In 1919 Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers' Party. In 1921 he assumed leadership of this party and renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In German, the party was called the Na tionalso zi alistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, and its members were called Nazis. The head of this party, Hitler, was called the führer—the German word for "leader."

Throughout the later part of the 1920s, the party became increasingly popular in Germany. Germany's government was a republic, much like the United States today, and parties campaigned to get their candidates elected to the Reichstag—the German congress—and also to the positions of president and chancellor. In the early 1930s the Nazi Party was the largest in the country. As a result of this popularity, Hitler was...