National Socialist German Workers Party

The National-Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) (NSDAP), generally known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. The party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and rapidly established a dictatorial regime known as the Third Reich, under which the party gained almost unlimited power. The anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazi Party led the regime into the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, while its German expansionist ideology was the principal cause of World War II. Despite having the support of the majority of Germans until the last months of the war, the Nazi Party has not reappeared since its dissolution in 1945. It remains illegal in Germany.

The term “Nazi” is a short form of “Nationalsozialist,” representing the German pronunciation of the first two syllables of the word “national.” It was formed analogously with “Sozi,” the long-established nickname for the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Early years: 1919-1925

The National-Socialist German Workers Party came into existence under that name on 24 February 1920, but it had existed under the name German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP) since January 1919. The party was founded in Munich by a group including Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer. Drexler, an avid German nationalist, had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party during World War I, and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and to the revolutionary upheavals that followed in its wake.

The DAP was one of many small political groups formed in the wake of Germany’s defeat, which German conservatives saw as resulting from betrayal of the undefeated army by the SPD, the liberals, the intellectuals and the Jews. Like other groups, the DAP advocated völkisch ideology – the belief that Germany should become a unified “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) rather than a society divided along class and party lines. This ideology was explicitly anti-Semitic from the start – the “national community” would be “judenrein” (free of Jews). The DAP was violently opposed to the SPD and to “Bolshevism”, although its program had some socialist elements and it saw itself as a working-class party, rejecting pre-war aristocratic conservatism. Among the party’s earlier members were Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg, all later prominent in the Nazi regime.

In September 1919 Adolf Hitler joined the DAP. Hitler, who had finished the war in a military hospital after suffering a gas attack at the front, had returned to Munich, his adopted home, in November 1918. He had stayed in the army and had joined the intelligence section. In this capacity he was sent to monitor the DAP’s activities. He found the DAP reflected his own views – German nationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism. He became the party’s 55th member, although he later claimed to be member number seven. (He was in fact the seventh member of the DAP’s central committee).

The founding of the Nazi Party with the support of industrialist Alfred Hugenberg in February 1920 resulted from talks on German war goals as early as 1915. German military-industrial leaders could not gain the broad support of labor for the war effort. Hugenberg and his followers wanted a German colonial empire both in Europe and abroad, and to this end founded the Fatherland Party. It failed to win support from workers, although various "lodges" already existed blaming Germany's ills on "racial inbreeding." One of these groups, the Political Workers' Circle, tried to overcome its own membership tensions by reconstituting itself on 5 January 1919 as a political party, the German Workers' Party. Hitler joined on 6 September 1919 and made it a mass party, giving it a written program on 6 February 1920 and a new name: the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). The term “national socialism” had been current in German and Austrian politics since the 1890s. There was a German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) in Austria – Hitler later acknowledged that this was the inspiration for the DAP’s new name.

Hitler soon 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 in a small party. This was recognised by Drexler, and Hitler became party chairman on 28 July 1921. When the party had been first established, it consisted of a Leadership Board elected by the members, which in turn elected a Board Chairman. Hitler soon 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. Hitler at this time saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, 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 (also known as Brownshirts and storm troopers) were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties.

Unlike some other party members, Hitler was not interested in the “socialist” aspect of the national socialist doctrine. Himself of provincial lower-middle-class origins, he disliked the mass working class of the big cities, and had no sympathy with the notions of attacking private property or the business class which some early Nazis espoused. For Hitler the twin goals of the party were always German nationalist expansionism and anti-Semitism. These two goals were fused in his mind by his belief that Germany’s external enemies – Britain, France and (later) 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. Although the party’s 1925 program made some rhetorical concessions to the socialist element, this was never central to the party’s policies. 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, of Indian origin and supposedly a symbol of the “Aryan” race.

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, small businessmen and disaffected former socialists. 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. Others to join the party at this time were a former army officer Ernst Röhm, who became head of the SA, World War I flying ace Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. In December 1920 the party acquired a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter

In January 1923 the French 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 Communist Party (KPD) to stage a revolution. The reaction to these events was an upsurge of nationalist and extreme right-wing sentiment. Nazi Party membership grew sharply, to about 20,000 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 postwar German army) 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 7 November, the Nazis used a patriotic rally in a Munich beer hall to launch an attempted putsch (coup d’etat). The so-called Beer hall putsch attempt failed almost at once when the local Reichswehr commanders refused to support it. On the morning of 8 November the Nazis staged a march of about 2,000 supporters through Munich in an attempt to rally support. Troops opened fire and 14 Nazis were killed. Hitler, Hess, 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”). Meanwhile the Nazi Party effectively ceased to exist without his leadership, something he made no effort to prevent.

Rise to power: 1925-1933

Hitler was released in December 1924. In the following year he effectively refounded and reorganised the Nazi Party, with himself as its undisputed Leader. The new Nazi Party was no longer a paramilitary organisation, and disavowed any intention of taking power by force. In any case, the economic and political situation had stabilised 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 emphasised. 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 Rudolph 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, Göring and Röhm. Beneath the Leadership Corps were the party’s regional leaders, the Gauleiters, each of whom commanded the party in his Gau (region). There were 34 Gaue for Germany and an additional seven for Austria, the Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia), Danzig and the Saarland (then under French occupation). 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 anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. Beneath the Gauleiters were lower-level officials, the Kreisleiter (County Leader), Zellenleiter (Cell Leader) and Blockleiter (Block Leader). 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. The SA was composed largely of unemployed workers, and many SA men took the Nazis’ “socialist” rhetoric seriously. At this time the Nazi salute (borrowed from the Italian fascists) and the greeting “Heil Hitler!” were adopted throughout the party.

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 percent of the vote in the December 1924 Reichstag elections, and this fell to 2.6 percent 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 organisation to three competent officials: the head of the party secretariat, Philipp Bouhler, the party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and the business manager Max Amann. The party also had a very capable propaganda head in Gregor Strasser, who was promoted to national organisational leader in January 1928. These men gave the party efficient recruitment and organisational structures. The party also owed its growth to the gradual fading away of competitor groups on the right, such as the DNVP. As Hitler became the recognised head of the German far right, other groups declined or were absorbed.

The party also expanded successfully in the 1920s beyond its Bavarian base. In fact Catholic Bavaria 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 and who feared Bolshevism more than anything else. The small business class were receptive to Hitler’s anti-Semitism, 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.

Despite these strengths, it is highly unlikely that the Nazi Party would ever have come to power had it not been for the Great Depression, which began with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. By 1930 the German economy was again plunged into crisis with mass unemployment and widespread business failures. The parties of the left, the SPD and the KPD, were bitterly divided and unable to mount an effective opposition. This gave the Nazis their opportunity, and Hitler’s message, blaming the crisis on the “Jewish financiers” and the Bolsheviks (also controlled by the Jews) resonated with wide sections of the electorate. At the September 1930 Reichstag elections the Nazis won 18.3 percent 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 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 eliminating the traditional parties of the right, the DNVP and the DVP, leaving the Nazis as the only 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 on the far left, and the continued decline of the economy all played into Hitler’s hands. He now came to be seen as the de facto leader of the opposition, and donations poured into the Nazi Party’s coffers. The belief that the Nazis were extensively or exclusively funded by big business is a myth, deriving ultimately from SPD and KPD propaganda. Some business figures such as Fritz Thyssen were Nazi supporters and gave generouslygenerously, but most were traditional conservatives who saw Hitler as a dangerous demagogue and the Nazis as another variety of socialists, and remained aloof. The party’s major source of finance was membership dues and levies.

During 1931 and into 1932 Germany’s political crisis deepened. In March 1932 Hitler ran for President against the incumbent President Paul von Hindenberg, polling 30.1 percent in the first round and 36.8 percent in the second. 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 German cities to a state of near anarchy. 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 anti-Semitism 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 Bolshevism.

At the July 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis made another leap forward, polling 37.4 percent and becoming the largest party in the Reichstag by a wide margin. Furthermore, the Nazis and the KPD between them won 52 percent of the vote and a majority of seats. Since both parties opposed democracy and neither would join or support any ministry, this made the formation of a majority government committed to democracy impossible. The result was weak ministries governing by decree. Under Stalin’s orders, the KPD maintained its policy of treating the “social fascist” SPD as the main enemy, creating a fatal division on the left. The KPD, by its tactics at this time, and indeed by its very existence which terrified the middle class into supporting the Nazis, bears a heavy responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power.

Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, hoping to find a way out of this impasse. The result was the same, with the Nazis and the KPD winning 50 percent 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 fell to 33.1 percent, 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 right-wing press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues which eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it was “safe” to appoint Hitler Reich Chancellor at the head of a cabinet which included only a minority of Nazi ministers, which he did on 30 January 1933.

In power: 1933-45

When it came to power in 1933 the Nazi Party had over 2 million members. Once in power, it attracted many more members and by the time of its dissolution it had 8.5 million members. Many of these were nominal members who joined for careerist reasons, but the party nevertheless had an active membership of at least a million, including virtually all the holders of senior positions in the national government. Within a few months all other parties were banned or dissolved themselves, and Germany became a one-party state. Membership of the Hitler Youth was made compulsory for German teenagers, and served as a conveyor belt to party membership. But unlike the Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union, the Nazi Party did not immediately purge the state administration of all opponents. The career civil service was left in place, and only gradually were its senior levels taken over by Nazis. In some places people who were opposed to the Nazi regime retained their positions for a long time. Examples included Johannes Popitz, finance minister of the largest German state, Prussia, until 1944 and an active oppositionist, and Ernst von Weizsäcker, under-secretary of state at the Foreign Ministry, who protected a resistance network in his ministry. The armed forces banned party membership and retained their independence for some years.

Nevertheless the period 1933-39 saw the gradual fusion of the Nazi Party and the German state, as the party arrogated more and more power to itself at the expense of professional civil servants. This led to increasing inefficiency and confusion in administration, which was compounded by Hitler’s deliberate policy of preventing any of his underlings accumulating too much power, and of dividing responsibility among a plethora of state and party bureaucracies, many of which had overlapping functions. This administrative muddle later had severe consequences Many party officials also lapsed rapidly into corruption, taking their lead from Göring, who looted and plundered both state property and wealth appropriated from the Jews. By the mid 1930s the party as an institution was increasingly unpopular with the German public, although this did not effect the personal standing of Hitler, who maintained a powerful hold over the great majority of the German people until at least 1943.

The SA under Röhm’s leadership soon became a major problem for the party. Many of the 700,000 members of this well-armed working-class militia took the “socialist” element of national socialism seriously, and soon began to demand that the Nazi regime broaden its attack from SPD and KPD activists and Jews to include the capitalist system as a whole. Röhm and his associates also saw the SA as the army of the new revolutionary Nazi state, replacing the old aristocratic officer corps. The army was still outside party control, and Hitler feared that it might stage a putsch if its leaders felt threatened with an SA takeover. The business community was also alarmed by the SA’s socialist rhetoric, with which, as noted earlier, Hitler had no sympathy.

In June 1934, therefore, Hitler, using the SS and Gestapo under Himmler’s command, staged a coup against the SA, having Röhm and about 700 others killed without any semblance of legal process. This Night of the Long Knives broke the power of the SA, while greatly increasing the power of Himmler and the SS, who emerged as the real executive arm of the Nazi Party. The business community was reassured and largely reconciled to Nazi rule. The army leaders were so grateful that the Defence Minister, Werner von Blomberg, who was not a Nazi, on his own initiative had all army members swear a personal oath to Hitler as “führer” of the German state. These events marked a decisive turning point in the Nazi takeover of Germany. The borders between the party and the state became increasingly blurred, and Hitler’s personal will increasingly had the force of law, although the independence of the state bureaucracy was never completely eclipsed.

The effect of the purge of the SA was to redirect the energies of the Nazi Party away from class enemies and towards racial enemies, namely the Jews, whose civil, economic and political rights were steadily restricted, culminating in the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which stripped them of their citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” After a lull in anti-Semitic agitation during 1936 and 1937 (partly because of the 1936 Olympic Games, the Nazis returned to the attack in November 1938, launching the pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), in which at least 100 Jews were killed, 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps, and thousands of Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues and community facilities were attacked and burned. This satisfied the party radicals for a while, but the regional party bosses remained a persistent lobby for more radical action against the Jews, until they were finally deported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943.

Paradoxically, the more completely the Nazi regime dominated German society, the less relevant the Nazi Party became as an organisation within the regime’s power structure. Hitler’s rule was highly personalised, and the power of his subordinates such as Himmler and Goebbels depended on Hitler’s favour and their success in interpreting his desires rather than on their nominal positions within the party. Unlike the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin, the Nazi Party had no governing body or formal decision-making process – no Politburo, no Central Committee, no Party Congresses. The “party chancellery” headed by Hess theoretically ran the party, but in reality it had no influence because Hess himself was a marginal figure within the regime. It was not until 1941, when Hess flew off on a quixotic “peace mission” to Britain, and was succeeded by Martin Bormann, that the party chancellery regained its power – but this was mainly because Hitler had a high opinion of Bormann and allowed him to act as his political secretary. Real power in the regime was exercised by an axis of Hitler’s office, Himmler’s SS and Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.

War and eclipse

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the party to some extent came back into its own, particularly after 1941 as the war dragged on and the military situation began to turn against Germany. As Hitler withdrew from domestic matters to concentrate on military matters, leaving no-one in a position to make decisions, civil administration ground to a halt and the German state became steadily more disorganised and ineffective. In these circumstances the Gauleiters, who were nearly all old-guard Nazis and fanatical Hitler loyalists, increasingly took control of rationing, labour direction, the allocation of housing, air-raid protection and the issuing of the multiplicity of permits Germans needed to carry on their lives and businesses. They served to some extent as ombudsmen for the citizenry against a remote and ineffective state. They also agitated for the removal of the remaining Jews from Germany, using the shortage of housing in German cities as a result of Allied bombing as a pretext. As the Allied armies closed in on Germany, the Gauleiters often took charge of last-ditch resistance: Karl Hanke’s prolonged defence of Breslau was an outstanding example. In Berlin the teenagers of the Hitler Youth, under the direction of their fanatical leader Artur Axmann, fought and died in large numbers against the invading Soviet armies.

The army was the last area of the German state to succumb to the Nazi Party, and it never did so entirely. The pre-1933 Reichswehr had banned its members joining political parties, and this was maintained for some time after 1933. Nazis of military age joined the Waffen SS, the military wing of the SS. But in 1938 both Defence Minister Blomberg and the army chief of staff, General Werner von Fritsch, were removed from office after trumped-up scandals. Hitler made himself Defence Minister, and the new army leaders, Generals Franz Halder and Walther von Brauchitsch, were in awe of Hitler and unable to openly oppose his will. Neverthless Halder actively supported unsuccessful plans to stage a coup and remove Hitler from power during the crisis over Czechslovakia crisis of 1938, and again in 1939. Brauchitsch knew of these plans but would not support them. After 1939 the ban on Nazis joining the army was lifted, and a number of generals, notably Walther von Reichenau and Walter Model, were fanatical Nazis. It was not until 1944 that a group of officers opposed to the regime staged a serious attempt to overthrow Hitler in the July 20 plot, but they never had the full support of the officer corps. The German Navy was always firmly loyal to Hitler and its commander, Karl Dönitz, was Hitler's designated successor in 1945.

By 1945 the Nazi Party and the Nazi state were no longer capable of separation. When the German armies surrendered to the Allies in May 1945 and the German state ceased to exist, the Nazi Party, despite its 8.5 million nominal members and its nationwide organisational structure, also ceased to exist. Its most fanatical members either killed themselves, fled Germany or were arrested. The rank-and-file burned their party cards and sought to blend back into German society as quickly as possible. By the end of the war Nazism had been reduced to little more than loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler, and his death released most Nazis from their oaths and any desire to keep the party alive. In his Political Testament, Hitler appointed Bormann "Party Minister," but nominated no successor as leader of the party - a recognition that a Nazi Party without Hitler had no basis for existence. The party was formally banned by the Allied occupation authorities and an extensive process of denazification was carried out to remove former Nazis from the administration, judiciary, universities, schools and press. There was virtually no resistance or attempt to organise a Nazi underground. By the time normal political life resumed in western Germany in 1949, Nazism was effectively extinct.

Since 1949 there have been several attempts to organise extreme right-wing parties in Germany, but none of these parties were overtly Nazi or tried to use the symbols and slogans of the Nazi Party – as Germans correctly point out, there are many more Nazis in the United States (and now also in Russia) than there are in Germany. The German Reich Party (Deutsche Reichspartei, DRP), containing many former Nazis, had five members in the first Bundestag elected in 1949, which it lost in 1953. By the 1960s its chairman Adolf von Thadden realised it had no future and it was wound up in 1964. Thadden (whose half-sister Elisabeth von Thadden was executed by the Nazis for her role in the German Resistance), then formed a new, broader party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), which still exists, led today by Udo Voigt. The NPD has survived several attempts to have it banned by the Federal Constitutional Court as a neo-Nazi party. It has occasionally won seats in the Landtags of several German states but has never reached the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in the Bundestag. The NPD had 5,300 registered party members in 2004, and its main platform is opposition to immigration

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