National Socialist Program

The National Socialist Program, also referred to as the 25-point program, was developed to formulate party policies of, first, the Austrian German Workers Party (or DAP) and was copied by the Adolf Hitler's Nazi party. It is an expression of extreme ethnic nationalism and xenophobia coupled with reformist socialist demands. It was first developed in Vienna, at a German Workers Party congress and was brought to Munich by Rudolf Jung who was expelled from Czechoslovakia. (1) "Josef Pfitzner, a Sudetenland German Nazi author, wrote that "the synthesis of the two great dynamic powers of the century, of the socialist and national idea, had been perfected in the German borderlands which thus were far ahead of their motherland." (2)

Background: At this time Czeckoslovakia and Austria did not exist as separate countries. They both existed under the Austria-Hungary Empire. These programs of the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) and Austrian developed under the Habsburg monarchy and in one country at the time. Different German Worker parties developed in Vienna, Aussig, and Eger.

Table of contents

1 Sudetenland Party Platform
2 Austria Party Platform
3 The German Party Platform
4 References
5 Related Topics
6 External links

Sudetenland Party Platform

In Cheb (northwest Bohemia), (which is a part of modern Czechoslovakia), Franko Stein was a member of the German National Workers' League. In 1898, he organized a German National Workers' Congress where a twenty-five point program was first promulgated.

Austria Party Platform

Before Austria became a republic, the DNSAP (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei), proclaimed this program in May 1918:

...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 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 (referenda) 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)

This program is the synthesis of Pan-Germanism, collectivism, egalitarianism and pseudo-liberal currents. Moreover, this program was anti-Habsburg, anti-monarchical, anti-clerical, and anti-feudal. In demanding plebiscitess for all important decisions, it showed itself to be nominally democratic. The plan attacks all hierarchies; capital, clergy and hierarchic nobility. The Jews were especially singled out because they were seen as the "rising aristocracy of capital" (Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European movement, repeatedly called them this.). As in all levelling tendencies, all "elites" and hierarchies were to be done away with.

The German Party Platform

The 25 point Program of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (ie the Nazi Party) was proclaimed by Adolf Hitler at a large party gathering in Munich on February 25, 1920 when the group was still known as the German Workers Party. The party kept the program when it changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party in April 1920 and it remained the official party programme throughout the party's existence. It was adapted from Rudolf Jung's Austro-Bohemian program by by Anton Drexler, Adolf Hitler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. Unlike the Austrian program, the NDSAP program makes no claims of being "liberal" or democratic, nor does it express an opposition to "reaction" or to aristocracy.

Ten of the twenty five points are clearly pro-labor. "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 labor, and an end to the dominance of investment capital." (4)For William Brustein, this and the statements of Anton Drexler show the clear manifestation of the working-class orientation of the NSDAP.

The Agrarian crisis of the late 1920s persuaded Hitler to reinterpret point 17 in hopes of winning the sizable agricultural vote in May 1928 elections. Point 17 called for the "unremunerative expropriation of land". Hitler explained that the expropriation only referred to land unscrupulously acquired illegitimately through jüdishe Grundspekulationsgesellschften or being mismanaged without the benefit of the people. This clarification assuaged the fears of the old middle class and definitely brought a huge swath of the rural vote to the Nazi Party. (5)

References

Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Regernery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 1990. pp 147-149.
Leftism Revisited, pg 149.
Liberty or Equality, von Kuhnelt-Leddihn, Christendom Press, Front Royal, VA, 1952, 1993. pg 257.
The Logic of Evil, The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933, William Brustein, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996. pg 141.
The Logic of Evil, William Brustein, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996. pg 90.

External links

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it].