Nazism

Introduction

Nazism, or National Socialism, is a right-wing, totalitarian sociopolitical ideology that was developed by Adolf Hitler in Germany after World War I. The Nazi Party combined fascism with virulent White supremacist racism, anti-Semitism, and other violently discriminatory beliefs to promote extreme German ethnonationalism and territorial expansion, while building a dictatorial cult of personality around Hitler. From the very start, Nazism rejected both Western capitalist liberal democracy and Marxist socialism and communism.

Nazi policies and practices violated human and civil rights, both within Germany and elsewhere as Hitler used military force to expand Germany's territory. The ideology directly led to the Holocaust and the outbreak of World War II. After Nazi Germany was defeated in the war, Nazism became largely reviled worldwide and even outlawed in many countries. However, fringe neo-Nazi groups have continued to promote its ideas.

Beginnings

Nazism is rooted in the long history of German nationalism, and particularly the form known as Völkisch ("folkist") nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Völkisch nationalism envisioned the German people as a distinct ethnic and racial group, and tended to hold Germans and other supposedly "Nordic" peoples as superior to other groups. Such beliefs often overlapped with anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, social Darwinism, and other racist and discriminatory ideas. The development of fascism in Italy in the 1910s and backlash against both communism and capitalism also strongly informed the rise of Nazism. Historians suggest that these various ideologies gained popularity in large part due to the large-scale socioeconomic turmoil during and after World War I (1914–18).

Nazism's direct forerunner as a political party was the right-wing German Workers’ Party, which was organized in Munich early in 1919. Adolf Hitler, a lower-middle-class Austrian by birth and a corporal in the German army during World War I, joined the German Workers’ Party later in the year. It soon was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party. Hitler, showing oratorical and organizational talent, became the party's undisputed leader in 1921.

The main tenets of Nazism were drawn from the party program of 1920, Hitler’s speeches and writings (especially his two-volume manifesto Mein Kampf, published in 1925 and 1926), and other Nazi publications. They attacked liberalism and parliamentarianism, including democracy, as inherently weak political systems and branded the early leaders of the Weimar Republic, liberals, socialists, and Jews as “November criminals” of 1918, who had overthrown the imperial government. In place of the failed parliamentary democracy, Nazism offered authoritarian rule rooted in a solid hierarchical system of leaders and followers. At the head would be a führer, or “leader,” who, with the support of the Nazi Party, would exercise total control over the society and mobilize it for the achievement of the political and social goals that he postulated.

White Supremacy and Anti-Semitism

Nazism, above all, extolled racial nationalism, as derived from the nineteenth-century racial theories of thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde. Proponents of Nazism contended that human races were divided into culture-creating and culture-destroying groups, which were engaged in a social-Darwinian struggle of survival of the fittest. At the top of the supposed culture-creating races stood the Nordic-Aryan-Germanic group, the “master race,” which was destined to dominate inferior races. At Hitler’s instigation, Nazism singled out the Jews as the greatest threat to the "pure" Aryans, alleging that the Jews, the leading culture-destroying race, were conspiring to gain domination over the world. In Nazi foreign policy, the idea of the primacy of the Aryan race was combined with a Great German nationalism or imperialism, whose aim it was to create a Great German empire far beyond the borders of the German nation. Such an expansion was to give the German people the Lebensraum, or “living space,” that it needed to ensure its security and economic independence.

The Nazis did not conceal that, although they would attain power legally, once in office they would destroy the constitutional system. Within one month after Hitler was appointed chancellor early in 1933, he had communists and many socialists confined to quickly established concentration camps and suspended civil rights. Through cajolery, pressure, and terror, he prevailed upon the Reichstag (parliament) to give him dictatorial powers, which he used to eliminate trade unions and all political parties except the Nazi Party. Hitler also continued to consolidate his power within the Nazi organization. In 1934, he executed the top leadership of the paramilitary Storm Troopers, or SA, when he felt threatened by a rival from within his own ranks. He justified these acts of criminality by declaring: “I was responsible for the fate of the German people and thereby I became the Supreme Judge of the German people.”

World War II and the Holocaust

The Nazi regime under Hitler’s direction defined national interest in the most expansive terms. Hitler once characterized Germany’s foreign policy by declaring: “Germany will become a world power or it will not exist at all.” In the early years of Nazi dictatorship, he and his associates constantly proclaimed the German Reich’s “sincere desire for peace,” while unilaterally abrogating the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, rearming Germany, and then, in 1938, annexing Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Nazi Germany unleashed World War II by invading Poland, followed by campaigns into France and other European countries in 1940. One year later, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, waging a brutal ideological war in the quest for Lebensraum in the East.

While worldwide violence was raging as a result of war, the Nazi regime also prepared for the elimination of “racially inferior” populaces and “those of lesser value” in society. The persecution of German Jews culminated in the violence against Jewish property and people of the Kristallnacht of 1938. With the outbreak of the war in 1939, a euthanasia program was begun, resulting in the killing by injection or by gassing of almost one hundred thousand mentally and physically handicapped persons, most of whom were German. Finally, the plan to liquidate all European Jews in Nazi hands—the “final solution”—was implemented by Hitler and his immediate associates in 1941. Known as the Holocaust, it claimed the lives of almost six million people. In addition, the Nazis and collaborators murdered millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ people, and other racial and political “enemies.” This unprecedented mechanized genocide was only stopped by the defeat of Nazi Germany and the suicide of Hitler in 1945.

Nazism After World War II

After the total defeat of Nazi Germany and the death of the führer, Nazism never revived as a significant force. Following the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, its Federal Constitutional Court outlawed the noisy but unimportant Socialist Reich Party in 1952 as a neo-Nazi organization. In the 1960s and 1980s, two right-wing parties were formed in German: the National Democratic Party and the Republicans. Both showed some neo-Nazi features but achieved little influence. More noteworthy were a number of small German neo-Nazi groups formed since the 1970s, whose racist hate propaganda and violence was often directed primarily against foreigners, especially people of color.

Neo-Nazi groups have continued to spring up all over the world. Many sociologists, human rights watchdog groups, and other observers identified a significant uptick in neo-Nazi and other far-right nationalist activity in the 2010s, including overt White supremacist and anti-Semitic ideology. Some groups reportedly adhering to many principles of Nazism have gained considerable influence, such as Greece's political party Golden Dawn, which entered parliament for the first time in 2012. However, such groups often denied the neo-Nazi label as they sought mainstream support and influence. Scholars have suggested that the rise of the internet and social media helped neo-Nazi and Nazi-influenced groups organize and evolve, while another wave of broad socioeconomic upheaval in the twenty-first century contributed to surging interest in various forms of ultranationalism.

Bibliography

Bracher, K. D. The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism. Translated by Jean Steinberg, Praeger, 1970.

Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Revised ed., Harper, 1962.

Donahue, Anne Marie, editor. Ethics in Politics and Government. Wilson, 1989.

Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in History and Memory. Oxford UP, 2015.

Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. U of California P, 1984.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton, 1971.

"Information-Age Nazis—Experts' Views on Neo-Nazism." Newsweek, 29 Feb. 2017, www.newsweek.com/information-age-555202. Accessed 25 Apr. 2017.

Jackel, Eberhard. Hitler’s Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power. Translated by Herbert Arnold, Wesleyan UP, 1972.

"The Nazi Rise to Power." Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-rise-to-power. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

"Neo-Nazi." SPLC, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/neo-nazi. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Spielvogel, Jackson J., and David Redles. Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History. 7th ed., Pearson, 2014.