Lee Neville
Adolf Eichmann
Search results
Cast
Episode Guide
- 1. The Misfits Gather Feb 14, 2014
- Adolf Hitler builds a fringe political group into the Nazi Party in the years following World War I.
- 2. Becoming Respectable Feb 21, 2014
- Hitler is arrested for high treason and writes "Mein Kampf" while serving time in prison.
- 3. Seizing Power Mar 2, 2014
- Hitler blames the democratic Weimar government for the economic woes caused by the Great Depression.
The Nazi Party was one of a number of right-wing extremist political groups that emerged in Germany following World War I. Beginning with the onset of the Great Depression it rose rapidly from obscurity to political prominence, becoming the largest party in the German parliament in 1932.
- Overview
- The Nazi Party and Hitler’s rise to power
- The Nazi Party in the Third Reich
- The Nazi Party in World War II
- Postwar neo-Nazi parties
Upon his release Hitler quickly set about rebuilding his moribund party, vowing to achieve power only through legal political means thereafter. The Nazi Party’s membership grew from 25,000 in 1925 to about 180,000 in 1929. Its organizational system of gauleiters (“district leaders”) spread through Germany at this time, and the party began contesting municipal, state, and federal elections with increasing frequency.
However, it was the effects of the Great Depression in Germany that brought the Nazi Party to its first real nationwide importance. The rapid rise in unemployment in 1929–30 provided millions of jobless and dissatisfied voters whom the Nazi Party exploited to its advantage. From 1929 to 1932 the party vastly increased its membership and voting strength; its vote in elections to the Reichstag (the German Parliament) increased from 800,000 votes in 1928 to about 14,000,000 votes in July 1932, and it thus emerged as the largest voting bloc in the Reichstag, with 230 members (38 percent of the total vote). By then big-business circles had begun to finance the Nazi electoral campaigns, and swelling bands of SA toughs increasingly dominated the street fighting with the communists that accompanied such campaigns.
Upon his release Hitler quickly set about rebuilding his moribund party, vowing to achieve power only through legal political means thereafter. The Nazi Party’s membership grew from 25,000 in 1925 to about 180,000 in 1929. Its organizational system of gauleiters (“district leaders”) spread through Germany at this time, and the party began contesting municipal, state, and federal elections with increasing frequency.
However, it was the effects of the Great Depression in Germany that brought the Nazi Party to its first real nationwide importance. The rapid rise in unemployment in 1929–30 provided millions of jobless and dissatisfied voters whom the Nazi Party exploited to its advantage. From 1929 to 1932 the party vastly increased its membership and voting strength; its vote in elections to the Reichstag (the German Parliament) increased from 800,000 votes in 1928 to about 14,000,000 votes in July 1932, and it thus emerged as the largest voting bloc in the Reichstag, with 230 members (38 percent of the total vote). By then big-business circles had begun to finance the Nazi electoral campaigns, and swelling bands of SA toughs increasingly dominated the street fighting with the communists that accompanied such campaigns.
On July 14, 1933, Hitler’s government declared the Nazi Party to be the only political party in Germany. On the death of Hindenburg in 1934 Hitler took the titles of Führer (“Leader”), chancellor, and commander in chief of the army, and he remained leader of the Nazi Party as well. Nazi Party membership became mandatory for all higher civil servants and bureaucrats, and the gauleiters became powerful figures in the state governments. Hitler crushed the Nazi Party’s left, or socialist-oriented, wing in 1934, executing Ernst Röhm and other rebellious SA leaders on what would become known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Thereafter, Hitler’s word was the supreme and undisputed command in the party. Its vast and complex hierarchy was structured like a pyramid, with party-controlled mass organizations for youth, women, workers, and other groups at the bottom, party members and officials in the middle, and Hitler and his closest associates at the top wielding undisputed authority.
The history of the Nazi Party after 1934 can be divided into two main phases. The years between 1934 and 1938 were used by the party to establish virtual total control of all political, social, and cultural activities in Germany. This phase began in earnest with the death of Hindenburg on August 2, 1934. The functions of the military and government were subsumed into the party, and all troops and officials were forced to take the oath of fidelity to Hitler personally. Subordination of the broader German populace was achieved primarily through the unification of all the police, security, and Schutzstaffel (SS) organizations under the direction of Heinrich Himmler and his chief lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich.
A core element of the Nazi Party ideology was anti-Semitism, and Hitler used this period of consolidation to mobilize the power of the Nazi police state against Germany’s Jewish citizens. Jews were deprived of virtually all legal rights under the Nürnberg Laws of September 15, 1935, and prewar state-sponsored persecution of Jews reached its climax on Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938). Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels ordered these pogroms, in which SS-directed rioters damaged or destroyed more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked some 7,500 Jewish-owned homes and businesses. Scores of Jews were killed in the violence, and tens of thousands of Jewish men and boys were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, the bulk of all Jewish property was confiscated, and Germany’s Jews were effectively erased from public life.
The years between 1938 and 1945 witnessed the effort to impose Nazism on territories outside the Third Reich. This phase was initiated in 1938 with the suppression of the last conservative influences in the two remaining bulwarks of an older, authoritarian but civilized Germany—the army and the foreign office. In that year Hitler began German territorial expansion, carried out through threats and diplomatic pressure, by “peaceful” means. In such a way he incorporated into the Third Reich first the republic of Austria and then the Sudetenland (the German-speaking parts of the republic of Czechoslovakia).
When Germany started World War II, it came as the logical outcome of Hitler’s plans—known to Germans since the publication of Mein Kampf (1926)—and of his systematic preparations since 1933. From the beginning, the Nazis did not intend to establish a new order of authoritarianism and inequality for Germany alone. Therein Nazism imitated communism. Its dynamism was bound to expand and to spread. By its own nature it could not recognize any limits to its own volition, only limits set by opposed superior forces. To a certain extent World War II repeated the pattern of World War I: great initial German military successes, the forging of a large-scale coalition against Germany, the loss of the war because of German overreaching and conduct.
Prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, local Nazi affiliates had been present in areas outside the Reich, typically where there existed a sizable population of German descent. One notable group was the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi paramilitary organization in the United States that was secretly funded and organized by the German government. These Nazi client organizations typically existed on the fringes of political life, but Germany’s early military successes brought them to the fore, especially in occupied territories. On April 9, 1940, German troops invaded Norway, and Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the small Norwegian National Socialist (Nasjonal Samling, or National Union) party immediately proclaimed a “national government.” Quisling’s party had virtually no domestic support, and his government collapsed within a week. Nevertheless, Quisling continued to serve the Nazi occupation forces, and he was named “minister president” in February 1942. German troops also occupied Denmark; although the Danish Nazi Party never managed to achieve a position of political prominence, it was able to orchestrate the creation of a Danish “Free Corps” of volunteers who fought on the Eastern Front as members of the Waffen-SS.
Hitler’s dream of a “Thousand-Year Reich” came to an end with Germany’s defeat in 1945, after almost six years of war. Out of the ruins there arose a divided and occupied Germany. The Nazi Party was banned, and its top leaders were convicted of crimes against peace and against humanity. Remnants of Nazi ideology remained in Germany, however, and former Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann was arrested by Allied forces in December 1945 while attempting to reorganize the Nazi Party. A small number of Nazi-oriented political parties and other groups were formed in West Germany from the late 1940s, though some were later banned.
The American Nazi Party was active in protests against the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and in 1978 the National Socialist Party of America won court approval to hold a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, a city that was home to a large Jewish population, including individuals who had survived the Holocaust. In the 1990s gangs of neo-Nazi youths in eastern Germany staged attacks against immigrants, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, and engaged in violent confrontations with leftists and police. In the 21st century, small neo-Nazi parties were to be found in many European countries as well as in the United States, Canada, and several Central and South American countries. They were rare, but not unheard of, in the rest of the world. After 1945, however, Nazism as a mass movement was virtually nonexistent.
The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist ("Völkisch nationalist"), racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.
- Nazi Party Origins. In 1919, army veteran Adolf Hitler, frustrated by Germany’s defeat in World War I, which had left the nation economically depressed and politically unstable, joined a fledgling political organization called the German Workers’ Party.
- Beer Hall Putsch Sends Hitler to Prison. In 1923, Hitler and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany.
- Hitler and the Nazis Come to Power: 1933. In 1929, Germany entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment. The Nazis capitalized on the situation by criticizing the ruling government and began to win elections.
- Nazi Foreign Policy: 1933-39. Once Hitler gained control of the government, he directed Nazi Germany’s foreign policy toward undoing the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany’s standing in the world.
Adolf Hitler's rise to power began in the newly established Weimar Republic in September 1919 when Hitler joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP; German Workers' Party). He rose to a place of prominence in the early years of the party.
In 1932, the Nazis became the biggest party in the Reichstag , with 37.3% of the vote. Shortly afterwards, on 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The Nazis quickly consolidated their power, taking advantage of the Reichstag Fire of February 1933 to begin their reign of terror.
Jun 18, 2024 · The Nazi Party was the political party of the mass movement known as National Socialism. Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the party came to power in Germany in 1933 and governed by totalitarian methods until 1945.
