# Nazi Party The **National Socialist German Workers' Party** (NSDAP) began as the German Workers' Party (DAP), a Munich beer-hall circle founded in January 1919 by the locksmith Anton Drexler, with the economic crank Gottfried Feder as its early theorist — his doctrine of "interest slavery" gave the movement its anti-finance rhetoric. Army intelligence sent Corporal [[Adolf Hitler]] to observe a meeting in September 1919; he joined, discovered he could speak, and by July 1921 had made himself its dictator. The party took its name in February 1920 with the [[NSDAP 25-Point Program]] — nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-capitalist in the Feder sense — and its symbols from the völkisch fringe: the swastika, the brown shirt, the Roman salute ([[Roman Salute Revival]]). It was one of dozens of such groups in the wreckage of the [[Treaty of Versailles]] and the [[Weimar Republic]]'s early years. What distinguished it was the leader, the paramilitary, and the decision, after the failed [[Beer Hall Putsch]] of November 1923, to take power legally. ## Structure The party was built as a state-in-waiting. The **SA** (Sturmabteilung, brownshirts) was its street army, several hundred thousand strong by 1932 and four million by 1934, under Ernst Röhm; the **SS**, begun as Hitler's bodyguard, became under [[Heinrich Himmler]] the party's police, its racial elite, and eventually the machinery of the [[Holocaust]]. [[Joseph Goebbels]] ran propaganda; Gregor Strasser built the northern organization and led the party's "socialist" wing — the Strasserites, who took the anti-capitalism seriously — until Hitler defeated him at the 1926 Bamberg conference and had him murdered in 1934. The faction fight matters to the vault because "Strasserism" is the label modern far-right movements reach for when they want national socialism without Hitler. ## The seizure of power The party won 2.6% in 1928. The [[Great Depression]] made it the largest in the Reichstag by July 1932 (37.3%), still short of a majority and already slipping (33.1% in November). It did not seize power; it was handed it. [[Paul von Hindenburg]] appointed Hitler chancellor on **January 30, 1933** on the advice of the conservative Franz von Papen, who believed he could be controlled. The [[Reichstag Fire]] four weeks later produced the emergency decree suspending civil liberties; the [[Enabling Act of 1933]] on March 23 let the cabinet legislate without parliament; *Gleichschaltung* — coordination — dissolved the other parties, the unions and the states by July, when the NSDAP became the only legal party. The [[Night of the Long Knives]] (June 1934) killed Röhm, Strasser and the conservative critics in one operation, and Hindenburg's death in August merged the presidency into the Führer. Eighteen months, no coup, every step lawful in form. This is the sequence the vault's [[Benito Mussolini]] page calls the template — legal appointment, paramilitary pressure, a legislature abolishing itself — and the reason the [[Fascism]] literature spends so much time on the conservatives who opened the door. ## Party and state After 1933 the party never governed directly; it sat beside the state as a parallel apparatus — Gauleiters alongside governors, the SS alongside the police, party courts alongside the courts — with the leader as the only point where they met. Membership reached about 8.5 million by 1945. The Allies dissolved it in October 1945, and the Nuremberg tribunal declared its leadership corps, the SS and the Gestapo criminal organizations. The [[Nuremberg Laws]], *[[Mein Kampf]]*, and the ideology are treated on their own pages; the [[American Nazi Party]] and its successors borrowed the iconography, not the organization. ## See Also - [[Adolf Hitler]] · [[Heinrich Himmler]] · [[Joseph Goebbels]] · [[Hermann Göring]] · [[Paul von Hindenburg]] - [[NSDAP 25-Point Program]] · [[Beer Hall Putsch]] · [[Reichstag Fire]] · [[Enabling Act of 1933]] · [[Night of the Long Knives]] · [[Nuremberg Laws]] · [[Holocaust]] - [[Weimar Republic]] · [[Treaty of Versailles]] · [[Great Depression]] · [[Fascism]] · [[Benito Mussolini]] · [[The Doctrine of Fascism]] - [[Roman Salute Revival]] · [[American Nazi Party]] · [[Mein Kampf]] · [[Ultra (podcast)]]