Nazism

The ideology behind Nazi dictatorship

Interwar Germany and the Nazi era

Nazism was the racist, extreme nationalist and totalitarian ideology associated with Adolf Hitler and his party. It rejected parliamentary democracy and imagined society as a racial hierarchy. Understanding these ideas helps explain why Nazi rule combined dictatorship, persecution and conquest.

An ideology, a party and a regime

These words describe connected but different things. Nazism refers to ideas; the Nazi Party was a political organisation; the Nazi regime was the system of rule established in Germany from 1933. A belief became state policy through people, institutions and decisions.

Who belonged—and who was excluded

Nazism treated supposed racial categories as determining human worth. Its claims about a German or “Aryan” master race were pseudo-science, not a valid description of humanity. Antisemitism made Jews a principal target of exclusion and persecution.

The Nuremberg Laws show how these ideas became legal discrimination. The later Holocaust was the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Ideology helps explain the aims of persecution; the regime’s institutions and the course of war explain how it was carried out.

Obedience and conquest

Hitler’s leader principle demanded obedience to superiors, with himself at the top. Opposition and the possibility of replacing the government were incompatible with that rule.

“Living space”, or Lebensraum, meant conquest and Germanisation in the east at the expense of the people already living there. Territorial expansion was therefore connected to racial policy, rather than being only a dispute over borders.

Explore further

• Adolf Hitler

  Leader who promoted the ideology.

• Nazi dictatorship

  How these ideas became state power.