'Nazi' began as a Bavarian put-down meaning a clumsy country bumpkin
Before Hitler's party existed, Nazi was a pet form of Ignatz, a common man's name in Bavaria, and by extension a mocking word for a backward peasant or yokel. In the 1920s the party's labour-movement opponents clipped Nationalsozialistische down to Nazi precisely to attach that sneer to it.
The trick copied an older one: Sozi was already a familiar shorthand for a socialist. Joseph Goebbels first used a related form himself in 1926, in a publication titled Der Nazi-Sozi, but only as part of that compound. Once the party held power in the 1930s, German exiles spread Nazi, Nazi Germany and Nazi regime into other languages, while inside Germany the words were not used. The party briefly tried to reclaim the label, for instance in 1934 articles in its own newspaper, then gave up and called its members National Socialists. The foreign terms came back into German only after the Second World War.
The official name was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP, adopted in 1920 when the German Workers' Party, founded in 1919, was renamed. Hitler initially opposed the change. The new title deliberately mixed vocabularies, with Socialist and Workers' aimed at the left and National and German at the right. National Socialism presented itself as a nationalist alternative to both Marxism and free-market capitalism, rejecting class conflict and universal equality and demanding that every class subordinate its interests to a supposed common good.
Most scholars place Nazism firmly on the far right. It is classed as a form of fascism built on pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy, casting ethnic Germans and so-called Nordic Aryans as a master race. It opposed liberal democracy and parliaments and embraced dictatorship, antisemitism, anti-communism, eugenics and territorial expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum.
The party became the largest in the German parliament in the 1932 elections without winning a majority. Other parties could not or would not form a coalition, and in January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, backed by conservative nationalists who believed they could control him. The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act then let the Nazis create a one-party state.
Source: Nazism
