A Gauleiter was a regional leader of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) who served as the head of a Gau or Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to Reichsleiter and to the Führer himself. The position was effectively abolished with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945.
Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, headed the Party organization in Berlin as Gauleiter from 28 October 1926 to his suicide on 1 May 1945.
Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter in Munich, the headquarters of the Nazi Party, from 1 November 1929. Though incapacitated by a stroke in June 1942, he remained titular Gauleiter until his death on 12 April 1944.
Fritz Sauckel was the Gauleiter of Thuringia, from 30 September 1927 to 8 May 1945 and the Reichsstatthalter of Thuringia from 5 May 1933. Also the Reich's General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment, he was executed as a war criminal after the Nuremberg trials.
Karl Kaufmann was the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Germany's second most populous city, from 15 April 1929 to the end of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945. He was also the Reichsstatthalter of Hamburg from 16 May 1933. After serving a prison sentence for war crimes, he became involved in neo-Nazi political activities in post-war West Germany.
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.
NSDAP membership book
Mein Kampf in its first edition cover
Nazis during the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich
Hitler with Nazi Party members in 1930