187-692: The Jugendbund der NSDAP was a youth organisation attached to the Nazi Party and a predecessor to the Hitler Youth . It was effectively the youth section of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or Storm Troopers) and it existed between 1922 and 1923 when the Nazi Party was banned following the failed Munich Putsch . It contained three sections: This article about an organisation based in Germany
374-650: A fascist party with similar policies and objectives came into power in Italy, the National Fascist Party , under the leadership of the charismatic Benito Mussolini . The Fascists, like the Nazis, promoted a national rebirth of their country, as they opposed communism and liberalism; appealed to the working-class; opposed the Treaty of Versailles ; and advocated the territorial expansion of their country. Hitler
561-407: A form of government that prohibits opposition political parties , disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science , totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism , wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator , who also controls
748-461: A régime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) as Il Duce of The State. That Italian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopian worldview unlike the realistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power. Later, the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to
935-623: A totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich and became dictator with absolute power . Following the military defeat of Germany in World War II , the party was declared illegal. The Allies attempted to purge German society of Nazi elements in a process known as denazification . Several top leaders were tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trials , and executed. The use of symbols associated with
1122-486: A "people's community" ( Volksgemeinschaft ). The party aimed to unite "racially desirable" Germans as national comrades while excluding those deemed to be either political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race ( Fremdvölkische ). The Nazis sought to strengthen the Germanic people, the " Aryan master race ", through racial purity and eugenics , broad social welfare programs, and
1309-472: A Catholic monarch; and Westphalia , along with working-class "Red Berlin", were always the Nazis' weakest areas electorally, even during the Third Reich itself. The areas of strongest Nazi support were in rural Protestant areas such as Schleswig-Holstein , Mecklenburg , Pomerania and East Prussia . Depressed working-class areas such as Thuringia also produced a strong Nazi vote, while the workers of
1496-550: A Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic secret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships. Under Stalin , the Soviet Union was thus totalitarian, as was Mao 's China , Pol Pot 's Cambodia , Hitler 's Germany , and U Ne Win 's Burma . Totalitarianism is, then,
1683-579: A Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I. Drexler saw the political violence and instability in Germany as the result of the Weimar Republic being out-of-touch with the masses, especially the lower classes. Drexler emphasised the need for a synthesis of völkisch nationalism with a form of economic socialism , in order to create a popular nationalist-oriented workers' movement that could challenge
1870-590: A bystander lay dead. Hitler, Ludendorff and a number of others were arrested and were tried for treason in March 1924. Hitler and his associates were given very lenient prison sentences. While Hitler was in prison, he wrote his semi-autobiographical political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). The Nazi Party was banned on 9 November 1923; however, with the support of the nationalist Völkisch-Social Bloc ( Völkisch-Sozialer Block ), it continued to operate under
2057-489: A collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state on behalf of the people. To protect the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to disenfranchise, segregate, and eventually exterminate Jews , Romani , Slavs , the physically and mentally disabled , homosexuals , Jehovah's Witnesses , and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when
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#17327728360832244-527: A development which was formally documented by the merger of the offices of Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police on 17 June 1936, as the position was held by Heinrich Himmler who derived his authority directly from Hitler. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD, formally the "Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS") that had been created in 1931 as an intraparty intelligence became
2431-546: A high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Domenico Losurdo , totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and
2618-610: A league called the Freier Arbeiterausschuss für einen guten Frieden (Free Workers' Committee for a good Peace) was created in Bremen , Germany. On 7 March 1918, Anton Drexler , an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league in Munich . Drexler was a local locksmith who had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party during World War I and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and
2805-435: A military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict , of
2992-424: A ministerial-level post at any level in Germany. In 1931 the Nazi Party altered its strategy to engage in perpetual campaigning across the country, even outside of election time. During 1931 and into 1932, Germany's political crisis deepened. Hitler ran for president against the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg in March 1932, polling 30% in the first round and 37% in the second against Hindenburg's 49% and 53%. By now
3179-555: A month later. In January 1923, France occupied the Ruhr industrial region as a result of Germany's failure to meet its reparations payments. This led to economic chaos, the resignation of Wilhelm Cuno 's government and an attempt by the German Communist Party (KPD) to stage a revolution. The reaction to these events was an upsurge of nationalist sentiment. Nazi Party membership grew sharply to about 20,000, compared to
3366-517: A new South German nation with Austria . In vehemently attacking the man's arguments, Hitler made an impression on the other party members with his oratorical skills; according to Hitler, the "professor" left the hall acknowledging unequivocal defeat. Drexler encouraged him to join the DAP. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give
3553-523: A part of or aiding so-called " international Jewry ". The DAP was also deeply opposed to the Treaty of Versailles . The DAP did not attempt to make itself public and meetings were kept in relative secrecy, with public speakers discussing what they thought of Germany's present state of affairs , or writing to like-minded societies in Northern Germany . The DAP was a comparatively small group with fewer than 60 members. Nevertheless, it attracted
3740-419: A party member, abbreviates the party's name ( Nationalsozialist [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪst] ), and was coined in analogy with Sozi (pronounced [ˈzoːtsiː] ), an abbreviation of Sozialdemokrat (member of the rival Social Democratic Party of Germany ). Members of the party referred to themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), but some did occasionally embrace
3927-536: A political ideology for which a totalitarian government is the agency for realizing its ends. Thus, totalitarianism characterizes such ideologies as state socialism (as in Burma ), Marxism–Leninism as in former East Germany , and Nazism . Even revolutionary Muslim Iran , since the overthrow of the Shah in 1978–79 has been totalitarian—here totalitarianism was married to Muslim fundamentalism . In short, totalitarianism
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#17327728360834114-432: A political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the public sphere and in the private sphere . In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from
4301-510: A protest, but had now drawn back from the prospect of actually putting him into power. The Nazis interpreted the result as a warning that they must seize power before their moment passed. Had the other parties united, this could have been prevented, but their shortsightedness made a united front impossible. Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues that eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it
4488-616: A right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts, thus, the revisionist school dismiss traditionalist historians as the being the politically reactionary faculty of the HUAC school of scholarship about the Communist Party USA . In 1980, in a book review of How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of
4675-562: A shortened version of Ignatius , which was a common name in the Nazis' home region of Bavaria . Opponents seized on this, and the long-existing Sozi , to attach a dismissive nickname to the National Socialists. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power in the German government, the usage of "Nazi" diminished in Germany, although Austrian anti-Nazis continued to use the term. The use of " Nazi Germany " and "Nazi regime"
4862-615: A society divided along class and party lines. This ideology was explicitly antisemitic. As early as 1920, the party was raising money by selling a tobacco called Anti-Semit . From the outset, the DAP was opposed to non-nationalist political movements, especially on the left, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Members of the DAP saw themselves as fighting against " Bolshevism " and anyone considered
5049-488: A strict interpretation of Sharia law. Francoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictator Francisco Franco , has been characterized as a totalitarian state until at least the 1950s by scholars. Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism , the declared state religion . Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by
5236-693: A struggle against Communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of secular materialism and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order". That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to
5423-419: A thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups. Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism. Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an " invented tradition " and he believes that
5610-424: A traitor to the party. In the following days, Hitler spoke to several packed houses and defended himself and Esser to thunderous applause. Hitler's strategy proved successful; at a special party congress on 29 July 1921, he replaced Drexler as party chairman by a vote of 533 to 1. The committee was dissolved, and Hitler was granted nearly absolute powers in the party as its sole leader. He would hold
5797-519: A vanguard party that advanced socialist revolution , such as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962), Syrian Arab Republic (1963), and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978). In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as
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5984-685: A way out of this impasse. The electoral result was the same, with the Nazis and the Communists winning 50% of the vote between them and more than half the seats, rendering this Reichstag no more workable than its predecessor. However, support for the Nazis had fallen to 33.1%, suggesting that the Nazi surge had passed its peak—possibly because the worst of the Depression had passed, possibly because some middle-class voters had supported Hitler in July as
6171-585: A week. Unlike many other members of the organisation, this continued employment provided him with enough money to dedicate himself more fully to the DAP. Hitler's first DAP speech was held in the Hofbräukeller on 16 October 1919. He was the second speaker of the evening, and spoke to 111 people. Hitler later declared that this was when he realised he could really "make a good speech". At first, Hitler spoke only to relatively small groups, but his considerable oratory and propaganda skills were appreciated by
6358-504: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Nazi Party Final solution Parties The Nazi Party , officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( German : Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP ), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism . Its precursor,
6545-565: Is a brilliant speaker, we can hold out the prospect of an extremely exciting evening". Over the following months, the party continued to attract new members, while remaining too small to have any real significance in German politics. By the end of the year, party membership was recorded at 2,000, many of whom Hitler and Röhm had brought into the party personally, or for whom Hitler's oratory had been their reason for joining. Hitler's talent as an orator and his ability to draw new members, combined with his characteristic ruthlessness, soon made him
6732-596: Is everywhere unmistakable" in the decolonising countries of Eurasia . That revolutionary Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialisation (1929–1941) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only
6919-529: Is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilised and law-abiding society. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian. North Korea is the only country in East Asia to survive totalitarianism after the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and handed over to his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011, as of today in
7106-459: Is the ideology of absolute power. State socialism, Communism , Nazism, fascism , and Muslim fundamentalism have been some of its recent raiments. Totalitarian governments have been its agency. The state, with its international legal sovereignty and independence, has been its base. As will be pointed out, mortacracy is the result. In exercising the power of government upon a society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates
7293-607: The Reichswehr remained impartial. Nazi power over Germany remained virtual, not absolute. The Nazis embarked on a campaign of Gleichschaltung (coordination) to exert their control over all aspects of German government and society. During June and July 1933, all competing parties were either outlawed or dissolved themselves and subsequently the Law Against the Formation of Parties of 14 July 1933 legally established
7480-771: The Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy (1922–1943) the representative Totalitarian State : "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish
7667-520: The Republic ( res publica ) proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece , from Hegel 's conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and from the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th century —yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute the historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because
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7854-425: The nomenklatura , the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of
8041-635: The Bolsheviks , resonated with wide sections of the electorate. At the September 1930 Reichstag elections , the Nazis won 18% of the votes and became the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. Hitler proved to be a highly effective campaigner, pioneering the use of radio and aircraft for this purpose. His dismissal of Strasser and his appointment of Goebbels as
8228-609: The German Workers' Party ( Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist (" Völkisch nationalist "), racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post– World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti– big business , anti- bourgeois , and anti-capitalist rhetoric; it
8415-457: The Iraqi insurgency , under the name " Islamic State of Iraq ". Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , the organization later changed its name to the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" in 2013. The group espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a fundamentalist hybrid of Global Jihadism , Wahhabism , and Qutbism . Following its territorial expansion in 2014 , the group renamed itself as
8602-621: The Ruhr and Hamburg largely remained loyal to the Social Democrats , the Communist Party of Germany or the Catholic Centre Party . Nuremberg remained a Nazi Party stronghold, and the first Nuremberg Rally was held there in 1927. These rallies soon became massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power and attracted many recruits. The Nazis' strongest appeal was to the lower middle-classes—farmers, public servants, teachers and small businessmen—who had suffered most from
8789-573: The de facto intelligence agency of Nazi Germany. It was put under the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939, which then coordinated SD, Gestapo and criminal police , therefore functioning as a hybrid organisation of state and party structures. Officially, Nazi Germany lasted only 12 years. The Instrument of Surrender was signed by representatives of the German High Command at Berlin , on 8 May 1945, when
8976-554: The legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader . After the Second World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the terms totalitarian , totalitarianism , and totalitarian model . In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy , McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism
9163-423: The totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version of Communist Russia . The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of politburo policies upon Soviet society, civil and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists said that
9350-517: The totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin , who heads a monolithic, centralised hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the politburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: (i) traditionalist Kremlinology and (ii) revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for
9537-414: The worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty." Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature", whereas
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#17327728360839724-644: The "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate that sought domination over the Muslim world and established what has been described as a " political-religious totalitarian regime ". The quasi-state held significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the Third Iraq War and the Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , who imposed
9911-671: The "Night of the Long Knives"), Hitler disempowered the SA's leadership—most of whom belonged to the Strasserist (national revolutionary) faction within the NSDAP—and ordered them killed. He accused them of having conspired to stage a coup d'état , but it is believed that this was only a pretense to justify the suppression of any intraparty opposition. The purge was executed by the SS, assisted by
10098-408: The "blind and incurable" ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of
10285-454: The "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens", by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police , and monopolistic control of industrial mass society ." From the right-wing perspective, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism , which the philosopher Karl Popper said originated from humanist philosophy ; from
10472-512: The 1929 Lateran Treaty , under the leadership of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International , in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label totalitarian
10659-414: The 1950s, the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich said that Communist states , such as Soviet Russia and Red China , were countries systematically controlled with the five features of the totalitarian model of government by a supreme leader: (i) an official dominant ideology that includes a cult of personality about the leader, (ii) control of all civil and military weapons, (iii) control of
10846-401: The 21st century. Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading , contact tracing , and various applications of artificial intelligence . Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world government , and in turn
11033-489: The Church, along with divorces. Divorce, contraception and abortions were forbidden. According to historian Stanley G. Payne , Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne,
11220-473: The Communist world , other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I , without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in
11407-697: The Control Council Law no. 2 Providing for the Termination and Liquidation of the Nazi Organization specified the abolition of 52 other Nazi affiliated and supervised organisations and outlawed their activities. The denazification was carried out in Germany and continued until the onset of the Cold War. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi Party led regime, assisted by collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries,
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#173277283608311594-562: The Gestapo and Reichswehr units. Aside from Strasserist Nazis, they also murdered anti-Nazi conservative figures like former chancellor von Schleicher. After this, the SA continued to exist but lost much of its importance, while the role of the SS grew significantly. Formerly only a sub-organisation of the SA, it was made into a separate organisation of the NSDAP in July 1934. Upon the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged
11781-539: The Government of the USSR to adjust public policy to the actual political economy of a Soviet society composed of pre–War and post–War generations of people with different perceptions of the utility of Communist economics for all the Russias. Hence, Russian modern history had outdated the totalitarian model that was the post– Stalinist perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s. The historiography of
11968-466: The Nature of Mass Movements (1951), Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such mass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining
12155-424: The Nazi Party might never have come to power had it not been for the Great Depression and its effects on Germany. By 1930, the German economy was beset with mass unemployment and widespread business failures. The Social Democrats and Communists were bitterly divided and unable to formulate an effective solution: this gave the Nazis their opportunity and Hitler's message, blaming the crisis on the Jewish financiers and
12342-404: The Nazi Party's monopoly. On 1 December 1933, the Law to Secure the Unity of Party and State entered into force, which was the base for a progressive intertwining of party structures and state apparatus. By this law, the SA—actually a party division—was given quasi-governmental authority and their Stabschef became a cabinet minister without portfolio . By virtue of the 30 January 1934 Law on
12529-409: The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip . In the mid 20th-century, the German academics Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer traced the origin of totalitarianism to the Age of Reason (17th–18th centuries), especially to the anthropocentrist proposition that: "Man has become the master of
12716-416: The Nazi regime. Hitler later claimed to be the seventh party member. He was, in fact, the seventh executive member of the party's central committee and he would later wear the Golden Party Badge number one. Anton Drexler drafted a letter to Hitler in 1940—which was never sent—that contradicts Hitler's later claim: No one knows better than you yourself, my Führer, that you were never the seventh member of
12903-482: The Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of collective leadership . The American historian Walter Laqueur agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski. In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968)
13090-434: The Reconstruction of the Reich , the Länder (states) lost their sovereignty and were demoted to administrative divisions of the Reich government. Effectively, they lost most of their power to the Gaue that were originally just regional divisions of the party, but took over most competencies of the state administration in their respective sectors. During the Röhm Purge of 30 June to 2 July 1934 (also known as
13277-433: The SA had 400,000 members and its running street battles with the SPD and Communist paramilitaries (who also fought each other) reduced some German cities to combat zones. Paradoxically, although the Nazis were among the main instigators of this disorder, part of Hitler's appeal to a frightened and demoralised middle class was his promise to restore law and order. Overt antisemitism was played down in official Nazi rhetoric, but
13464-725: The SA retained some autonomy. Being composed largely of unemployed workers, many SA men took the Nazis' socialist rhetoric seriously. At this time, the Hitler salute (borrowed from the Italian fascists ) and the greeting "Heil Hitler!" were adopted throughout the party. The Nazis contested elections to the national parliament (the Reichstag ) and to the state legislature (the Landtage ) from 1924, although at first with little success. The " National Socialist Freedom Movement " polled 3% of
13651-580: The Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism." Into the 21st century, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West. According to some scholars, calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be
13838-517: The Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of
14025-518: The Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward social mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became Stalinists loyal to
14212-616: The State to share profits of land and land for national needs to be taken away without compensation. In general, the manifesto was antisemitic , anti-capitalist , anti-democratic , anti-Marxist and anti-liberal . To increase its appeal to larger segments of the population, on the same day as Hitler's Hofbräuhaus speech on 24 February 1920, the DAP changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ("National Socialist German Workers' Party", or Nazi Party). The name
14399-410: The USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography. Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism inherent to Marxism , to Communism , and to the political nature of Communist states , such as
14586-436: The USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy. The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising
14773-415: The USSR. Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola , transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. The revisionist social history indicated that the social forces of Soviet society had compelled
14960-422: The USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country. As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that
15147-483: The USSR. Moreover, traditionalist historians criticise the politically liberal bias they perceive in the predominance of revisionist historians in academic publishing, and claim that revisionist-school historians also over-populate the faculties of colleges, universities, and think tanks . Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history, and so produce anti-communist history biased towards
15334-502: The USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism. In the case of East Germany , (0000) Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur posited that
15521-550: The USSR]." In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda. In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010),
15708-674: The Weimar Republic government. Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 gave Hitler a pretext for suppressing his political opponents. The following day he persuaded the Reich's President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree , which suspended most civil liberties . The NSDAP won the parliamentary election on 5 March 1933 with 44% of votes, but failed to win an absolute majority. After
15895-475: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State . In the early 20th century, Giovanni Gentile proposed Italian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people". In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933),
16082-520: The approximate 6,000 at the beginning of 1923. By November 1923, Hitler had decided that the time was right for an attempt to seize power in Munich, in the hope that the Reichswehr (the post-war German military) would mutiny against the Berlin government and join his revolt. In this, he was influenced by former General Erich Ludendorff , who had become a supporter—though not a member—of the Nazis. On
16269-670: The attention of the German authorities, who were suspicious of any organisation that appeared to have subversive tendencies. In July 1919, while stationed in Munich , army Gefreiter Adolf Hitler was appointed a Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance unit) of the Reichswehr (army) by Captain Mayr , the head of the Education and Propaganda Department (Dept Ib/P) in Bavaria . Hitler
16456-477: The class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone". Saladdin posited that while Chile under Pinochet had no "official ideology", there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than Milton Friedman , the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago Boys , was Pinochet's adviser". In this sense, Saladdin criticised the totalitarian concept because it
16643-516: The colloquial Nazi (so Leopold von Mildenstein in his article series Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina published in Der Angriff in 1934). The term Parteigenosse (party member) was commonly used among Nazis, with its corresponding feminine form Parteigenossin . Before the rise of the party, these terms had been used as colloquial and derogatory words for a backward peasant , or an awkward and clumsy person. It derived from Ignaz,
16830-630: The concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny." José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones , the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA), declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it." General Francisco Franco
17017-494: The destruction of rival political parties, organisations, and independent centres of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries. Some totalitarian one-party states were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to
17204-667: The discredited Social Democrats and the Zentrum, whose leader, Heinrich Brüning , headed a weak minority government. The inability of the democratic parties to form a united front, the self-imposed isolation of the Communists and the continued decline of the economy, all played into Hitler's hands. He now came to be seen as de facto leader of the opposition and donations poured into the Nazi Party's coffers. Some major business figures, such as Fritz Thyssen , were Nazi supporters and gave generously and some Wall Street figures were allegedly involved, but many other businessmen were suspicious of
17391-453: The dominant figure. However, while Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin in June 1921, a mutiny broke out within the party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP). Upon returning to Munich on 11 July, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that his resignation would mean the end of
17578-403: The economic and political situation had stabilised and the extremist upsurge of 1923 had faded, so there was no prospect of further revolutionary adventures. Instead, Hitler intended to alter the party's strategy to achieving power through what he called the "path of legality". The Nazi Party of 1925 was divided into the "Leadership Corps" ( Korps der politischen Leiter ) appointed by Hitler and
17765-420: The election, hundreds of thousands of new members joined the party for opportunistic reasons, most of them civil servants and white-collar workers. They were nicknamed the "casualties of March" (German: Märzgefallenen ) or "March violets" (German: Märzveilchen ). To protect the party from too many non-ideological turncoats who were viewed by the so-called "old fighters" (alte Kämpfer) with some mistrust,
17952-536: The end of the Cold War". In the 1990s, François Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. Eric Hobsbawm criticised Furet for his temptation to stress the existence of a common ground between two systems with different ideological roots. In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion , Žižek wrote that "[t]he liberating effect" of General Augusto Pinochet 's arrest "was exceptional", as "the fear of Pinochet dissipated,
18139-415: The entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the majority Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women's rights . The Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist militant group that was established in 2006 by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi during
18326-599: The essay "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers" (1994) the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel said that: There is much confusion about what is meant by totalitarian in the literature, including the denial that such [political] systems even exist. I define a totalitarian state as one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by
18513-546: The establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship. The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and returned to power in 2021 , controlling
18700-410: The exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian régime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview , authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power, and is supported, either jointly or individually, by a military junta and by
18887-504: The extreme nationalist tendencies of the Nazis and preferred to support the traditional conservative parties instead. In 1930, as the price for joining a coalition government of the Land (state) of Thuringia , the Nazi Party received the state ministries of the Interior and Education. On 23 January 1930, Wilhelm Frick was appointed to these ministries, becoming the first Nazi to hold
19074-402: The foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology , the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the politburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with
19261-613: The formation of a majority government impossible. The result was weak ministries governing by decree. Under Comintern directives, the Communists maintained their policy of treating the Social Democrats as the main enemy, calling them " social fascists ", thereby splintering opposition to the Nazis. Later, both the Social Democrats and the Communists accused each other of having facilitated Hitler's rise to power by their unwillingness to compromise. Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, hoping to find
19448-752: The general membership ( Parteimitglieder ). The party and the SA were kept separate and the legal aspect of the party's work was emphasised. In a sign of this, the party began to admit women. The SA and the SS members (the latter founded in 1925 as Hitler's bodyguard, and known originally as the Schutzkommando ) had to all be regular party members. In the 1920s the Nazi Party expanded beyond its Bavarian base. At this time, it began surveying voters in order to determine what they were dissatisfied with in Germany, allowing Nazi propaganda to be altered accordingly. Catholic Bavaria maintained its right-wing nostalgia for
19635-621: The historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of
19822-527: The historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into
20009-425: The ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defence of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term totalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of
20196-409: The imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicise human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarised with the epigram: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism , contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of
20383-461: The impression they were a much larger party). Among the party's earlier members were Ernst Röhm of the Army's District Command VII; Dietrich Eckart, who has been called the spiritual father of National Socialism; then- University of Munich student Rudolf Hess ; Freikorps soldier Hans Frank ; and Alfred Rosenberg , often credited as the philosopher of the movement. All were later prominent in
20570-509: The inflation of the 1920s, so who feared Bolshevism more than anything else. The small business class was receptive to Hitler's antisemitism, since it blamed Jewish big business for its economic problems. University students, disappointed at being too young to have served in the War of 1914–1918 and attracted by the Nazis' radical rhetoric, also became a strong Nazi constituency. By 1929, the party had 130,000 members. The party's nominal Deputy Leader
20757-510: The isolationist Falangist movement . This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the " Spanish miracle ". This is comparable to De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of economic freedom . The city of Geneva under John Calvin 's leadership has also been characterised as totalitarian by scholars. The death of Stalin in 1953 voided
20944-417: The key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass mobilization , Arendt wrote: "While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations.... [E]ven Mussolini, who
21131-434: The lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world." However, from 1959 to 1974 the " Spanish Miracle " took place under the leadership of technocrats , many of whom were members of Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old Falangist guard. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky , reassigning economic authority from
21318-466: The making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Toby Ord believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent technological dystopia . Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern
21505-535: The mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titled The Soviet Impact on the Western World , the British historian E. H. Carr said that "the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism
21692-505: The millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s." In Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022),
21879-609: The minds of unknown agitators and crackpots. In the essay "The 'Dark Forces', the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History" (1987), by J.F. Hough, and in the book The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution (2019), by Alexander Riley, the historians said that the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lenin was the first politician to establish a sovereign state of the totalitarian model. As
22066-562: The moral order of their respective societies; and collaborated with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture. In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism , totalitarian , and totalitarian model , presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in
22253-549: The movement. Later in 1918, Karl Harrer (a journalist and member of the Thule Society ) convinced Drexler and several others to form the Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel (Political Workers' Circle). The members met periodically for discussions with themes of nationalism and racism directed against Jewish people. In December 1918, Drexler decided that a new political party should be formed, based on
22440-522: The name "German Party" ( Deutsche Partei or DP) from 1924 to 1925. The Nazis failed to remain unified in the DP, as in the north, the right-wing Volkish nationalist supporters of the Nazis moved to the new German Völkisch Freedom Party , leaving the north's left-wing Nazi members, such as Joseph Goebbels retaining support for the party. Pardoned by the Bavarian Supreme Court, Hitler
22627-413: The national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media . The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, the sciences, and the private-life morality of the citizens. In
22814-476: The new Fascist Italy (1922–1943) , which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (subservience to the state) determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the lives of the Italian people. That to achieve the Fascist utopia in
23001-472: The night of 8 November, the Nazis used a patriotic rally in a Munich beer hall to launch an attempted putsch ("coup d'état"). This so-called Beer Hall Putsch attempt failed almost at once when the local Reichswehr commanders refused to support it. On the morning of 9 November, the Nazis staged a march of about 2,000 supporters through Munich in an attempt to rally support. The two groups exchanged fire, after which 15 putschists, four police officers, and
23188-536: The notion of "modern despotism " is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present". Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to Shoshana Zuboff , the economic pressures of modern surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at
23375-818: The offices of party leader, head of state and chief of government in one, taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler by passage of the Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich . The Chancellery of the Führer , officially an organisation of the Nazi Party, took over the functions of the Office of the President (a government agency), blurring the distinction between structures of party and state even further. The SS increasingly exerted police functions,
23562-407: The official texts of the totalitarian ideology. In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar ' culture war ' crystallized as
23749-680: The old image of the Stalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society. After the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact , most revisionist Kremlinologists worked the national archives of ex–Communist states, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation about Soviet-period Russia. In
23936-596: The party is still outlawed in many European countries, including Germany and Austria. The renaming of the German Worker's Party (DAP) to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) was partially driven by a desire to draw upon both left-wing and right-wing ideals, with "Socialist" and "Workers'" appealing to the left, and "National" and "German" appealing to the right. Nazi , the informal and originally derogatory term for
24123-646: The party issued a freeze on admissions that remained in force from May 1933 to 1937. On 23 March, the parliament passed the Enabling Act of 1933 , which gave the cabinet the right to enact laws without the consent of parliament. In effect, this gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Now possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control as they abolished labour unions and other political parties and imprisoned their political opponents, first at wilde Lager , improvised camps, then in concentration camps . Nazi Germany had been established, yet
24310-542: The party leadership. With the support of Anton Drexler, Hitler became chief of propaganda for the party in early 1920. Hitler began to make the party more public, and organised its biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people on 24 February 1920 in the Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München . Such was the significance of this particular move in publicity that Karl Harrer resigned from the party in disagreement. It
24497-433: The party supported the middle-class and that its socialist policy was meant to give social welfare to German citizens deemed part of the Aryan race. They became one of many völkisch movements that existed in Germany. Like other völkisch groups, the DAP advocated the belief that through profit-sharing instead of socialisation Germany should become a unified "people's community" ( Volksgemeinschaft ) rather than
24684-638: The party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and business manager Max Amann . The party had a capable propaganda head in Gregor Strasser , who was promoted to national organizational leader in January 1928. These men gave the party efficient recruitment and organizational structures. The party also owed its growth to the gradual fading away of competitor nationalist groups, such as the German National People's Party (DNVP). As Hitler became
24871-546: The party were always German nationalist expansionism and antisemitism . These two goals were fused in his mind by his belief that Germany's external enemies—Britain, France and the Soviet Union—were controlled by the Jews and that Germany's future wars of national expansion would necessarily entail a war of annihilation against them. For Hitler and his principal lieutenants, national and racial issues were always dominant. This
25058-545: The party's most active orator, appearing in public as a speaker 31 times within the first year after his self-discovery. Crowds began to flock to hear his speeches. Hitler always spoke about the same subjects: the Treaty of Versailles and the Jewish question . This deliberate technique and effective publicising of the party contributed significantly to his early success, about which a contemporary poster wrote: "Since Herr Hitler
25245-505: The party's propaganda chief were major factors. While Strasser had used his position to promote his own leftish version of national socialism, Goebbels was completely loyal to Hitler, and worked only to improve Hitler's image. The 1930 elections changed the German political landscape by weakening the traditional nationalist parties, the DNVP and the DVP, leaving the Nazis as the chief alternative to
25432-405: The party, but at best the seventh member of the committee... And a few years ago I had to complain to a party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP, bearing the signatures of Schüssler and myself, was falsified, with the number 555 being erased and number 7 entered. Although Hitler initially wanted to form his own party, he claimed to have been convinced to join the DAP because it
25619-580: The party-controlled German state set in motion the Final Solution – an industrial system of genocide that carried out mass murders of around 6 million Jews and millions of other targeted victims in what has become known as the Holocaust . Adolf Hitler , the party's leader since 1921, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933, and quickly seized power afterwards. Hitler established
25806-423: The party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed, and he rejoined the party on 26 July as member 3,680. Hitler continued to face some opposition within the NSDAP, as his opponents had Hermann Esser expelled from the party and they printed 3,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking Hitler as
25993-556: The person had a spouse, the spouse also had to be a "racially pure" Aryan. Party members could not be related either directly or indirectly to a so-called "non-Aryan". Even before it had become legally forbidden by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the Nazis banned sexual relations and marriages between party members and Jews. Party members found guilty of Rassenschande ("racial defilement") were persecuted heavily. Some members were even sentenced to death. Hitler quickly became
26180-471: The physically and mentally disabled. The National Socialist Programme was a formulation of the policies of the party. It contained 25 points and is therefore also known as the "25-point plan" or "25-point programme". It was the official party programme, with minor changes, from its proclamation as such by Hitler in 1920, when the party was still the German Workers' Party, until its dissolution. At
26367-657: The political principles that he endorsed, by combining his branch of the Workers' Committee for a good Peace with the Political Workers' Circle. On 5 January 1919, Drexler created a new political party and proposed it should be named the "German Socialist Workers' Party", but Harrer objected to the term "socialist"; so the term was removed and the party was named the German Workers' Party ( Deutsche Arbeiterpartei , DAP). To ease concerns among potential middle-class supporters, Drexler made clear that unlike Marxists
26554-428: The political scientist Raymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: Laure Neumayer posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at
26741-443: The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way said that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes if not destroyed with a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as a social revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a military coup d'état ). For example, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were founded after
26928-497: The post for the remainder of his life. Hitler soon acquired the title Führer ("leader") and after a series of sharp internal conflicts it was accepted that the party would be governed by the Führerprinzip ("leader principle"). Under this principle, the party was a highly centralised entity that functioned strictly from the top down, with Hitler at the apex. Hitler saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, whose aim
27115-425: The public and the private mass communications media , (iv) the use of state terrorism to police the populace, and (v) a political party of mass membership who perpetually re-elect The Leader. In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and studied the policies of the relatively autonomous bureaucracies that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in
27302-431: The recognised head of the German nationalists, other groups declined or were absorbed. In the late 1920s, seeing the party's lack of breakthrough into the mainstream, Goebbels proposed that instead of focusing all of their propaganda in major cities where there was competition from other political movements, they should instead begin holding rallies in rural areas where they would be more effective. Despite these strengths,
27489-513: The revisionists in the field of Soviet history were guilty of confusing popularity with morality and of making highly embarrassing and not very convincing arguments against the concept of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. Laqueur stated that the revisionists' arguments with regard to Soviet history were highly similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte regarding German history. For Laqueur, concepts such as modernisation were inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history while totalitarianism
27676-453: The revolutionary upheavals that followed. Drexler followed the views of militant nationalists of the day, such as opposing the Treaty of Versailles , having antisemitic , anti-monarchist and anti-Marxist views, as well as believing in the superiority of Germans whom they claimed to be part of the Aryan " master race " ( Herrenvolk ). However, he also accused international capitalism of being
27863-481: The rise of communism and internationalist politics . These were all well-known themes popular with various Weimar paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps . Drexler's movement received attention and support from some influential figures. Supporter Dietrich Eckart , a well-to-do journalist, brought military figure Felix Graf von Bothmer , a prominent supporter of the concept of "national socialism", to address
28050-533: The simplistic totalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome of the totalitarian state . A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government. That the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomised by
28237-692: The socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country. Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian. Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance -policing of public places; and state terrorism . In
28424-659: The spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself". Saladdin Ahmed cited Hannah Arendt as stating that "the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term after Stalin's death ", writing that "this was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from
28611-612: The survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict , of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism (Law of History) or by an appeal to nature , as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus. In The True Believer: Thoughts on
28798-406: The top of the Nazi Party was the party chairman (" Der Führer "), who held absolute power and full command over the party. All other party offices were subordinate to his position and had to depend on his instructions. In 1934, Hitler founded a separate body for the chairman, Chancellery of the Führer , with its own sub-units. Totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a political system and
28985-471: The totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union —because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose." That the legitimacy of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of
29172-487: The totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper. Revisionist historians noted
29359-400: The violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State. Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and
29546-480: The vote in the December 1924 Reichstag elections and this fell to 2.6% in 1928 . State elections produced similar results. Despite these poor results and despite Germany's relative political stability and prosperity during the later 1920s, the Nazi Party continued to grow. This was partly because Hitler, who had no administrative ability, left the party organisation to the head of the secretariat, Philipp Bouhler ,
29733-769: The war ended in Europe. The party was formally abolished on 10 October 1945 by the Allied Control Council , followed by the process of denazification along with trials of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. Part of the Potsdam Agreement called for the destruction of the Nazi Party alongside the requirement for the reconstruction of the German political life. In addition,
29920-478: The world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history", which excludes the intervention of supernatural beings to earthly politics of government. American historian William Rubinstein wrote that: The 'Age of Totalitarianism' included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by the Jewish Holocaust , but also comprising the mass murders and purges of
30107-403: The years long Russian Civil War (1917-1922) and Chinese Civil War (1927-1936 and 1945-1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive ruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii)
30294-520: Was Gauleiter of Franconia , where he published his antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer . Beneath the Gauleiter were lower-level officials, the Kreisleiter ("county leaders"), Zellenleiter ("cell leaders") and Blockleiter ("block leaders"). This was a strictly hierarchical structure in which orders flowed from the top and unquestioning loyalty was given to superiors. Only
30481-450: Was Rudolf Hess , but he had no real power in the party. By the early 1930s, the senior leaders of the party after Hitler were Heinrich Himmler , Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring . Beneath the Leadership Corps were the party's regional leaders, the Gauleiters , each of whom commanded the party in his Gau ("region"). Goebbels began his ascent through the party hierarchy as Gauleiter of Berlin-Brandenburg in 1926. Streicher
30668-471: Was a backlash against socialist and liberal politics in Bavaria as Germany's economic problems deepened and the weakness of the Weimar regime became apparent. The party recruited former World War I soldiers, to whom Hitler as a decorated frontline veteran could particularly appeal, as well as small businessmen and disaffected former members of rival parties. Nazi rallies were often held in beer halls, where downtrodden men could get free beer. The Hitler Youth
30855-426: Was an existential threat to Western civilisation , and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by client-state proxies of the US and the USSR. During the Russo–American Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of Kremlinology (analysing politburo policy politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by
31042-513: Was assigned to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the DAP. While Hitler was initially unimpressed by the meetings and found them disorganised, he enjoyed the discussion that took place. While attending a party meeting on 12 September 1919 at Munich's Sterneckerbräu , Hitler became involved in a heated argument with a visitor, Professor Baumann, who questioned the soundness of Gottfried Feder 's arguments against capitalism; Baumann proposed that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found
31229-663: Was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), in the essay " Why I Write " (1946), the socialist George Orwell said, "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism , as I understand it." That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use
31416-507: Was formed for the children of party members. The party also formed groups in other parts of Germany. Julius Streicher in Nuremberg was an early recruit and became editor of the racist magazine Der Stürmer . In December 1920, the Nazi Party had acquired a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter , of which its leading ideologist Alfred Rosenberg became editor. Others to join the party around this time were Heinrich Himmler and World War I flying ace Hermann Göring . On 31 October 1922,
31603-750: Was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four . In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently". That same year, Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states". In 2016, The Economist described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping 's administration , to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian . Opponents of China's ranking system say that it
31790-477: Was in this speech that Hitler enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Workers' Party manifesto that had been drawn up by Drexler, Feder and himself. Through these points he gave the organisation a much bolder stratagem with a clear foreign policy (abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a Greater Germany , Eastern expansion and exclusion of Jews from citizenship) and among his specific points were: confiscation of war profits , abolition of unearned incomes,
31977-447: Was inspired by Mussolini and the Fascists, beginning to adopt elements of their program for the Nazi Party and himself. The Italian Fascists also used a straight-armed Roman salute and wore black-shirted uniforms; Hitler would later borrow their use of the straight-armed salute as a Nazi salute . When the Fascists took control of Italy through their coup d'état called the " March on Rome ", Hitler began planning his own coup less than
32164-509: Was intended to draw upon both left-wing and right-wing ideals, with "Socialist" and "Workers'" appealing to the left, and "National" and "German" appealing to the right. The word "Socialist" was added by the party's executive committee (at the suggestion of Rudolf Jung ), over Hitler's initial objections, in order to help appeal to left-wing workers. In 1920, the Nazi Party officially announced that only persons of "pure Aryan descent [ rein arischer Abkunft ]" could become party members and if
32351-400: Was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression , when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism. Central to Nazism were themes of racial segregation expressed in the idea of
32538-414: Was never far from the surface. Germans voted for Hitler primarily because of his promises to revive the economy (by unspecified means), to restore German greatness and overturn the Treaty of Versailles and to save Germany from communism. On 24 April 1932, the Free State of Prussia elections to the Landtag resulted in 36% of the votes and 162 seats for the NSDAP. On 20 July 1932, the Prussian government
32725-424: Was not exclusively for any class and indicated that it favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved "pure" elements from both "camps" by stating: "From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism". The votes that the Nazis received in the 1932 elections established the Nazi Party as the largest parliamentary faction of
32912-505: Was not. Laqueur's argument has been criticised by modern "revisionist school" historians such as Paul Buhle , who said that Laqueur wrongly equates Cold War revisionism with the German revisionism; the latter reflected a "revanchist, military-minded conservative nationalism." Moreover, Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked
33099-476: Was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten, Vladimir Tismăneanu , and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus on utopianism , scientism , or political violence . They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy as
33286-435: Was ousted by a coup, the Preussenschlag ; a few days later at the July 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis made another leap forward, polling 37% and becoming the largest party in parliament by a wide margin. Furthermore, the Nazis and the Communists between them won 52% of the vote and a majority of seats. Since both parties opposed the established political system and neither would join or support any ministry, this made
33473-419: Was popularised by anti-Nazis and German exiles abroad. Thereafter, the term spread into other languages and eventually was brought back to Germany after World War II. In English, the term is not considered slang and has such derivatives as Nazism and denazification . The Nazi Party grew out of smaller political groups with a nationalist orientation that formed in the last years of World War I . In 1918,
33660-481: Was released from prison on 20 December 1924, against the state prosecutor's objections. On 16 February 1925, Hitler convinced the Bavarian authorities to lift the ban on the NSDAP and the party was formally refounded on 26 February 1925, with Hitler as its undisputed leader. It was at this time Hitler began referring to himself as " der Führer ". The new Nazi Party was no longer a paramilitary organisation and disavowed any intention of taking power by force. In any case,
33847-418: Was responsible for the deaths of at least eleven million people, including 5.5 to 6 million Jews (representing two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), and between 200,000 and 1,500,000 Romani people . The estimated total number includes the killing of nearly two million non-Jewish Poles , over three million Soviet prisoners of war , communists , and other political opponents, homosexuals,
34034-493: Was safe to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor, at the head of a cabinet including only a minority of Nazi ministers—which he did on 30 January 1933. In Mein Kampf , Hitler directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany. However, a majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far-right form of politics. When asked in an interview in 1934 whether the Nazis were "bourgeois right-wing" as alleged by their opponents, Hitler responded that Nazism
34221-450: Was small and he could eventually become its leader. He consequently encouraged the organisation to become less of a debating society, which it had been previously, and more of an active political party. Normally, enlisted army personnel were not allowed to join political parties. In this case, Hitler had Captain Karl Mayr 's permission to join the DAP. Further, Hitler was allowed to stay in the army and receive his weekly pay of 20 gold marks
34408-417: Was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule ." For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Also, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in Vatican City per
34595-444: Was symbolised by the adoption as the party emblem of the swastika . In German nationalist circles, the swastika was considered a symbol of an " Aryan race " and it symbolised the replacement of the Christian Cross with allegiance to a National Socialist State. The Nazi Party grew significantly during 1921 and 1922, partly through Hitler's oratorical skills, partly through the SA's appeal to unemployed young men, and partly because there
34782-403: Was the overthrow of the Weimar Republic , which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the " November criminals ", a term invented to describe alleged elements of society who had 'betrayed the German soldiers' in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties. For Hitler, the twin goals of
34969-423: Was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill 's speech of 5 October 1938 before the House of Commons , in opposition to the Munich Agreement , by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland . Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency . In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying
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