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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Nazism

15 min listen · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections
  • Nazism, formally named National Socialism, began its public life as a name its own followers found embarrassing. In the 1920s, opponents in the German labour movement borrowed the Bavarian slang term for a backward peasant, a clumsy yokel, and applied it as a taunt to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The first time the National Socialists themselves used the word "Nazi" in print was in 1926, in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi. Even then, they tried to reclaim it only briefly. While in power, they almost never used it, referring to themselves simply as "National Socialists".

    The ideology that came to wear that reluctant name would govern Germany from January 1933 onward, lead a war that killed tens of millions, and end with the systematic extermination of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in an event known as the Holocaust. After Germany's defeat, and after the full extent of those killings became public, Nazism became one of the most widely condemned political movements in history. Use of its symbols is now illegal in many European countries, including Germany and Austria.

    Yet Nazism did not spring fully formed from the mind of Adolf Hitler. Its roots lay in ideas that had circulated for decades across Europe, in philosophy, pseudoscience, nationalist mythology, and economic fear. How did a fringe party founded in 1919 become the largest in the German parliament by 1932? What ideas did it actually hold, and where did those ideas come from? And why did serious politicians, industrialists, and even a former kaiser initially believe they could control it?

  • George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Hitler in 1923 for the American Monthly and asked a blunt question: why call your party National Socialist when its program seemed the opposite of socialism? Hitler set down his cup of tea and replied that socialism was "an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution" and that Marxism had stolen and corrupted its meaning. He intended, he said, to take the word back.

    This argument about words was not trivial. The renaming of the German Workers' Party to the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1920 was a deliberate political calculation, one Hitler initially opposed. The word "Socialist" and "Workers'" were meant to attract the left; "National" and "German" were aimed at the right. Asked in 1934 why he chose the word "worker", Hitler said it was because he wanted to "naturalize" the term, to reclaim it from internationalist connotations and place it back under "the sovereign rights and obligations of the German Volk".

    Hitler also redefined socialism repeatedly and incompatibly. In a 1922 speech he declared that anyone who put the nation above all else was "a Socialist". By 1929, he had simplified the concept still further, telling Nazi leaders that socialism meant "If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism." In a 1934 interview, he claimed Nazism drew "national resolve" from bourgeois tradition and "living, creative Socialism" from Marxist materialism, while being neither.

    Historians are unanimous that Nazism belongs on the far right of the political spectrum. The argument among Nazi leaders themselves about where to sit in the Reichstag offers a small window into how they understood their own position. In September 1930, a dispute broke out between the Nazi Party representative Wilhelm Frick and the German National People's Party (DNVP) representative Oskar Hergt over which party had the stronger claim to the far-right seats. Frick insisted the National Socialists were the most right-wing party. That claim was provisionally accepted.

  • Martin Broszat, author of The Hitler State, pointed out that almost all essential elements of Nazi ideology were present in radical protest movements in Germany before 1914. Joachim Fest called these antecedent ideas "the scrapheap" of pre-war European political culture. Nazism did not invent its obsessions; it assembled them.

    The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte stands near the beginning of this lineage. In his Speeches to the German Nation, written in 1808 during the Napoleonic occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution, armed his own students for battle against the French, and promoted a "People's War" rooted in German exceptionalism. He also accused Jews of forming "a state within a state" that threatened German unity, and proposed two solutions: a Jewish state in Palestine, or, in his words, "to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea."

    Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, writing his Land und Leute between 1857 and 1863, tied the organic German Volk to the native landscape in explicit opposition to industrial civilisation. Geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer drew from his work, as did Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who argued each nation-state was an organism requiring its own living space to survive. This idea fed directly into the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum.

    Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the Austrian Pan-Germanist whom the young Hitler encountered during his years in Vienna, contributed more than ideology. From Schönerer, Hitler adopted the Heil greeting, the Führer title, and the model of absolute party leadership. Hitler was also impressed by Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna during those same years, whose rabble-rousing oratory appealed to the masses through populist antisemitism. Hitler praised both men, but criticised Lueger for not applying a racial doctrine consistently against Jews and Slavs.

  • Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born proponent of racial theory who became a German citizen, published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899. The book praised Germanic peoples for creativity and idealism while depicting the "Jewish" spirit as selfish and materialistic. It became popular, especially in Germany. In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler and admired him as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.

    Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, advocated Nordicism and proposed a eugenics programme to preserve the purity of the Nordic race. After reading it, Hitler called it "my Bible".

    The racial framework the Nazis drew on rested on a significant scientific distortion. Historians note that Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy; it stated that all humans had progressed in their evolution from apes. Lamarckian theory, by contrast, did rank races on such a hierarchy, with lower races deemed so long exposed to debilitating conditions that no meaningful improvement was foreseeable. Ernst Haeckel used Lamarckian theory to describe interracial struggle and arrange races on a scale from wholly human to subhuman. Yet the Nazis later condemned Haeckel's own works as inappropriate for National Socialist education, likely because of his atheism, his friendliness toward Jews, and his opposition to militarism.

    Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther divided Europeans into five races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic. His 1922 book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, which Hitler read, recognised that Germans were composed of all five but emphasised their Nordic heritage. Günther argued Jews were a racially mixed group of Near Eastern and Oriental types, and that European peoples had a racially motivated aversion to Near Eastern physiognomies. He claimed the Eastern racial type had been "bred not so much for the conquest and exploitation of nature as it had been for the conquest and exploitation of people".

    The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring made this pseudoscience into policy, mandating compulsory sterilisation for people with schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, and what the law called "imbecility", as well as for chronic alcoholism. An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised between 1933 and 1939.

  • Hitler extolled America in Mein Kampf as the only country with "racist" citizenship statutes in the 1920s, by which he meant laws explicitly grounded in racial categories. Nazi lawyers studied American legal models when crafting the legislation for Nazi Germany. The two principal Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law, were directly inspired by US citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation statutes.

    Nazism also looked to the American experience of continental expansion as a model for what it called Lebensraum. Hitler and Nazi legal theorists saw American treatment of indigenous peoples, the denial of full citizenship to African Americans, and restrictive immigration laws as confirmation that racial hierarchy could be encoded into the legal structure of a modern state. From their perspective, the United States had already demonstrated the project they intended to scale.

    The Nuremberg Laws introduced in 1935 first banned sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, then extended those prohibitions to what the law described as "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring", defined as people of "alien blood". After the war began, the law was extended further to cover all non-Germans. Party members found guilty of Rassenschande, "race defilement", faced severe punishment; some were sentenced to death.

  • The Allied blockade of Germany during and after World War I did not cause a famine, but chronic malnutrition killed roughly 600,000 people in Germany and Austria. That collective memory of hunger shaped the generation that would lead the Nazi Party. In the early 1930s, over nine million Germans, a third of the workforce, still worked in agriculture. Historian Adam Tooze estimates that half the German population in the 1930s lived in towns and villages with populations under 20,000.

    Tooze argues that the Nazi obsession with agrarian life and food security was not nostalgia but the response of a society still in the middle of its economic transition. The acquisition of Lebensraum, "living space", was framed not as a military adventure but as a solution to a food problem. At the strategic level, Tooze explains, guns were "ultimately viewed as a means to obtaining more butter".

    Hitler's territorial vision moved over time. From 1921 to 1922, he called for a reduced Russia, still governed by Russian nationalists who had overthrown the Bolsheviks, with Germany enjoying access to its raw materials. By the end of 1922, he had shifted to supporting an outright alliance with Britain to destroy Russia. Later still, he declared that Europe's safety could not be assured until "Asia" had been driven back beyond the Ural Mountains, and that no organised Russian state could exist west of that line.

    Rudolf Hess relayed to Walter Hewel Hitler's belief that world peace could only come "when one power, the racially best one, has attained uncontested supremacy". That power could then establish a world police force, and the "lower races will have to restrict themselves accordingly". Lebensraum was not the endpoint. It was the first step toward complete global dominance.

  • The German Workers' Party was founded in 1919. It became the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1920. By the elections of July 1932, it was the largest party in the German parliament, though still without a majority. What brought it to power was not popular mandate but a calculation by conservative politicians who believed they could use Hitler as a vehicle and then control him.

    Franz von Papen proposed to President Paul von Hindenburg that Hitler be appointed Chancellor at the head of a government formed primarily of conservatives, with only three Nazi ministers. Hindenburg agreed. Conservative support had been building for years, partly because the Nazi Party promised to protect business interests against communism. By January 1933, the party had secured backing from key sectors of industry, including steel, coal, insurance, and chemicals. Business groups contributed significant funds before and after the Nazi seizure of power, hoping a Nazi dictatorship would eliminate organised labour and left-wing parties.

    Within the party itself, large segments of the Sturmabteilung, the SA paramilitary organisation, expected a social and economic revolution once power was achieved. Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA, pushed for a "second revolution" that would enact socialist policies and absorb the German Army into the SA under his command. Some former Social Democrats and Communists had joined the party and were known as "Beefsteak Nazis", brown on the outside and red inside.

    Hitler resolved this internal contradiction with violence. In the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, he purged Rohm and other radical SA leaders. That same year he assumed the title of Fuhrer und Reichskanzler. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had initially supported the Nazis and whose sons had joined the party hoping for a restoration of the monarchy, grew appalled. After witnessing the Kristallnacht of 1938, the former emperor denounced the Nazis as "a bunch of shirted gangsters" and "a mob...led by a thousand liars or fanatics." Hitler had called the prospect of restoring the monarchy simply "idiotic."

  • Historian Martin Broszat wrote that National Socialism was "not primarily an ideological and programmatic, but a charismatic movement, whose ideology was incorporated in the Fuhrer, Hitler". Once the party was purged of competing factions such as Strasserism, Hitler was accepted by its leadership as the "supreme authority to rule on ideological matters". The ideology had no coherent first principles; it was assembled from Hitler's personal views, the 25-point plan, the goals of the volkisch movement, and factional arguments about what National Socialism meant.

    Oswald Spengler, whose 1918 book The Decline of the West shaped many of the ideas the Nazis absorbed, was condemned by them after 1933 for criticising Hitler. Spengler himself had privately written of antisemitism: "how much envy of the capability of other people in view of one's lack of it lies hidden in anti-Semitism!" and "when one would rather destroy business and scholarship than see Jews in them, one is an ideologue, i.e., a danger for the nation. Idiotic."

    After Germany's defeat, Nazi ideology was widely regarded as evil. The euthanasia programme, later named Action T4, in which disabled people were killed under the logic of racial purity, was disclosed to the world. The Holocaust, in which two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population were exterminated, became the defining fact by which the entire ideology is remembered. Only small fringe groups, generally called neo-Nazis, still claim to follow it. The brochure Der Untermenschen, published by the SS in 1942 as a piece of anti-Slavic propaganda, stands as a record of what the ideology looked like when carried to its stated conclusions.

Common questions

What does the word Nazi mean and where does it come from?

"Nazi" was originally a Bavarian slang term for a backward or clumsy peasant, derived from the German name Ignatz. In the 1920s, opponents in the German labour movement applied it mockingly to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) by shortening "Nationalsozialistische". The first use of "Nazi" by the National Socialists themselves appeared in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi. While in power, the party almost never used the term, preferring "National Socialists".

When was the Nazi Party founded and how did it come to power?

The German Workers' Party, the Nazi Party's precursor, was founded in 1919. It was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1920. By the elections of 1932 it was the largest party in the German parliament. In January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor at the head of a coalition government, an arrangement proposed by conservative politician Franz von Papen, who believed Hitler could be controlled.

What were the main ideological influences on Nazism?

Nazism drew on pan-German nationalism, the volkisch movement, the racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Madison Grant, the nationalism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the cultural philosophy of Oswald Spengler. It was also shaped by Italian Fascism; Hitler openly acknowledged in 1941 that "the brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt". American immigration and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

What was Lebensraum and why was it central to Nazi ideology?

Lebensraum, meaning "living space", was the Nazi doctrine that Germany required territorial expansion to the east to feed its population and achieve economic security. Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that Lebensraum would be acquired in Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Historian Adam Tooze argues the obsession with land was rooted in the memory of the malnutrition that killed roughly 600,000 people in Germany and Austria during the Allied blockade of World War I, and in the fact that over nine million Germans still worked in agriculture in the early 1930s.

What were the Nuremberg Laws and what did they do?

The Nuremberg Laws, introduced in 1935, were two race laws that codified Nazi racial hierarchy into German statute. The Citizenship Law and the Blood Law stripped Jews of citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Germans and Jews, later extending to Romani people and Black people. These laws were directly inspired by American citizenship and anti-miscegenation statutes, which Hitler cited in Mein Kampf as the only example of volkisch citizenship law in the 1920s.

How did Nazi racial hygiene policies lead to mass sterilisation?

The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring mandated compulsory sterilisation for people diagnosed with schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, "imbecility", and chronic alcoholism. An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised between 1933 and 1939. The programme later escalated to involuntary euthanasia of physically and mentally disabled people, an operation named Action T4 after World War II.

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