The National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (help·info), abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known in English as the Nazi Party (from the Ger. pronunciation of Nationalsozialist), was a political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers' Party (DAP) before the name was changed in 1920.
The party's last leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich. Nazi ideology stressed the failure of both laissez-faire capitalism and communism, the failure of democracy, and "racial purity of the German people", as well as Northwestern Europeans and persecuted those it perceived either as race enemies or Lebensunwertes Leben, that is "life unworthy of living".
This included Jews, Slavs, and Roma along with homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Communists and others. To carry out these beliefs, the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and six million other people from the aforementioned and other groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust. Hitler's desire to build a Germanic empire through expansionist policies led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
The Nazi Party is generally described as being at the extreme or far right of the left-right political axis. While the party incorporated elements from both left and right-wing politics, the Nazis formed most of their alliances on the right.