Officially known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the far-right political party was founded on this day in 1920 to support the ideology of Nazism. Emerging from the German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany, the Nazi Party was created 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 this was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s the party’s main focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.

Pseudoscientific racist theories were central to Nazism, expressed in the idea of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft). The party aimed to unite “racially desirable” Germans as national comrades, while excluding those deemed either to be political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische). The Nazis sought to strengthen the Germanic people, the ‘Aryan master race’, through racial purity and eugenics, broad social welfare programs, and a collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state on behalf of the people. To protect the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, Poles and most other Slavs, along with the physically and mentally disabled. They disenfranchised and segregated homosexuals, Africans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state set in motion the Final Solution—an industrial system of genocide which achieved the murder of around six million Jews and millions of other targeted victims, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler, the party’s leader since 1921, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg January 30, 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich.

-Wikipedia

Photo Caption – Adolf Hitler in Weimar in 1930 –Wikipedia