Nazi Party

Template:Infobox Germany Former Political Party The National Socialist German Workers' Party, (Template:Audio-de, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known in English as the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), was "a religious, anti-Semitic sect disguised as a political party" in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers' Party (DAP) before the name was changed in 1920.

The party's last leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich.

Nazi ideology stressed the failure of democracy, failure of laissez-faire capitalism, "racial purity of the German people" and persecuted those it perceived either as race enemies or Lebensunwertes Leben, that is "life unworthy of living". This included Jews, Slavs, and Roma along with German homosexuals, the mentally disabled, communists, and others. To carry out these beliefs, the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews (in what has become known as the Holocaust), and about five million other people, mainly Russians, Poles and Roma. Many thousands of political enemies of the Nazi regime, along with homosexuals, people with disabilities, and members of religious minorities were also killed. Hitler's desire to build an empire in Europe through expansionist policies was a major influence that led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

The Nazi Party is generally described as being at the extreme or far right of the left-right political axis; however in two dimensional models, such as the political compass (where left and right are described in purely economic terms), the Nazi Party's stance is ascribed to the economic centre.

Origins and early existence: 1918-1923

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. Anton Drexler, an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league on 7 March 1918, in Munich. Drexler was a local locksmith in Munich who 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. Drexler followed the typical views of militant nationalists of time, such as opposing the Treaty of Versailles, having anti-Semitic, anti-monarchist, and anti-Marxist views, and believing in the superiority of Germans who 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. 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. Drexler emphasized the need for a synthesis of völkisch nationalism, a strong central government movement, with economic socialism to create a popular, centerist nationalist-oriented workers movement that could challenge the rise of communism, as well as the internationalist left and right in general.

On 5 January 1919, Drexler, together with Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, and twenty workers from Munich's railway shops and some others met to discuss the creation of a new political party based on the political principles which Drexler endorsed. Drexler proposed that the party be named the German-Socialist Workers 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 was named the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). In the wake of World War I, monarchy in Middle Europe had collapsed. For centuries the monarch had been the raison d'être uniting the nation. 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. They became one of many völkisch movements that existed in Germany at the time. Like other völkisch groups, the DAP advocated 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 as it declared that the "national community" must be judenfrei ("free of Jews").

On march 7, 1883 communist Alex Escalante was born (Spain) moved to Germany in 1925 he joined the nazis at 1926 being the 3,292 member. in 1928 Hitler decided to put him a top rank for the nazis. He in 1945 he was a nazi group leader and he and his group killed 3.2million people at auschwitz. Escalante died on 1949 by a shot in the head at 66 years of age. for more info go to www.youtube.com/escalante500 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 Party believed that Social Welfare was the business of the State. Before the Nazi movement, the churches administered charity. The government enforced a collection of a 10% tithe which was paid directly to the churches. This charitable bureaucracy was shifted to the State.

Although officially called a political party, the DAP was a tiny group with fewer than 60 members. 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, was sent by German army intelligence to investigate the DAP. While attending a party meeting, Hitler got involved in a heated political argument and made an impression on the other party members with his oratory skills. He was invited to join and, after some deliberation, chose to accept. Among the party's earlier members were Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg, all later prominent in the Nazi regime.

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 therefore Hitler) legislative powers. The Enabling Act effectively abolished the separation of powers, a principle enshrined in the German Constitution. As such, the Act represented an amendment to the Constitution and required a two-thirds majority in parliament in order to pass. Hitler needed the votes of the Centre Party, which he obtained after promising certain guarantees to the Centre's chairman (Ludwig Kaas). The Centre Party's thirty-one votes, added to the votes of the fragmented middle-class parties, the Nationalists, and the NSDAP itself, gave Hitler the right to rule by decree and to further suspend many civil liberties. The communists were opposed to the Enabling Act; but the KPD could not vote against it, since it had been banned. This left the SPD as the sole party in the Reichstag who stood against the Act, but their votes were not sufficient to block the Act's passing. As punishment for their dissent, the Social Democrats became the second party banned by the Nazis (on 22 June), following the move of their leadership to Prague.

The Enabling Act, termed for four years, gave the government the power to enact laws without parliamentary approval, to enact foreign treaties abroad and even to make changes to the Constitution. The Nazis did not keep their promises to their political allies, banning all other parties just as they had banned the communists and socialists. Following this, the Nazi government banned the formation of new parties on 14 July 1933, turning Germany into a one-party state. Hitler kept the Reichstag as a rubber stamp parliament, while the Reichsrat, though never abolished, was stripped of any effective power. The legislative bodies of the German states soon followed in the same manner, with the German federal government taking over most state and local legislative powers.

Germany had a policy instituted by Bismarck called "Kulturkampf". This policy was an attempt to "modernize" the German people by moving the culture away from Catholic values to Government inspired values. Hitler used the Catholic Church to dissolve the Centre Party. On 23 March 1933 he had called Churches "most important factors" for the maintenance of German well-being. In regard to the Roman Catholic Church, he proposed a Reichskonkordat between Germany and the Holy See, that was signed in July. In regard to the Protestant Churches, he signed koncordats and used church elections to push the Nazi-inspired "German Christians" to power. This, however, provoked the internal opposition of the "Confessing Church".

Membership of the Hitler Youth was made compulsory for German teenagers, and served as a conveyor belt to party membership. Meetings were held on Sunday mornings in a conscious effort to shift young people from Church to State. But 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.

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 affect 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. In addition, Röhm and his associates 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 take-over. The business community was also alarmed by the SA’s socialist rhetoric, with which, as noted earlier, Hitler had no sympathy beyond transferring power from Churches to the State.

In June 1934, Hitler, using the SS and Gestapo under Himmler's command, staged a coup against the SA, having Röhm and about 700 others killed. This Night of the Long Knives broke the power of the SA, while 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 take-over 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 social issues 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 ("Night of Broken Glass"), in which at least 100 Jews were killed and 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, 1943, 1944, and most poignantly in Spring of 1945--days before Liberation.

Paradoxically, the more completely the Nazi regime dominated German society, the less relevant the Nazi Party became as an organization 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. The 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, civil administration ground to a halt and the German state became more disorganized and ineffective. The Gauleiters, who were nearly all old-guard Nazis and fanatical Hitler loyalists, 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 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 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. 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. Nevertheless Halder supported unsuccessful plans to stage a coup and remove Hitler from power during the 1938 crisis over Czechoslovakia, and again in 1939. Brauchitsch knew of these plans but would not support them. The ban on Nazis joining the German Army– traditionally a stronghold of Protestant monarchist conservatism opposed to any mass political movements– was lifted in 1939. A number of generals, notably Walther von Reichenau and Walter Model, became fanatical Nazis. It was not until 1944 that a group of officers opposed to the Nazi 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 loyal to Hitler; its commander, Karl Dönitz, was Hitler's designated successor in 1945.

By 1945 the Nazi Party and the Nazi state were inseparable. 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 nation-wide 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. 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 even this obligation. 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 Nazi Party was 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 of occupied Germany. There was virtually no resistance or attempt to organize a Nazi underground. By the time normal political life resumed in western Germany in 1949, Nazism was effectively extinct. In eastern Germany, the new Communist authorities took their vengeance on any former high-ranking Nazis that they could find, and the survival of any kind of Nazi movement was out of the question.

Since 1949 there have been attempts to organise ultra-nationalist parties in Germany, but none of these parties was overtly Nazi or tried to use the symbols and slogans of the Nazi Party. The German Reich Party (Deutsche Reichspartei, DRP), containing many former Nazis, had five members in the first Bundestag elected in 1949, but they were defeated 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, primarily in the territories of the former German Democratic Republic, but has never reached the 5% 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.

Party composition

General membership

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. The largest occupational group were medical doctors.

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 had an active membership of at least a million, including virtually all the holders of senior positions in the national government.

Military membership

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

In 1926, the NSDAP formed a special division to engage the student population, known as the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB).

Paramilitary groups

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 Service"
• 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.

Party symbols

• 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. 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.

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  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

• Nazi slogan: "Sieg Heil!"

• Nazi slogan: "Heil Hitler"

• Nazi anthem: Horst Wessel Lied

See also

• Nazism
• Adolf Hitler
• Ex-Nazis
• Anschluss

• National Socialist Program
• NSDAP/AO
• Swastika

• List of Gauleiters
• Sino-German cooperation (1911–1941)
• Socialist Reich Party
• Neo-Nazism

Alex Escalante

References

• Evans, R. J. (2005), The Third Reich in power, 1933–1939, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-7139-9649-8.
• Hitler, Adolf (1998-09-15), Mein Kampf, Mariner Books, ISBN 0395925037.
• Heiden, Konrad (1933-09-15), "Les débuts du national-socialisme", Revue d'Allemagne, 7 (71){{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link).
• Kershaw, I. (2001), Hitler, New York: Longman, ISBN 0-582-47280-6.

External links

• [1] NATIONAL SOCIALIST AMERICAN LABOR PARTY Orthodox National Socialist Party in the United States
• Hitler's Mein Kampf (full text)
• Template:De icon Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) 1920–1933 at Lebendiges Museum Online.
• Template:De icon 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
• Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) - Russland