Martin Ludwig Bormann was a German Nazi Party official and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, private secretary to Adolf Hitler, and a war criminal. After the war, he was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. Bormann gained immense power by using his position as Hitler's private secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler. He used his position to create an extensive bureaucracy and involve himself as much as possible in the decision making.
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party, existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric; it was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.
Karl Roland Freisler was a German jurist, judge and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942 and as President of the People's Court from 1942 to 1945. As a prominent ideologist of Nazism, he influenced as a jurist the Nazification of Germany's legal system. He attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion. He was appointed President of the People's Court in 1942, overseeing the prosecution of political crimes as a judge, and became known for his aggressive personality, his humiliation of defendants, and frequent use of the death penalty in sentencing.
The Sturmabteilung was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.
Hanns Kerrl was a German Nazi politician. His most prominent position, from July 1935, was that of Reichsminister of Church Affairs. He was also President of the Prussian Landtag (1932–1933) and head of the Zweckverband Reichsparteitag Nürnberg and in that capacity edited a number of Nuremberg rally yearbooks.
Otto Ernst Remer was a German Wehrmacht officer in World War II who played a major role in stopping the 20 July plot in 1944 against Adolf Hitler. In his later years, he became a politician and far-right activist. He co-founded the Socialist Reich Party in West Germany in the 1950s and is considered an influential figure in postwar neo-fascist politics in Germany.
Adolf "Adi" Dassler was a German cobbler, inventor, and businessman who founded the German sportswear company Adidas. He was also the younger brother of Rudolf Dassler, founder of Puma. Dassler was an innovator in athletic shoe design and one of the early promoters who obtained endorsements from athletes to drive sales of his products. As a result of his concepts, Adi Dassler built the largest manufacturer of sportswear and equipment. At the time of his death, Adidas had 17 factories and annual sales of one billion marks.
Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was linked to the Red Orchestra.
The Nazi Party/Foreign Organization was a branch of the Nazi Party and the 43rd and only non-territorial Gau ("region") of the Party. In German, the organization is referred to as NSDAP/AO, "AO" being the abbreviation of the German compound word Auslands-Organisation. Although Auslands-Organisation would be correctly written as one word, the Nazis chose an obsolete spelling with a hyphen.
Leonardo Conti was the Reich Health Leader and an SS-Obergruppenführer in Nazi Germany. He was involved in the planning and execution of Action T4 that murdered hundreds of thousands of adults and children with severe mental and physical handicaps. On 19 May 1945, after Germany's surrender, Conti was imprisoned and in October hanged himself to avoid trial.
Rudolf Buttmann was a German lawyer, Bavarian State Library director and Nazi politician.
Julius Heinrich Dorpmueller was general manager of Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft from 1926 to 1945, a Nazi politician and the Reich Minister for Transport from 1937 to 1945.
Rudolf Wagner-Régeny was a composer, conductor, and pianist. Born in Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, since 1920 Romania, he became a German citizen in 1930, and then East German after 1945.
Andreas Hermes was a German agricultural scientist and politician. In the Weimar Republic, he was a member of several governments, serving as minister of food/nutrition and minister of finance for the Catholic Zentrum. During the rule of the Nazi Party, Hermes was part of the right-wing resistance, for which he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. After World War II, he co-founded the Christian Democratic Union.
Rudolf Wissell was a German politician in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). During the Weimar Republic, he held office as the Minister for Economic Affairs and Minister for Labour.
Rudolf Bahmann was an East German politician. Between 1973 and 1977 he served as chairman of the council in the Gera administrative district.
Charlotte Hohmann was the first editor in chief of Die Frau von heute, the mass circulation weekly women's magazine founded in 1946 in Germany's Soviet occupation zone, into which, after 1949, rival publications were absorbed. As a young woman she was a political activist (KPD). Unlike her brother, she survived the Nazi years, but she nevertheless underwent several Gestapo interrogation sessions. During the early 1950s she held various senior positions within the East German print media sector even, at least on paper, after her retirement in 1955.
Elly Lotte Bergtel-Schleif, née Schleif, was a German librarian who was actively involved in the resistance against Nazis while a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Bergtel-Schleif became head of the Berlin Library School after the war.
