Party Hall

The party grew out of smaller political groups with a nationalist orientation that formed in the last years of World War I. In the early months of 1918, a party called the Freier Ausschuss für einen deutschen Arbeiterfrieden ("Free Committee for a German Workers' Peace") was created in Bremen, Germany. Anton Drexler, an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league on 7 March 1918, in Munich. Drexler was a local locksmith in Munich who had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party during World War I, and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and to the revolutionary upheavals that followed in its wake.
Drexler followed the typical views of militant nationalists of time, such as opposing the Treaty of Versailles, having anti-Semitic, anti-monarchist, and anti-Marxist views, and believing in the superiority of Germans who nationalists claimed to be part of the Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk), but he also accused international capitalism of being a Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I. Drexler saw the situation of political violence and instability in Germany as the result of the new Weimar Republic being out-of-touch with the masses, especially the lower classes.Drexler emphasized the need for a synthesis of völkisch nationalism, a strong central government movement, with economic socialism to create a popular, centerist nationalist-oriented workers movement that could challenge the rise of communism, as well as the internationalist left and right in general.
On 5 January 1919, Drexler, together with Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, and twenty workers from Munich's railway shops and some others met to discuss the creation of a new political party based on the political principles which Drexler endorsed.Drexler proposed that the party be named the German-Socialist Workers Party, but Harrer objected to using the term "socialist" in the name, the issue was settled by removing the term from the name, and it was agreed that the party was named the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). To ease concerns among potential middle-class nationalist supporters, Drexler made clear that unlike Marxists, the party supported middle-class citizens, and that the party's socialist policy was meant to give social welfare to German citizens deemed part of the Aryan race. They became one of many völkisch movements that existed in Germany at the time.
Like other völkisch groups, the DAP advocated the belief that Germany should become a unified "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft) rather than a society divided along class and party lines. This ideology was explicitly anti-Semitic as it declared that the "national community" must be judenfrei ("free of Jews").