Nazism

Definition

Nazism, or National Socialism, was the totalitarian ideology of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), combining fascist-style authoritarian single-party rule with explicit biological racial antisemitism, racial hygiene policy, and a doctrine of territorial expansion (Lebensraum) that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945.

Historical Origin

The NSDAP formed in Munich in 1920, building on earlier nationalist and antisemitic currents in post-First World War Germany; Hitler set out the movement’s ideology in Mein Kampf (1925), written during his imprisonment following a failed 1923 coup attempt. The party won power legally in 1933 amid Weimar-era economic and political crisis, and rapidly established one-party totalitarian rule.

How Supporters Understood It

Nazi ideology presented itself as a revolutionary national rebirth, combining ultranationalism, a cult of leadership around Hitler, and a racial-biological worldview holding that the German (“Aryan”) race was locked in existential struggle with other races, particularly Jewish people, and required both territorial expansion and biological “purification” to survive and flourish.

Criticisms

Political theorists, including Hannah Arendt, have analyzed Nazism as a paradigmatic case of totalitarianism — a system seeking total control over public and private life, mobilizing an entire society around a single ideology, and treating designated enemy populations as subject to unlimited state violence.

Historical Uses

Nazi Germany implemented its ideology through the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Aktion T4 killing program documented in this archive, and ultimately the Holocaust’s systematic murder of six million Jewish people alongside Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, political dissidents and others.

Documented Consequences

Nazi rule caused the Second World War in Europe, the Holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions of people through war, genocide and related atrocities, extensively documented through postwar trials, surviving state records, and decades of subsequent historical scholarship.

Misuse or Distortion of the Idea

Nazi propaganda described its racial and territorial policies using euphemistic and pseudo-scientific language — “racial hygiene,” “living space,” “resettlement” — that obscured, and was designed to obscure, the scale of violence these policies actually involved, a pattern this archive’s Files examine against the full documentary record established at Nuremberg and since.

Related Files

• Aktion T4

Counterarguments

Nazism was comprehensively defeated militarily and repudiated legally and morally following the Second World War, documented in the Nuremberg trials’ extensive evidentiary record; it remains, among historians across the political spectrum, the paradigmatic case of totalitarian ideology enacted as state policy.

Bibliography