Philipp Bouhler was a German senior Nazi Party functionary who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP. He was also the SS official responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program that killed more than 250,000 disabled adults and children in Nazi Germany, as well as co-initiator of Aktion 14f13, also called Sonderbehandlung, that killed 15,000–20,000 concentration camp prisoners.
Bouhler as an SS-Obergruppenführer in 1936
Bouhler with Adolf Hitler, Baldur von Schirach, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann; Munich, October 1938
(from left) Bouhler, Karl Freiherr Michel von Tüßling, Robert Ley with his wife Inge; Munich, July 1939
Rudolf Heß, Heinrich Himmler, Bouhler, Fritz Todt and Reinhard Heydrich (from left), listening to Konrad Meyer at a Generalplan Ost exhibition, 20 March 1941
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