# NSDAP 25-Point Program The founding platform of the [[Nazi Party]], drafted by [[Anton Drexler]], [[Adolf Hitler]], and [[Gottfried Feder]] and proclaimed by Hitler at a mass meeting in Munich's Hofbräuhaus on **February 24, 1920** — the day the German Workers' Party (DAP) renamed itself the NSDAP. Where [[The Doctrine of Fascism]] is fascism as theory and [[Mein Kampf]] is movement autobiography, this is the genre at its most literal: a numbered list of demands, the party-platform-as-manifesto. In 1926 Hitler declared its 25 points "unalterable," freezing it as scripture even as the party ignored the points it found inconvenient. ## What it demanded The program braided three strands that explain the party's deceptively broad early appeal: - **Ultranationalism and treaty revision:** union of all Germans in a Greater Germany (Point 1), abrogation of the [[Treaty of Versailles]] (Point 2), and colonies/"land and territory" to feed the nation (Point 3) — the seed of *Lebensraum*. - **Racial exclusion and antisemitism:** only those of "German blood" can be citizens (*Volksgenossen*); "no Jew" can be a citizen or hold office (Point 4). Jews and other non-citizens would live as "guests" under alien-law and be expelled in times of shortage (Points 5–8), and any Jew who entered Germany after August 2, 1914 would be deported (Point 8). This is the program's through-line to the [[Nuremberg Laws]] of 1935. - **Pseudo-socialist economics ([[Gottfried Feder]]'s imprint):** abolition of unearned ("interest") income (Point 11), nationalization of trusts and profit-sharing in large industry (Points 13–14), confiscation of war profits (Point 12), death penalty for "usurers and profiteers" (Point 18), and protection of the *Mittelstand* small trader (Point 16). The "Socialist" in National Socialist was real as rhetoric and as economic [[Antisemitism]] — "predatory" finance capital coded as Jewish — but was gutted in practice once Hitler courted industrialists. The final points demanded a strong central state (Point 25), a national press purged of non-Germans (Point 23), and "positive Christianity" subordinated to no particular confession (Point 24). ## The propaganda design The program's genius was breadth: nationalist grievance for veterans, anticapitalist red meat for workers and shopkeepers, and a racial scapegoat tying it together — a coalition document engineered to recruit from the left and right at once. The economic radicalism let the party pose as a workers' movement; the moment it threatened actual business interests, Hitler treated the "unalterable" points as dead letters, expelling the Strasserite faction that took the socialism seriously. The gap between a frozen, sacred text and its cynical application is the program's most durable lesson about platform documents. ## Why it matters for the KB It is the standing exhibit, alongside [[Mein Kampf]], for the vault's "when movements publish their intentions, believe them" precept: the citizenship exclusions, expulsions, and the logic that ended in catastrophe were printed in 1920 and recited for a quarter-century before they became state policy. It also models the **party-platform-as-manifesto** form — the numbered, "unalterable" list that signals seriousness while reserving deniability — a structure echoed in everything from later movement platforms to contemporary mandate documents. And it is the economic-[[Antisemitism]] anchor: Feder's "productive vs. predatory capital" distinction is the template for every later coding of finance as a racial-conspiratorial enemy. ## Key passage > "Point 4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation." [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]