Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party, grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany through totalitarian means from 1933-1945. Founded in 1919 as the German Workers' Party, the group promoted German pride and anti- semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I (1914-1918) and required Germany to make numerous concessions and repartions. Hitler joined the party the year it was founded and became its leader in 1921. In 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and his Nazi goverment soon assumed dictatiorial powers. At the beginning of the 1930's , Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party exploited widespread and deep-seated dicontent in Germany to attract popular and political support. There was resentment at the crippling territorial, military and economic terms of the Versailles Treaty, which Hitler blamed on treacherous politicians and promised to overturn. The democratic post- World War I, Weimar Rebublic was marked by a weak coalition goverment and political crisis, in answer to which the Nazi party offered strong leadership and national rebirth. From 1929 onwards, the worldwide economic depression provoked hyperinflation, social unrest and mas unemployment to which Hitler offered scape goats such as the Jews. Hitler pledged civil peace, radical economic policies, and the restoration of national pride and unity. The 'subversive' Jews were portrayed as responsible for all of Germany's ills. The Nazi rise to power brought an end to the Weimar Republic, a parliamentary democracy established in Germany after World War I. The Nazi state quickly became a regime in which Germans enjoyed no guaranteed basic rights. After a suspicios fire in the Reichstag (the German Parliament), on February 28, 1933, the goverment issued a decree which suspended constitutional civil rights and created a state of emergency in which official decrees could be enacted without parliamentary confirmation. After Germany's defeat in World War II (1939-1945), the Nazi Party was outlawed and many of its top officials were convicted of war crimes related to the murder of some 6 million European Jews during the Nazis' reign.