Definition of NSDAP (Nazi Party)
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Guillem Alsina González, in Nov. 2017
If any of us were asked about the "Nazi party", we would probably answer that it was the one founded by Adolf Hitler. Big mistake, although the German dictator (of Austrian origin) used it politically for his own benefit.
The direct precedent of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers' Party) was the DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Workers' Party)
Founded by a small group of workers (there were two from rail transport, for example), the DAP was one of many groups and parties founded after the First World War (this one, specifically, 1919) that pursued the resurgence of Germany embracing ultra-nationalist, pan-Germanist postulates (union of all German-speaking and cultural territories, including Austria) and anti-Semites.
Hitler did not join the DAP until 1920, and it was almost like a fluke.
After the war, Hitler had rejoined the army, and in those days he was doing espionage carrying out infiltrations and follow-ups on political groups that the authorities considered dangerous. And it was in this task that the DAP was assigned.
At one of the party's rallies in a Munich brewery, Hitler faced one of the speakers, and his arguments were just as convincing to the attendees, and his charisma proved such that he so impressed the attendees that the party leadership offered to join.
Hitler had an advantage in his dialectical confrontation, since for years he had carefully cared for his racist and supremacist arguments.
The veteran corporal of the war was also not lacking in political aspirations, so he did not hesitate to leave the army and join that incipient movement, in which he had membership card number 55, although later he would cultivate the myth that he found himself among the group of founders.
Initially, he did not hold any relevant position either, he began working in secondary positions below the management, but his oratorical skills and a personality overwhelming and that provoked the admiration of the followers of the party and dazzled new ones, made him the most visible and popular face of the DAP, whose leadership would arrive in 1921.
It was precisely when he came to power in the party that he changed the name by which he would be known and had in the future: NSDAP.
Let's look at the transformation of the name to which nationalism is added, understood in this case as pan-Germanism, while the socialism it is something logical since it is a theoretically workers' party.
However, in practice and once with the reins of the party in his hands, Hitler will advocate following the strategy of Benito Mussolini (whom he admired) to adapt and adapt his message to be a transversal movement, reaching all classes and social strata.
The new NSDAP also breaks with its location to the state of Bavaria, with the intention of becoming first a German political force and, later, transnational to all Germanic territories and even more there.
A good example of this will be the Austrian NSDAP (which will play its role in all the social-political movements that will eventually lead to the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany), or that of the Sudetenland (which will do the same in this Czech region to facilitate its return to the Reich).
The symbol of the NSDAP is the call swastika or swastika was used before Hitler came to power within the party, since it was a symbol used widely in pan-German nationalism, but it was the future dictator who gave it its final shape according to his tastes personal.
Other organizations coexisted within the NSDAP, such as the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the SS (Schutzstaffel)
Each of these protected their own interests, which were still those of their leaders, in a conflict that will be constant even after the rise of the NSDAP to power, thereby affecting the course of the war.
Thus, the SA were the most radical, paramilitary militias that, led by Ernst Röhm, advocated a revolution continues to impose the purest principles of ideology National Socialist, something that did not suit Hitler and others once installed in power.
That is why the SA were eliminated in one fell swoop in the call Night of the long knives, which left a hindrance to the SA under the command of the SS.
This last organization was born, precisely, as a counterweight to the SA, and ended up constituting a hidden state within the German state itself.
With the coming to power of Hitler, the history of the NSDAP as a "single party" begins to intermingle with that of Germany itself first, that of the Reich later, and the dynamics of the war at the end.
The plan of Hitler and the Nazi hierarchs was to convert the population German in devoted followers of Nazism, and even strengthen the SS's own combat forces (the Waffen SS) as substitutes for the army, to have soldiers indoctrinated in the fanaticism of Nazism.
It is for all this that, after the war, the NSDAP will be declared a criminal organization and prohibited by law in Germany.
However, both in Germany and in other countries of the world, political forces have existed since the postwar period that have inherited part of the legacy of hatred and fanaticism of the NSDAP, although luckily, none with commanders under their care to seize power in the same way that the National Socialists did in Germany in the mid-1990s. thirty.
Although we already know that humans are the only animal capable of tripping twice on the same stone, so we will have to be alert ...
Photo: Fotolia - Engineer
Issues in NSDAP (Nazi Party)