Nazi Party

Political party · 1920–1945

The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Led by Adolf Hitler, it rose to power during the Great Depression as worsening living standards and unemployment drove Germans into political extremism. Central to Nazism was the idea of a racially exclusive 'people's community' that sought to unite 'racially desirable' Germans while excluding and eventually exterminating Jews, Slavs, Romani, and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state set in motion the Final Solution, an industrial system of genocide that carried out the mass murders of the Holocaust.