Germany: 100th anniversary of the Nazi Party reviving its work, which brought Hitler to power and unleashed the horrors of Nazism
The future leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, as chair of what was then the modest, smaller-scale National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), attempted to stage a coup d'état from a crowded Munich beer hall on 8 November 1923 together with his henchmen, who included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler. That action became famous as the "Beer Hall Putsch" and it yielded the NSDAP a ban on their activity and Hitler a short stay in prison during which he wrote the "Bible of Nazism", the book Mein Kampf [My Struggle].
Of his five-year-sentence, Hitler served just one year, and the dissolved NSDAP, whose program he formulated in Mein Kampf, renewed its activity 100 years ago on 27 February 1925. The revived NSDAP started winning over voters with appealing slogans about uniting a great nation and erasing social differences in Germany.
While in 1928 the NSDAP won just about 2 % of the vote in the parliamentary elections, by September 1930 (after the eruption of the global economic crisis) it won roughly nine times as many votes, and in July 1932, with almost 38 % of the vote, it became the strongest party in the parliament. Hitler was then appointed Chancellor of the Reich on 30 January 1933, thanks to conservatives who believed they had “just created a certain framework” for him and that they had thereby “tamed” him.
The opposite was true. Hitler destroyed his opponents in the party during the “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934 and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, started fanaticizing the German masses with the Nazi ideology, which advocated for a state ruled by a supreme leader and for the superiority of one “race” entitled to subjugate and eliminate all other “races”.
In September 1935, Hitler announced at an NSDAP congress in Nuremberg the laws under which, on the pretext of protecting “German honor and blood”, he would murder anybody who could not prove their “Aryan origin”. This especially targeted the Jews, of whom six million were murdered in the German concentration and extermination camps.
Other groups were also systematically murdered, for instance, people living with disabilities, Romani people, and sexual minorities. Hitler began to realize his Great Power ambitions by annexing the Saarland (1935), Austria (1938) and the Czech borderlands (1938) to Germany and establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939).
By invading Poland in September 1939, he started the Second World War, which became the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity. An estimated 60 million people fell victim to the Second World War.
