Hitler's Third Reich and World War II in the News is a daily edited review of WWII news, providing thought- provoking collection of hand-picked WW2 information.

Category: Nazi Party - NSDAP  -- See latest WWII news here. See also 'Nazi Uniforms', 'Gestapo', 'Causes of WW2', 'Munich: Nazi Party Stronghold', 'SS Daggers'.

Photos from the early days of SA and Nazi Party - thread at Axis History Forum
Axis History Forum thread has pictures from the early days of SA (Sturmabteilung) and NSDAP (Nazi Party, officially National Socialist German Workers' Party). Photographs include: Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm at Reichsparteitag 1933. Erich Ludendorff, Hitler and Ernst Röhm at the time of Hitlers trial 1924. Different SA-groups training. Julius Streicher posing...     [ forum.axishistory.com :: 2008-08-20 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Adolf Hitler ballot paper from 1933 German election goes up for auction
A ballot paper from the 1933 election that brought Adolf Hitler to power is to be auctioned. Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullock's Auctioneers, said that the ballot with a vote for the Nazi Party, was a document that had doomed the world to war. "Many people do not realise that Hitler did not come to power via a military takeover. He was democratically elected Chancellor of Germany." The paper, to be sold on June 25 at an auction of historical documents at Ludlow Racecourse, has the name of Hitler with those of Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering - and of Nazi Party leaders whom Hitler later murdered.     [ timesonline :: 2008-06-07 :: Nazi Relics: Personal items of leaders ]

German parliament marks Nazis' 1933 destruction of democracy
Germany's parliament remembered the Nazis' destruction of democracy after Adolf Hitler took power 75 years ago, and honoring those who held out against the Nazis' drive to crush out opposition. Hitler convinced ailing President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint him chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. A month later Hitler used the torching of the Reichstag to secure his grip on power, suspending civil liberties and suppressing parties. On March 23, parliament approved the Enabling Act, enabling Hitler's Cabinet to issue decrees without the need for approval and in reality giving him dictatorial powers.     [ iht :: 2008-04-10 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Pictures of SA Officer Viktor Lutze to be sold after 60 years in British home
The private life of one of Adolf Hitler's most feared henchmen has come to light. Viktor Lutze joined the Nazi party in 1922 and became an associate of the SA's first leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. In the Night of the Long Knives Hitler "purged" the SA (including Ernst Rohm) and made Lutze a chief of staff and ordered him to clean up the SA (the brownshirts). Yet private photos show him in the role of a family man. Other pics are truer to Lutze's image, like shots of him in full Nazi uniform. Photos, looted by senior allied officers from his home in 1944, show the care-free life he enjoyed away from the Führer.     [ dailymail :: 2008-04-09 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Hitler's Rise to Power - 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's attainment of power
It took the Führer just 12 years to plunge Europe into the gloomiest chapter of its history. But how did a failed painter manage to bring Germany under his thumb? It was a chilly winter day in 1933, and at 10 a.m., Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), made his way down Wilhelmstrasse. Hitler was on his way to the Reichskanzlei, seat of the Weimar Republic's govt, where his cabinet were to meet with President Paul von Hindenburg. The swearing-in ceremony was set for 11 a.m. It was a moment Hitler had been working towards for years. His first attempt, the Beer Hall Putsch in Nov. 1923, would fail in a hail of bullets in Munich.     [ spiegel :: 2008-01-31 :: Adolf Hitler: Dictator, Fuhrer, Biography ]

Former Nazi Munich Headquarters to become center of learning
Munich is attempting to face its past as the capital of the Nazi movement with a new documentation center in the former Nazi HQ: The Brown House on Munich's Brienner Strasse. It was in Munich that the National Socialist movement gained ground following the trauma of WWI. A young Adolf Hitler arranged a failed putsch in the Bavarian capital in 1923 and after coming to power in 1933, the Nazi leader chose Munich as the headquarters of Nazi movement. When the World War II came to an end, the American military government ordered the removal of all Nazi symbols (swastikas, flags, Nazi architecture). A cellar covered by grass was all that was left of the Brown House.     [ dw-world :: 2007-12-23 :: Nazi Architecture ]

Nazi Party voting paradox emerges in tale of two villages
The village in Germany that formed the most united front against the Nazis nestles next to one with total support of Adolf Hitler. This unlikely tale of two villages is told in "Hauenstein gegen Hitler" (Hauenstein against Hitler), by historian Theo Schwarzmueller, that sheds light on how religious differences influenced politics in Nazi Germany. In March 1933, the village of Hauenstein cast over 92% of its votes for a joint Catholic ticket fronted by the Centre Party. 3 years earlier, the nominally Protestant Darstein had become famous as the first village to vote exclusively for Hitler. It did so again in 1933.     [ reuters :: 2007-11-08 ]

Elderly Germans discover Hitler made them Nazi party members
Hundreds of elderly Germans are being confronted with the revelation that they were recruited into the Nazi party. Historians researching Nazi party archives in Frankfurt have discovered that a group of prominent Germans were among those automatically granted membership to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday. According to records, they were part of a group born 1925-1927 recruited en masse on the Führer's birthday on 20 April 1944. The findings have unleashed a debate over the extent to which Germans were willing followers of the Nazis and how many were unknowingly sucked into the party machine.     [ guardian :: 2007-07-17 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Aug. 20 -- Hitler Endorsed by 9 to 1 in Poll on his Dictatorship
89% of the German voters endorsed plebiscite Chancellor Hitler's assumption of greater power than has ever been possessed by any other ruler in modern times. The German people were asked to vote whether they approved the consolidation of the offices of President and Chancellor in a single Leader-Chancellor personified by Adolf Hitler. The endorsement gives Chancellor Hitler, who four years ago was not even a German citizen, dictatorial powers unequaled in any other country, and probably unequaled in history since Genghis Khan. The question that interests the world now is what Chancellor Hitler will do with such unprecedented authority.     [ hartford-hwp :: 2006-08-25 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Munich: Stronghold of the Nazi party - Hunting lost Nazi sites
Nazi past lingers in Munich: the birthplace and stronghold of the National Socialist party. As a boy Von Halasz found a picture of his grandfather in a WWII SS uniform. Curiosity led him wrote "Hunting Nazis in Munich," a book on lost sites tied with Adolf Hitler: The meeting place for the Thule Society, considered a precursor of the Nazi party. The house where Adolf Hitler stayed when he arrived in 1913, the site of the beer hall where the SS was founded, the room where the Nazi party proclaimed its 25-point program. Munich's beer hall culture helped the Nazi party take shape: At the Hofbräuhaus on Feb. 24, 1920, Hitler gave a 2 1/2 -hour speech to 2,000 supporters.     [ latimes :: 2006-07-30 :: Ruins & Bunkers of Third Reich ]

Nazi hero: Member of the Nazi party who saved 250,000
There was chaos on the streets of Nanjing in December 1937 when Japanese troops stormed the capital of China, bent on the slaughter still known as the "Rape of Nanking." For some a saviour was at hand: a member of the Nazi party who offered refuge and helped save the lives of more than 250,000 people. With his swastika armband, John Rabe seems an unlikely hero, but his courage and the selfless way he administered the safety zone means for many people here he remains the hero of Nanjing. Rabe's account of the Nanjing in his 1,200-page diary is detailed, and it has become a key account of the time. His story is soon to be turned into a Hollywood movie.     [ independent :: 2006-07-25 :: Nanjing: Massacre of Nanking ]

Uniformly dangerous dreamers - What drove the Nazis?
Adolf Hitler had no military experience apart from his time as a corporal during the WWI. By 1943 he was monopolising 72 state functions. Von Loringhoven's account of the final days in Führerbunker shows what dreamers the Nazis were, Hitler most of all. Heinrich Himmler was barely 40 when he directed the mass exterminations. He was aware of the need to legitimise the half-baked claptrap on which the Third Reich was based, a heady combination of historical fantasy, bad science of Ahnenerbe and neo-paganism. Dr Theodor Hupfauer, Albert Speer's right-hand man, has said how exciting those times were, The Nazi party was a young people's progressive party.     [ guardian :: 2006-07-08 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Max Hirschberg - Courtroom battles with Adolf Hitler and Nazi party
Max Hirschberg was fighting a desperate battle against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. In three trials in the late 1920s and early 1930s he faced off with Adolf Hitler in court. Colleagues warned Hirschberg he was risking a violent attack by Nazis if he played his trump card in a libel suit brought by Hitler against the Munich Post - He brought forward former Nazi Werner Abel, who was able to verify Hitler's backdoor deal with Benito Mussolini to surrender claims to the South Tyrol. In 1932 Hirschberg defended the Munich Post again, when a group of Nazis sued the paper for publishing an article that the faction planned to murder Ernst Rohm.     [ criminaldefensebkra :: 2006-06-19 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Third Reich and the British Royals in Nazi uniforms
One picture stands out among the many photographs included in this book. A teenage Prince Philip is shown in the front row at the 1937 funeral procession in Germany of his sister and brother-in-law (Nazi Party members both), who had died in an air crash. But what grabs the attention is not just the young man in his dark formal clothes, but the contrast Philip presents with the relatives flanking him, all of whom are in Nazi uniform. They are his 3 remaining brothers-in-law, including Prince Christoph of Hesse in SS regalia, as well as Christoph's brother, Prince Philipp of Hesse, decked out in the garb of the equally sinister SA, the Nazi Party's own army.     [ calendarlive :: 2006-05-23 :: British Nazis: Royals - Oswald Diana Mosley ]

Film examines religious leaders' support of Nazi Party
In 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, many of Germany's religious leaders viewed the Nazi Party as a vehicle for the country's spiritual revival. Three men in particular ­- all prominent Protestant theologians - saw Hitler's ascent to power as God's blessing. Paul Althaus, Gerhard Kittel and Emanuel Hirsch eventually joined the Nazi Party and to varying degrees rationalized Hitler's killing of millions of European Jews. The movie is based on Robert P. Erikson's book 'Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.'     [ columbiamissourian :: 2006-03-14 :: Religion in Nazi Germany ]

Fascists versus Nazis - Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany
Very early in the history of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, Anton Drexler, the founder of the National Socialist German Workers Party wrote that Mussolini was 'probably a Jew' and that Fascism was a 'Jewish movement.' When Hitler was in Landsberg Prison, Nazi racial theoretician Alfred Rosenberg and Drexler published articles and books condemning Mussolini for his ties to wealthy Italian Jews. They stopped only when Hitler himself ordered it.     [ americandaily :: 2006-02-21 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Man recalls his teen years among the Nazis - not a typical war story
It begins simply: "Jan Makkreel spent his teen years in the Netherlands during the Nazi invasion and occupation of WWII." A couple of pages later he drops a bomb: "I was labeled a teenage Nazi collaborator." His uncle joined the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, to fight the Russians. His uncle had a friend who became part of the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany. Although his uncle asked him to join the Youth Storm in Holland, a group similar to Hitler Youth, "that military stuff was not for me," Makkreel said... In spring 1945, even after his uncle had been shot and killed by a Dutch farmer, Makkreel remained a target of scorn, as he was labeled "Nazi lover".     [ heraldnet :: 2005-12-26 :: Homefront: Daily life during World War II ]

My Grandfather, the Nazi - One of the highest Nazis in Lower Silesia
What did grandfather do during the war? Jens Schanze deals with the question in his documentary "Winterkinder" (Winter's Children), a journey into his family's past. He was one of the Nazis highest functionaries in Lower Silesia, which now forms part of Poland. He was a member of the SA, Hitler's private storm troopers and a fervent anti-Semite. And he followed Hitler faithfully to the end.     [ Deutsche Welle :: 2005-12-19 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Britain ran torture camp in Germany after World War Two
Britain ran a secret prison in Germany for two years after the end of World War Two where inmates including Nazi party members were tortured and starved to death. Based on Foreign Office files which were opened after a request under the Freedom of Information act, the newspaper said Britain had held men and woman at a prison in Bad Nenndorf until July 1947. Locals at the time said you could hear prisoners scream at night.     [ guardian :: 2005-12-17 :: Allied dark side - Allied atrocities ]

Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany: Christian Nationalism, Anti-Semitism
The Nazis and Adolf Hitler are commonly thought of as representing the antithesis of Christianity and Christian values. If that's true, why did tens of millions of German Christians adore Hitler, join the Nazis, and participate in the Holocaust (among other atrocities)? Hitler and the Nazis promoted a Christian nationalism, anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and return to traditional values which most Christians appreciated. The Nazi party platform specifically endorsed 'positive' Christianity.     [ about.com :: 2005-12-03 :: Anti-semitism: History, WWII, Nazis ]

Hitler and Socialism: Why the Nazi party was not particularly socialist
Many conservatives insist that the Nazis were an example of a 'socialist' government as part of their effort to discredit socialism and leftist policies in general. During his drive to power, Hitler exploited social unrest by promising workers to strengthen their labor unions and increase their standard of living. But these were empty promises; privately, he was reassuring wealthy German businessmen that he would crack down on labor once he achieved power.     [ About.com :: 2005-11-02 :: Nazi Party - NSDAP ]

Talking to Hitler's lost tribe - Interviewing former Nazis
The award-winning film-maker Laurence Rees has spent the past 15 years tracking down and interviewing former Nazis. A remarkable photograph hangs on the wall of his office. It shows a convivial outdoor tea party of Magda Goebbels, her husband Josef, and inconspicuously in a corner, Adolf Hitler himself, taking tea and staring. He has almost certainly interviewed more former Nazis than any other Briton alive. It has been his quest for the past 15 years to track them down and persuade them to talk on camera with extraordinary and sometimes appalling frankness, in an attempt to understand what persuaded them to do what they did.     [ guardian :: 2005-08-17 :: World War II Interviews ]

Prince Charles Edward joined the Nazi party before the WW2
The Royal Family has had a closer brush with Nazism than fancy dress within living memory. Prince Charles Edward, a first cousin of the Queen's grandfather, joined the Nazi party before the Second World War and was fined by a de-Nazification tribunal after Germany's defeat. Charles Edward gave glowing reports of life under Hitler to his cousin Edward VIII. In the 1930s, Charles Edward joined the German National People's Party, which in 1933 went into coalition with Hitler's Nazis. When it was dissolved Charles Edward became a Nazi.     [ telegraph :: 2005-01-16 :: British Nazis: Royals - Oswald Diana Mosley ]

Rudolf Hess Speeches
Rudolf Hess was one of the first people to join the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). In November, 1923, Hess took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison. While in Landsberg Hess acted as Adolf Hitler's secretary to type Mein Kampf. --- Electing Adolf Hitler Führer, 8/4/1934: "National Socialists! Fellow German citizens! I have rarely given a speech as difficult as this one. It is a challenge to attempt to prove the good of something as obvious as Hitler's assumption of Hindenburg's position. For fourteen years I have been convinced that he is the only man able to master Germany's fate."     [ calvin :: 2001-07-29 :: Rudolf Hess - Debuty Fuehrer ]

See also

'Nazi Uniforms'

'Gestapo'

'Causes of WW2'

'Munich: Nazi Party Stronghold'

'SS Daggers'.

Although the articles linked from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich 1933-1945 and World War II in the News are reviewed and specially selected, they do not necessarily represent the views of the editor, who is not responsible for the content of any external sites. This service is © Joni Nuutinen 2005-2008. All rights reserved.