The National Socialist German Workers' Party, normally called in English the Nazi Party , was a political party that dominated the way of life and events in Germany, and later the world, from 1920 to 1945 (the end of the Second World War in Europe).

The Nazi Party grew up in the years after the end of the First World War. The victorious allies had demanded that Germany (the loser) pay huge sums of money for repairing losses of the allies during the war. Not only could Germany not afford this, but the German people believed they had acted honourably in that war and did not think they should be made to suffer in that way. They were upset and confused, jobs were few and most people could barely find enough to eat. The German leaders put in place by the Allies after the war were also weak.

Unsurprisingly, people gathered around a party and its leader that told them that Germany should be proud of its past, and that it should soon be wealthy again and able to hold its head up high. Normally people might have noticed that it also held extreme racist views, but to the people feeling so hard done by, this did not seem important. Getting a good job and their pride back was all that counted.

The party called this time the "Third Reich", meaning the third republic, or the third age. There was also the threat of Communism which had overtaken Russia after the war. The Nazi party was against big business, the upper classes, and it supported the working class. It was anti Communist, but eventually became against racial groups, especially the Jews, with horrifying results.

They developed the idea of Germans being a kind of super-race, and modelled themselves on north mythology, where heroes won strength by battle. In effect, the leaders of the Nazi Party, dominated by Adolf Hitler, turned Germany into a kind of new Roman military state, with Hitler as the main war lord, set to reclaim lands that would give the German people room to breathe again - even if this did mean taking that land from others.

The horror of this control resulted in state organized murder of six million Jews and five million people from the other targeted (so-called inferior) groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

The surrounding democracies did little about this, hoping it would all go away, and that there would be no need for a war. But, of course, such ways do not end peacefully, and the rise of the Nazi Party was directly connected to the Second World War.