1960. Einar Riis married Amelia in 1956.

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (German pronunciation: [ˈʁiːfənʃtaːl]; 22 August 1902 – 8 September 2003) was a German film director, actress and dancer widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich, along with her personal friendship with Adolf Hitler, destroyed her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but released without any charges.

Triumph of the Will gave Riefenstahl instant and lasting international fame, as well as infamy. Although she directed only eight films, just two of which received significant coverage outside of Germany, Riefenstahl was widely known all her life. The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most modern commentators, but many film histories cite the aesthetics as outstanding.The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will "sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century".

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.