Ideology

Nazism has come to stand for a belief in the superiority of an Aryan race, an abstraction of the Germanic peoples. During the time of Hitler, the Nazis advocated a strong, centralized government under the Führer and claimed to defend Germany and the German people (including those of German ethnicity abroad) against Communism and so-called Jewish subversion. Ultimately, the Nazis sought to create a largely homogeneous and autarchic ethnic state, absorbing the ideas of Pan-Germanism.
Historians often disagree on the principal interests of the Nazi Party and whether Nazism can be considered a coherent ideology. The original National Socialists claimed that there would be no program that would bind them, and that they wanted to reject any established world view. Still, as Hitler played a major role in the development of the Nazi Party from its early stages and rose to become the movement's indisputable iconographic figurehead, much of what is thought to be "Nazism" is in line with Hitler's own political beliefs - the ideology and the man continue to remain largely interchangeable in the public eye. Some dispute whether Hitler's views relate directly to those surrounding the movement; the problem is furthered by the inability of various self-proclaimed Nazis and Nazi groups to decide on a universal ideology. But if Nazism is the world view promulgated in Mein Kampf, that world view is consistent and coherent, being characterized essentially by a conception of history as a "race struggle"; the Führerprinzip; anti-Semitism; the stigmatization of "Judeo-bolshevism" and the need to acquire a Lebensraum at the expenses of the Soviet Union . The core concept of Nazism is that the German Volk is under attack, and must become united, disciplined and self sacrificing (must submit to Nazi leadership) in order to win against this nefarious "Jewish plot" to subjugate the German nation.
Hitler's political beliefs were formulated in Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925). His views were composed of three main axes: a conception of history as a "race struggle" influenced by social darwinism; antisemitism and the idea that Germany needed to conquer a "Lebensraum" ("living space") from Russia. His antisemitism, coupled with his anti-Communism, gave the grounds of his conspiracy theory of "judeo-bolshevism." Hitler first began to develop his views through observations he made while living in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. He concluded that a racial, religious, and cultural hierarchy existed, and he placed "Aryans" at the top as the ultimate superior race, while Jews and "Gypsies" were people at the bottom. He vaguely examined and questioned the policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where as a citizen by birth, Hitler lived during the Empire's last throes of life. He believed that its ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the Empire and helped to create dissension. Further, he saw democracy as a destabilizing force because it placed power in the hands of ethnic minorities who, he claimed, "weakened and destabilized" the Empire by dividing it against itself. Hitler's political beliefs were then affected by World War I and the 1917 October Revolution, and saw some modifications between 1920 and 1923. He then definitively formulated them in Mein Kampf.

Fascism
In both popular thought and academic scholarship, Nazism is generally considered a form of fascism - a term whose definition is itself contentious. The debate focuses mainly on comparisons of fascist movements in general with the Italian prototype, including the fascists in Germany. The idea mentioned above to reject all former ideas and ideologies like democracy, liberalism, and especially marxism (as in Ernst Nolte) make it difficult to track down a perfect definition of these two terms; however, Italian Fascists tended to believe that all elements in society should be unified through corporatism to form an "Organic State"; this meant that these Fascists often had no strong opinion on the question of race, since it was only the state and nation that mattered.
German Nazism, on the other hand, emphasized the Aryan race or "Volk" principle to the point where the state simply seemed a means through which the Aryan race could realize its "true destiny." Since a debate among historians (especially Zeev Sternhell) to see each movement, or at least the German, as unique, the issue has been settled in most parts showing that there is a stronger family resemblance between the Italian and the German fascist movement than there is between democracies in Europe or the communist states of the Cold War; additionally, the crimes of the fascist movement can be compared, not only in numbers of casualties, but also in common developments: the March on Rome of Mussolini to Hitler's response shortly after to attempt a coup d'etat himself in Munich.
Also, Aryanism was not an attractive idea for Italians who were a non-Nordic race, but still there was a strong racism and also genocide in concentration camps long before either was in place in Germany. The philosophy that had seemed to be separating both fascisms was shown to be a result of happening in two different countries: since the king of Italy had not died, unlike the Reichspräsident, the leader in Italy (Duce) was not able to gain the absolute power the leader in Germany (Führer) did, leading to Mussolini's fall. The academic challenge to separate all fascist movements has since the 1980s and early 1990s been ground for a new attempt to see even more similarities.

Nationalism
Hitler founded The Nazi state upon a racially defined "German people" and principally rejected the idea of being bound by the limits of nationalism. That was only a means for attempting unlimited supremacy. In that sense, its hyper-nationalism was tolerated to reach a world-dominating Germanic-Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. This idea is a central concept of Mein Kampf, symbolized by the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one empire, one leader). The Nazi relationship between the Volk and the state was called the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), a late nineteenth or early twentieth century neologism that defined a communal duty of citizens in service to the Reich (as opposed to a simple society). The term "National Socialism" derives from this citizen-nation relationship, whereby the term socialism is invoked and is meant to be realized through the common duty of the individuals to the German people; all actions are to be in service of the Reich. The Nazis stated that their goal was to bring forth a nation-state as the locus and embodiment of the people's collective will, bound by the Volksgemeinschaft, as both an ideal and an operating instrument. In comparison, traditional socialist ideologies oppose the idea of nations.

Militarism
Nazi rationale invested heavily in the militarist belief that great nations grow from military power and maintained order, which in turn grow "naturally" from "rational, civilized cultures". The Nazi Party appealed to German nationalists and national pride, capitalizing on irredentist and revanchist sentiments as well as aversions to various aspects of modernist thinking (although at the same time embracing other modernist ideas, such as admiration for engine power). Many ethnic Germans felt deeply committed to the goal of creating the Greater Germany (the old dream to include German-speaking Austria), which some believe required the use of military force to achieve.

Racism and discrimination
The Nazi racial philosophy was influenced by the works of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant, and wholly embraced Alfred Rosenberg's Aryan Invasion Theory. The theory traced Aryan peoples in ancient Iran invading the Indus Valley Civilization, and carrying with them great knowledge and science that had been preserved from the antediluvian world. This "antediluvian world" referred to Thule, the speculative pre-Flood/Ice Age origin of the Aryan race, and is often tied to ideas of Atlantis. Most of the leadership and the founders of the Nazi Party were made up of members of the "Thule-Gesellschaft (the Thule Society)", which romanticized the Aryan race through theology and ritual.
Hitler also claimed that a nation was the highest creation of a "race", and "great nations" (literally large nations) were the creation of homogeneous populations of "great races", working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from "races" with "natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits". The "weakest nations", Hitler said, were those of "impure" or "mongrel races", because they had divided, quarreling, and therefore weak cultures. Worst of all were seen to be the parasitic "Untermensch" (Subhumans), mainly Jews, but also Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled and so called anti-socials, all of whom were considered "lebensunwertes Leben" ("Life-unworthy life") owing to their perceived deficiency and inferiority, as well as their wandering, nationless invasions ("the International Jew"). The persecution of homosexuals as part of the Holocaust has seen increasing scholarly attention since the 1990s, even though many homosexuals served in the Sturmabteilungen.
According to Nazism, it is an obvious mistake to permit or encourage plurality within a nation. Fundamental to the Nazi goal was the unification of all German-speaking peoples, "unjustly" divided into different Nation States. The Nazis tried to recruit Dutch and Scandinavian men into the SS, considering them of superior "Germanic" stock, with only limited success.
Hitler claimed that nations that could not defend their territory did not deserve it. He thought "slave races", like the Slavic peoples, to be less worthy to exist than "leader races". In particular, if a master race should require room to live ("Lebensraum"), he thought such a race should have the right to displace the inferior indigenous races.
"Races without homelands", Hitler proclaimed, were "parasitic races", and the richer the members of a parasitic race were, the more virulent the parasitism was thought to be. A master race could therefore, according to the Nazi doctrine, easily strengthen itself by eliminating parasitic races from its homeland. This idea was the given rationalization for the Nazis' later oppression and elimination of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Poles, the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals and others not belonging to these groups or categories that were part of the Holocaust. The Waffen-SS and other German soldiers (including parts of the Wehrmacht), as well as civilian paramilitary groups in occupied territories, were responsible for the deaths of an estimated eleven million men, women, and children in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, and death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Eugenics
The belief in the need to purify the German race led them to eugenics; this effort culminated in the involuntary euthanasia of disabled people and the compulsory sterilization of people with mental deficiencies or illnesses perceived as hereditary. Adolf Hitler considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State," and praised its early eugenics treatment of deformed children.[
Antisemitism
According to Nazi propaganda, the Jews thrived on fomenting division amongst Germans and amongst states. Nazi antisemitism was primarily racial: "the Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race;" however, the Jews were also described as plutocrats exploiting the worker: "As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."

Homosexuality
Main article: History of homosexual people in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
An estimated 100,000 homosexuals were arrested after Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. Of those, 50,000 were suspected to be incarcerated in concentration camps, making for 5,000 to 15,000 deaths. According to Harry Oosterhuis, the Nazis' view towards homosexuality was ambiguous at least, with homosexuality common in the Sturmabteilung. Thus, the eventual arrests of homosexuals should not be viewed in the context of "race hygiene" or eugenics. Völkisch-nationalist youth movements attracted homosexuals because of the preaching of Männerbund (male bonding); in practice, Oosterhuis says, this meant that the persecution of homosexuals was more politically motivated than anything else. For example, the homosexuality of Ernst Röhm was well known at the time and basis for satire and jokes. Röhm was killed chiefly because he was perceived as a political threat, not for his sexuality.
Religion

Hitler extended his rationalizations into a religious doctrine, underpinned by his criticism of traditional Catholicism. In particular, and closely related to Positive Christianity, Hitler objected to Catholicism's ungrounded and international character — that is, it did not pertain to an exclusive race and national culture. At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, the Nazis combined elements of Germany's Lutheran community tradition with its northern European, organic pagan past. Elements of militarism found their way into Hitler's own theology; he preached that his was a "true" or "master" religion, because it would "create mastery" and avoid comforting lies. Those who preached love and tolerance, "in contravention to the facts", were said to be "slave" or "false" religions. The man who recognized these "truths", Hitler continued, was said to be a "natural leader", and those who denied it were said to be "natural slaves". "Slaves" — especially intelligent ones, he claimed — were always attempting to hinder their masters by promoting false religious and political doctrines.
Anti-clericalism can also be interpreted as part of Nazi ideology, simply because the new Nazi hierarchy did not allow itself to be overridden by the power that the Church traditionally held. In Austria, clerics had a powerful role in politics and ultimately responded to the Vatican. Although a few exceptions exist, Christian persecution was primarily limited to those who refused to accommodate the new regime and yield to its power. A particularly poignant exemplar is the seen in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, the Nazis often used the church to justify their stance and included many Christian symbols in the Third Reich.
Volkism was inherently hostile toward atheism: freethinkers clashed frequently with Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. On taking power, Hitler banned freethought organizations and launched an “anti-godless” movement. In a 1933 speech he declared: “We have . . . undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” This forthright hostility was far more straightforward than the Nazis’ complex, often contradictory stance toward traditional Christian faith.
The prevailing scholarly view since the Second World War is that Martin Luther's 1543 treatise On the Jews and their Lies exercised a major and persistent influence on Germany's attitude toward its Jewish citizens in the centuries between the Reformation and the Holocaust . The National Socialists displayed On the Jews and their Lies during Nuremberg rallies, and the city of Nuremberg presented a first edition to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, the newspaper describing it as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published. Against the majority view, theologian Johannes Wallmann writes that the treatise had no continuity of influence in Germany, and was in fact largely ignored during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Martin Luther's writings shortly after the Kristallnacht; Sasse "applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, "On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews." Diarmaid MacCulloch argued that On the Jews and Their Lies was a "blueprint" for the Kristallnacht.

Anti-capitalist rhetoric

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Nazi publications and speeches included anti-capitalist (especially anti-finance capitalist) rhetoric. Hitler attacked what he called "pluto-democracy," which he claimed to be a Jewish conspiracy to favor democratic parties in order to keep capitalism intact. The Nazi Party's 1920 "Twenty-Five Point Programme" demanded:
that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens... the abolition of all incomes unearned by work... the ruthless confiscation of all war profits... the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations... profit-sharing in large enterprises... extensive development of insurance for old-age... land reform suitable to our national requirements...
Nazi Party officials made several attempts in the 1920s to change some of the program or replace it entirely. In 1924, Gottfried Feder proposed a new 39-point program that kept some of the old planks, replaced others and added many completely new ones. Hitler did not mention any of the planks of the programme in his book, Mein Kampf, and he only mentioned it in passing as "the so-called programme of the movement".
Party spokesman Joseph Goebbels claimed in 1932 that the Nazi Party was a "workers' party" and "on the side of labor and against finance". Hitler said of the Nazis: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance." However, Hitler stated that Nazism "has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism... Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not." He stated "I absolutely insist on protecting private property... we must encourage private initiative".Nevertheless, he wanted property to be regulated to make sure "benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual".

Ideological roots
The ideological roots that became German National Socialism were based on numerous sources in European history, drawing especially from Romantic nineteenth century idealism, and from a biological reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on "breeding upwards" toward the goal of an Übermensch (Superhuman). Hitler was an avid reader and received ideas that later influenced Nazism from traceable publications, such as those of the Germanenorden or the Thule society. He also adopted many populist ideas such as limiting profits, abolishing rents and generously increasing social benefits—but only for Germans.
The Nordic Myth has often been attributed to the reaction to an inferiority complex. Phillip Wayne Powell, in is book, Tree of Hate (1985), claimed that the Nordic Myth began to arise in fifteenth century Germany, when Germans resented the fact that Italians looked down on them as an inferior and unsophisticated people. On page 48, he states:
"In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a powerful surge of German patriotism was stimulated by the disdain of Italians for German cultural inferiority and barbarism, which lead to a counterattempt by Geman humanists to aud German qualities."
Fodor, M. W. claimed in "The Nation" (1936): "No race has suffered such from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Coué method of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority".

Romanticism
According to Bertrand Russell, Nazism would come from a different tradition than that of either Liberalism or Marxism. Thus, to understand values of Nazism, it would be necessary to explore this connection, without trivializing the movement as it was in its peak years in the 1930s and dismissing it as little more than racism.
Antisemitism was shown to be a handy tool for Nazis to gain support, mainly because of the popular Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Personal accounts by August Kubizek, Hitler's childhood friend, have varied, offering ambiguous claims that antisemitism did and did not date back to Hitler's youth. One reason is the higher Jewish community in Austria and Germany because Germany had been a haven for many Jews over the years, including influential families such as the Rothschilds, although World War I and the Dolchstosslegende ended that legacy. Anti-Judaism had already been widely transformed into antisemitism before 1914 because of the new Europe-wide post-Darwin theory of racism. Historians universally accept that Nazism's mass acceptance depended upon nationalistic appeals and fear against "unnormal people" (which also could include xenophobia and antisemitism) and a patriotic flattery toward the wounded collective pride of defeated World War I veterans.
Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the anti-rationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century in response to the Enlightenment. Strength, passion, frank declarations of feelings, and deep devotion to family and community were valued by the Nazis though first expressed by many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers. German romanticism in particular expressed these values. For instance, Hitler identified closely with the music of Richard Wagner, who harbored antisemitic views as the author of Das Judenthum in der Musik. Some claim that he was one of Hitler's role models, a comment of Kubizek's that is also disputed.
The idealization of tradition, folklore, classical thought, leadership (as exemplified by Frederick the Great), their rejection of the liberalism of the Weimar Republic, and calling the German state the "Third Reich" (which traces back to the medieval First Reich and the pre-Weimar Second Reich) has led many to regard the Nazis as reactionary.

Mysticism

Thule Society emblem
Nazi occultism is a term used to describe a philosophical undercurrent of Nazism that denotes the combination of Nazism with Germanic mysticism, cryptohistory, and/or the paranormal. The esoteric Thule Society and Germanenorden were secret societies that, while only a small part of the völkisch movement, led into the Nazi party.
Dietrich Eckart, a member of Thule Society, actually coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, and while Hitler has not been shown to have been a member of Thule, he received support from the group. Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.
Heinrich Himmler showed a strong interest in such matters, although as Steigmann–Gall points out, Hitler and many of his key associates attended Christian services.

Ideological variants
Nazism as a doctrine is far from homogeneous, and can be divided into at least two sub-ideologies. During the 1920s and 1930s, there were two dominant Nazi factions; the followers of Otto Strasser and the followers of Adolf Hitler. The Strasserite faction eventually fell afoul of Hitler, when Otto Strasser was expelled from the party in 1930, and his attempt to create an oppositional left-block in the form of the Black Front failed. The remainder of the faction, which was to be found mainly in the ranks of the SA, was purged in the Night of the Long Knives, which included the murder of Gregor Strasser, Otto's brother. Afterwards, the Hitlerite faction became dominant. In the post-World War II era, Strasserism has enjoyed something of a revival among many neo-Nazi groups.

List of elements of the Nazi ideology

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The National Socialist Program
The rejection of democracy, and consequently abolishing political parties, labour unions, and free press.
Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) as a total belief in the leader (responsibility up the ranks, and authority down the ranks)
Extreme Nationalism
Anti-Bolshevism
Strong show of local culture
Social Darwinism
Defense of Blood and Soil (German: "Blut und Boden" - represented by the red and black colors in the Nazi flag)
The Lebensraum policy of creation of more living space for Germans in the east
Nazism and race, Racial policies of the Third Reich and Nazi eugenics:
Anti-Slavism
Antisemitism
The creation of a Herrenrasse (or Herrenvolk) (Master Race = by the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life; A department in the Third Reich)).
Aryan Supremacism; more specifically, ranking of individuals according to their race and racial purity, with the Nordic race favoured the most
Limited freedom of religion ( Point #24 in the National Socialist Program )
Rejection of the modern art movement and an embrace of classical art
Association with Fascism or Totalitarianism
Animal rights
Environmentalism: In June 1935, the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Reich Nature Protection Law) was enacted. It was valid in West Germany till 1976. Some historians have either argued that this law was the symptom of an actual interest of the Nazi regime in the preservation of the natural world, or that it was not a Nazi law at all, but rather the nonideological expression of previous ideas. Others have contested these views, and claim that the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz reflected instead key elements of both progressive preservationism of the 1930s, such as the concepts of natural monuments and nature protection areas, and of Nazism, such as racialism and nationalism.
Kraft durch Freude The well-being of the working classes.
Public health (Anti smoking campaigns, asbestos restrictions, occupational health and safety standards)