National Socialist German Workers Party
The totalitarian party of Adolf Hitler, 1920 to 1945, which ruled Germany as a dictatorship, started the Second World War in Europe, and perpetrated the Holocaust.
Overview
The NSDAP grew from the German Workers Party, which Hitler took over in 1919-1920, fusing racial antisemitism, virulent nationalism, and paramilitary spectacle. It exploited Weimar crisis and unemployment to win a plurality in 1932, took power legally in 1933, and dismantled democracy within months through the Enabling Act and terror. One party rule followed: Gestapo, propaganda under Goebbels, SS control, concentration camps. Aggressive war from 1939 and the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others defined its record. The party was banned and dissolved in 1945. Its symbols are illegal in Germany today, and its history underlies postwar German party law and denazification.
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