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The National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (help·info), or NSDAP, commonly, the Nazi Party), was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945 that was known as the German Workers Party before the name was changed in 1920.
The party's leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. After Hindenburg's death, Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich, under which the party gained almost unlimited power.
Nazi ideology stressed the racial purity of the German people and persecuted those it perceived either as enemies or Lebensunwertes Leben, that is "life unworthy of life". (This included Jews, Roma, Slavs and homosexuals, along with Catholic clergy and religious people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally and/or physically disabled, socialists, and communists.) The practical application of these beliefs led directly to the deaths of approximately 11 million people in what has become known as the Holocaust. Additionally, the Nazi concept of Lebensraum ("living space"), and the pursuit of the creation of "Greater Germany" to achieve it, was one of the major causes of World War II, in which more than 60 million people died.

Origins: 1918-1920
Hitler became the 55th member of the DAP, but he later claimed to be member number seven (he was in fact the seventh executive member of the party's central committee). Over the following months, the DAP continued to attract new members, while remaining too small to have any real significance in German politics. On 24 February 1920, the party added "National Socialist" to its official name, becoming the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), although Hitler earlier suggested the party to be renamed the "Social Revolutionary Party"; it was Rudolf Jung who persuaded Hitler to follow the NSDAP naming. Meanwhile the Nazi Party effectively ceased to exist without his leadership, something he made no effort to prevent.

Rise to power: 1925-1933
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire. This Reichstag fire was promptly blamed on a communist conspiracy, and used as an excuse by the Nazis to close the KPD's offices, ban its press and arrest its leaders. Furthermore, Hitler convinced President von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending most of the human rights provided for by the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic. A further decree enabled preventive detention of all communist leaders, amongst many thousands of others.
Since the new government lacked a majority in parliament, Hitler held a new election in March of 1933. With the communists eliminated, the Nazis dominated the election with 43.9%, and with their Nationalist (DNVP) allies, achieved a parliamentary majority (51.8%).
A further decisive step in the Nazi seizure of power (Gleichschaltung) was the so called "Enabling Act", which granted the cabinet - and therefore Hitler - legislative powers. The Enabling Act effectively abolished the separation of powers, which was a basic 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 naturally 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, quickly 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 July 14, 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.
Hitler also tried to incorporate the Churches into his new regime. On March 23, 1933 he had called them "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 Church, he 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. 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.
Nevertheless the period 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 effect 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 also 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 takeover. The business community was also alarmed by the SA's socialist rhetoric, with which, as noted earlier, Hitler had no sympathy.
In June 1934, therefore, 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 greatly 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 takeover 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 (the Night of Broken Glass), in which at least 100 Jews were killed, 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 and 1943.
Paradoxically, the more completely the Nazi regime dominated German society, the less relevant the Nazi Party became as an organisation 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. Unlike the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin, the Nazi 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.

In power: 1933-45
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, leaving no one in a position to make decisions, civil administration ground to a halt and the German state became steadily more disorganised and ineffective. In these circumstances the Gauleiters, who were nearly all old-guard Nazis and fanatical Hitler loyalists, increasingly 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 also 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 prolonged 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. But 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 and unable to openly oppose his will. Nevertheless Halder actively 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. Only after 1939 the ban on Nazis joining the German Army - traditionally a stronghold of Protestant monarchist conservatism opposed to any mass political movements - was lifted, and 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 however was always firmly loyal to Hitler and its commander, Karl Dönitz, was Hitler's designated successor in 1945.
By 1945 the Nazi Party and the Nazi state were no longer capable of separation. 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 nationwide 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 as quickly as possible. 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 their oaths and any desire to keep the party alive. 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 formally 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 organise 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 several attempts to organise ultra-nationalist parties in Germany, but none of these parties were overtly Nazi or tried to use the symbols and slogans of the Nazi Party – as Germans correctly point out, there are many more Nazis in the United States (and now in Russia) than there are in Germany. 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 percent 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.

War and eclipse

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

General 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 such figures as 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.

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

Student membership
In addition to the NSDAP proper, several paramilitary groups existed which "supported" Nazi aims. All such 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:
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary group divided into an adult leadership corps and a general membership open to boys aged fourteen to eighteen.

Schutzstaffel (SS): Protection Service
Sturmabteilung (SA): Storm Division
Nationalsozialistisches Fliegerkorps (NSFK): National Socialist Flyers Corps
Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps (NSKK): National Socialist Motor Corps Paramilitary groups
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)

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). 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 colors black and white). 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 colors of the nationalists through the following history (for example World War I and the Weimar Republic).
Swastika
German Eagle: The Nazi party used the traditional German eagle in a martialized Nazi style, standing atop of a swastika inside a wreath of oak leaves. When the eagle is looking to its left shoulder, it symbolizes the Nazi party, and was therefore called the Parteiadler. In contrast, when the eagle is looking to its right shoulder, it symbolizes 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.
Nazi anthem: Horst Wessel Lied. Party symbols

Notes

Evans, R.J. (2005) The Third Reich in power, 1933-1939, London : Allen Lane, ISBN 0-7139-9649-8
Heiden, K. (1933) "Les débuts du national-socialisme", Revue d'Allemagne, VII, No. 71, September 15 1933
Hitler's Mein Kampf (full text)
Kershaw, I. (2001) Hitler, 2nd ed., New York : Longman, ISBN 0-582-47280-6