I’m watching Marathon Man again on AMC and need a long-awaited answer.
The National Socialist Deutche Arbeiten Partei (please correct the mangled spelling, it’s been a few years since I’ve studied German) comes out to NSDAP. In English it’s the National German Worker’s Party, or NGWP. So where does NAZI come from?
The best I can think is it’s an anglicized phonetic reading of NSDAP in some convoluted way. Though even that doesn’t make much sense.
So where did NAZI come from?
It comes from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of “national.”
I don’t know but found this you could probably make sense out of it.
If you’d like to hear it pronounced, go here.
The dictionary is your friend. Any half-decent dictionary will give the derivation of a word as well as its meaning.
Sometimes the answer is so obvious you miss it. Thanks all.
This way of shortening a word is fairly common in German. Also in the political arena, you have “Sozis” for “Socialisten” or “Socialdemokraten”.
‘Gestapo’ for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) is another common abbreviation of this type from the Nazi era. In the post-war era, the East German secret police were called ‘Stasi’ from Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (State Security Ministry).
This type of abbrevation isn’t restricted to political names though – there’s ‘KaDeWe’, ‘Kaufhaus des Westens’ (Department Store of the West), a large department store in Berlin.
And not all political organizations were abbreviated like this, such as the SS and the SA. Those would’ve been something like ‘Schuta’ and ‘Stuab’, which makes it clear why they weren’t. I think the abbreviations taken from the first syllables of words are generally meant to be familiar and colloquial. For this reason, political speakers would talk about the ‘NSDAP’ and less often about being ‘Nazis’. I don’t recall ever seeing the Gestapo referred to as anything else in English though.
Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard is much more commonly known as the Ku’damm or Kudamm.