Nazi Party
...nationalistic political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers Party (DAP) before the name was changed in 1920.
The party's eventual leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. 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, Slavs, Roma, Arabs, Africans and homosexuals), along with Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally and/or physically disabled, socialists, and communists.) To carry out these beliefs, the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systemic murder 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 a major cause of World War II in Europe, in which more than 70 million people died.
The Party grew out of smaller political groups with a nationalist orientation that formed in the last years of World War I. In the early months of 1918, a party called the Freier Ausschuss für einen deutschen Arbeiterfrieden (Free Committee for a German Workers' Peace) was created in Bremen, Germany. Anton Drexler, an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league on March 7, 1918, in Munich. Drexler had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party during World War I, and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and to the revolutionary upheavals that followed in its wake. In 1919, Drexler, together with Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, established the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei...
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