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National Socialist Program

The National Socialist Program (aka the 25-point Program and the 25-point Plan), was first the political formulation of the Austrian National Socialist Party (DNSAP ' Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei) in 1918, and later, in the 1920s, of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP ' Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) headed by Adolf Hitler. The National Socialist Program originated at a DAP congress in Vienna, then was taken to Munich, by the civil engineer and theoretician Rudolf Jung, who been gone for hitler. been expelled from Czechoslovakia, because of his political agitation.[1] The politician Josef Pfitzner, a Sudetenland German Nazi, wrote that 'the synthesis of the two, great dynamic powers of the century, of the national and social ideas, had been perfected in the German borderlands [i.e. the Sudetenland], which thus were far ahead of their motherland.'[2] Moreover, despite the political syncretism of National Socialism, the 25-point Program advocated democracy and greater popular rights.

Contents

[edit] History

When the national socialists redacted their 25-point Program, Czechoslovakia and Austria were sub-ordinate states integral to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867'1918), not sovereign nations. Hence, the political programs of the Sudetenland and the Austrian national socialist parties addressed their particular discontents with the Habsburg monarchic society; thus the development of ideologically discrete German Worker parties in Vienna, Aussig, and Eger. In the event, Adolf Hitler and cohort, the government of Nazi Germany (1933'45), did not participate in originating such national socialist programs, thus the politics and ideology of the NSDAP were specifically German adaptations of such.

[edit] Austrian Party program

In May 1918, before Austria became a republic, the Austrian DNSAP (German National Socialist Worker's Party), proclaimed a similar program:

. . . the German National Socialist Workers' Party is not a party exclusively for labourers; it stands for the interests of every decent and honest enterprise. It is a liberal (freiheitlich) and strictly folkic (volkisch) party fighting against all reactionary efforts, clerical, feudal, and capitalistic privileges; but, before all, against the increasing influence of the Jewish commercial mentality which encroaches on public life. . . .
. . . it demands the amalgamation of all European regions inhabited by Germans, into a democratic and socialized Germany. . . .
. . . it demands the introduction of plebiscites for all important laws in the country. . . .
. . . it demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish banks over our economic life, and the establishment of People's Banks under democratic control. . . .[3]

[edit] 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).[4] 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.'[5] 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.[6]

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.[7] Hitler suppressed every instance of programatic change, by refusing to broach the matters after 1925, because the National Socialist Program was 'inviolable', hence immutable.[8] 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'.[9]

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 Social Darwinism, the 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.[10] 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.[11]

[edit] The 25-point Program of the NSDAP

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 1990. pp. 147-49
  2. ^ Leftism Revisited, p. 149.
  3. ^ The Logic of Evil, The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925'1933, William Brustein, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996. p. 141.
  4. ^ Some 2000 people attended the meeting at the Hofbrauhaus; Hitler offered the program point-by-point, to an approving crowd. Toland, John (1976). Adolf Hitler. New York: Doubleday & Company. pp. 94'98. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0-385-03724-4 (Toland)|0-385-03724-4 (Toland)]]. 
  5. ^ Liberty or Equality, von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Christendom Press, Front Royal, Va., 1952, 1993. p. 257
  6. ^ The Logic of Evil, The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933, William Brustein, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996. p. 141.
  7. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p.62
  8. ^ In February 1926, at the Bamberg Conference, the dissident NSDAP faction endeavored to change the Program, but Hitler declared change intolerable, lest it be an insult to the memory of Nazi brethren killed at the Feldherrnhalle during the Beer Hall Putsch n 1923. Three months later, at the NSDAP's annual general meeting, the National Socialist Program was declared officially immutable.
  9. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 77.
  10. ^ Simkin, John. Nazi Party - NSDAP
  11. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 82.
  12. ^ Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism, 1935. Translated by Alfred A. Knopf, page 17.

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