The National Socialist Program, also known as the 25-point Program or the 25-point Plan ( German: 25-Punkte-Programm), was the party program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, and referred to in English as the Nazi Party). Adolf Hitler announced the party's program on 24 February 1920 before approximately 2,000 people in the Munich Festival of the Hofbräuhaus and within the program was written "The leaders of the Party swear to go straight forward, if necessary to sacrifice their lives in securing fulfilment of the foregoing points" and declared the program unalterable. [1] The National Socialist Program originated at a DAP congress in Vienna, then was taken to Munich, by the civil engineer and theorist Rudolf Jung, who having explicitly supported Hitler had been expelled from Czechoslovakia because of his political agitation. [2]
The historian Karl Dietrich Bracher summarizes the program by saying that its components were "hardly new" and that "German, Austrian and Bohemian proponents of anti-capitalist, nationalist-imperialist, anti-Semitic movements were resorted to in its compilation" but that a call to "breaking the shackles of finance capital" was added in deference to the idee fixe of Gottfried Feder, one of the party's founding members and Hitler provided the militancy of the stance against the Treaty of Versailles and the insistence that the points could not be changed and were to be the permanent foundation of the party. Bracher characterizes the points as being "phrased like slogans; they lent themselves to the concise sensational dissemination of the 'anti' position on which the party thrived. ... Ideologically speaking, [the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..." [3]
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 25-point program "remained the party's official statement of goals, though in later years many points were ignored". [4]
In Munich, on 24 February 1920, Hitler publicly proclaimed the 25-point Program of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, referred to in English as the Nazi Party), when the Nazis were still known as the DAP ( German Workers' Party). [5] They retained the National Socialist Program upon renaming themselves as the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in February 1920 and it remained the Party's official program. [6] 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 be 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: "[T]he program championed the right to employment, and called for the institution of profit sharing, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of usurers 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". [7] Whereas historian William Brustein proposes that said program points and party founder Drexler's statements indicate that the Nazi Party (NSDAP) originated as a working-class political party. [8]
In the course of pursuing public office, the agrarian failures of the 1920s prompted Hitler to explain further 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 viewpoint of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies". [9]
Throughout the 1920s, other members of the NSDAP, seeking ideologic consistency, sought either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1923, the economist Gottfried Feder proposed a 39-point program retaining some original policies and introducing new policies. [10] Hitler suppressed every instance of programmatic change by refusing to broach the matters after 1925, because the National Socialist Program was “inviolable”, hence immutable. [11]
Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes that to Hitler, the program was "little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: 'unalterable,' yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation, land reform and 'breaking the shackles of finance capital.' Yet it nonetheless fulfilled its role as backdrop and pseudo-theory, against which the future dictator could unfold his rhetorical and dramatic talents." [12]
The National Socialist Program, also known as the 25-point Program or the 25-point Plan ( German: 25-Punkte-Programm), was the party program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, and referred to in English as the Nazi Party). Adolf Hitler announced the party's program on 24 February 1920 before approximately 2,000 people in the Munich Festival of the Hofbräuhaus and within the program was written "The leaders of the Party swear to go straight forward, if necessary to sacrifice their lives in securing fulfilment of the foregoing points" and declared the program unalterable. [1] The National Socialist Program originated at a DAP congress in Vienna, then was taken to Munich, by the civil engineer and theorist Rudolf Jung, who having explicitly supported Hitler had been expelled from Czechoslovakia because of his political agitation. [2]
The historian Karl Dietrich Bracher summarizes the program by saying that its components were "hardly new" and that "German, Austrian and Bohemian proponents of anti-capitalist, nationalist-imperialist, anti-Semitic movements were resorted to in its compilation" but that a call to "breaking the shackles of finance capital" was added in deference to the idee fixe of Gottfried Feder, one of the party's founding members and Hitler provided the militancy of the stance against the Treaty of Versailles and the insistence that the points could not be changed and were to be the permanent foundation of the party. Bracher characterizes the points as being "phrased like slogans; they lent themselves to the concise sensational dissemination of the 'anti' position on which the party thrived. ... Ideologically speaking, [the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..." [3]
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 25-point program "remained the party's official statement of goals, though in later years many points were ignored". [4]
In Munich, on 24 February 1920, Hitler publicly proclaimed the 25-point Program of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, referred to in English as the Nazi Party), when the Nazis were still known as the DAP ( German Workers' Party). [5] They retained the National Socialist Program upon renaming themselves as the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in February 1920 and it remained the Party's official program. [6] 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 be 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: "[T]he program championed the right to employment, and called for the institution of profit sharing, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of usurers 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". [7] Whereas historian William Brustein proposes that said program points and party founder Drexler's statements indicate that the Nazi Party (NSDAP) originated as a working-class political party. [8]
In the course of pursuing public office, the agrarian failures of the 1920s prompted Hitler to explain further 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 viewpoint of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies". [9]
Throughout the 1920s, other members of the NSDAP, seeking ideologic consistency, sought either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1923, the economist Gottfried Feder proposed a 39-point program retaining some original policies and introducing new policies. [10] Hitler suppressed every instance of programmatic change by refusing to broach the matters after 1925, because the National Socialist Program was “inviolable”, hence immutable. [11]
Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes that to Hitler, the program was "little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: 'unalterable,' yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation, land reform and 'breaking the shackles of finance capital.' Yet it nonetheless fulfilled its role as backdrop and pseudo-theory, against which the future dictator could unfold his rhetorical and dramatic talents." [12]