National Socialist Program - German Party Program

German Party Program

In Munich, on 24 February 1920, Adolf Hitler publicly proclaimed the 25-point Program of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), when the Nazis were still known as the DAP (German Workers Party). They retained the National Socialist Program upon renaming themselves as the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in April 1920, and it remained the Party’s official program. The 25-point Program was a German adaptation — by Anton Drexler, Adolf Hitler, Gottfried Feder, and Dietrich Eckart — of Rudolf Jung’s Austro–Bohemian program; unlike the Austrians, the Germans did not claim to being either liberal or democratic, and opposed neither political reaction nor the aristocracy, yet advocated democratic institutions (i.e. the German central parliament) and voting rights solely for Germans — implying that a Nazi Government would retain popular suffrage.

The Austrian monarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn proposed that the 25-point Program was pro-labour: “the program championed the right to employment, and called for the institution of profit sharing, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of userers and profiteers, nationalization of trusts, communalization of department stores, extension of the old-age pension system, creation of a national education program of all classes, prohibition of child labour, and an end to the dominance of investment capital.” Whereas historian William Brustein proposes that said program points, and party founder Anton Drexler’s statements, indicate that the Nazi Party (NSDAP) originated as a working-class political party.

In the course of pursuing public office, the agrarian failures of the 1920s prompted Hitler to further explain the “true” meaning of Point 17 (land reform, legal land expropriation for public utility, abolishment of the land value tax, and proscription of land speculation), in the hope of winning the farmers’ votes in the May 1928 elections. Hitler disguised the implicit contradictions of Point 17 of the National Socialist Program, by explaining that “gratuitous expropriation concerns only the creation of legal opportunities, to expropriate, if necessary, land which has been illegally acquired, or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies”.

Moreover, throughout the 1920s, other members of the NSDAP, seeking ideologic consistency, sought either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1924, the economist Gottfried Feder proposed a 39-point program retaining some original policies and introducing new policies. Hitler suppressed every instance of programatic change, by refusing to broach the matters after 1925, because the National Socialist Program was “inviolable”, hence immutable. Simultaneously, however, he did not publicly support it; in his political biography, Mein Kampf (1925, 1926), Hitler only mentions it as “the so-called program of the movement”.

The historian Henry A. Turner proposes that many of the Program’s policies for economic reform, pro-labour legislation, and popular democratic politics, contradicted Adolf Hitler’s basis of his dictatorial ambition. That the land reform and anti-trust legislation especially threatened the financial interests of the businessmen whom Hitler courted for political campaign money. Because he could not safely discard the National Socialist Program of the Nazi Party — without provoking voter mutinies — Adolf Hitler, by force of personality, definitively closed all such ideologic discussion.