NSDAP in Berlin

• published: 01 Jun 2015
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The National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: About this sound Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (help·info), abbreviated NSDAP), commonly referred to in English as the Nazi Party (/ˈnɑːtsi/), was a political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that practised Nazism. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party (DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. Part of a series on Nazism Emblem of the Nazi Party Organizations[hide] National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) Sturmabteilung (SA) Schutzstaffel (SS) Hitler Youth (HJ) Deutsches Jungvolk (DJ) League of German Girls (BDM) National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB) Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL) National Socialist Women's League (NSF) Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists (KGRNS) History[show] Ideology[show] Racial ideology[show] Final Solution[show] People[show] Adolf Hitler Joseph Goebbels Heinrich Himmler Hermann Göring Houston Stewart Chamberlain Gregor Strasser Otto Strasser George Lincoln Rockwell Nazism outside of Germany[show] Lists[show] Related topics[show] Category Category v · t · e The party emerged from the German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany.[6] Advocacy of a form of socialism by right-wing figures and movements in Germany became common during and after World War I, influencing Nazism.[7] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck of the Conservative Revolutionary movement coined the term "Third Reich",[8] and advocated an ideology combining the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.[9] Prominent Conservative Revolutionary member Oswald Spengler's conception of a "Prussian Socialism" influenced the Nazis.[10] The party was created as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.[11] 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 1930s the party's focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.[12] Racism was central to Nazism. The Nazis propagated the idea of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) with the aim of uniting "racially desirable" Germans as national comrades, whilst excluding those deemed either to be political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische).[13] The Nazis sought to improve the stock of the Germanic people through racial purity and eugenics, broad social welfare programs, and a disregard for the value of individual life, which could be sacrificed for the good of the Nazi state and the "Aryan master race". To maintain the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally handicapped. They imposed exclusionary segregation on homosexuals, Africans, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political opponents.[14] The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and five million people from the other targeted groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust. The party's leader since 1921, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime[15][16][17][18] known as the Third Reich. Following the defeat of the Third Reich at the conclusion of World War II in Europe, the party was "declared to be illegal" by the Allied powers,[19] who performed denazification in the years after the war.