nazi
n. countablen. a member of the political party that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. In casual talk, people sometimes use it to describe someone who is very strict and controlling about rules.
n. a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In a figurative and often pejorative sense, it refers to a person who is perceived as excessively authoritarian or fanatically dedicated to enforcing specific rules.
The history book explains how the Nazi party rose to power.
The documentary features interviews with survivors who lived through the Nazi occupation of their home city.
Historians continue to debate the socio-economic factors that allowed Nazi ideology to permeate the mainstream political discourse of the Weimar Republic.
1930, from German Nazi, a clipping of Nationalsozialist (“National Socialist”) (1924), earlier attestation (1903) as shortening of national-sozial), since in German the nati- in national /ˌnatsi̯oˈnaːl/ is approximately pronounced Nazi [ˈnäːtsi]; compare the parallel pejorative terms Sozi (“socialist, social democrat”), Kozi (“commie, commo, communist”). A homonymic term Nazi was in use before the rise of the NSDAP in Bavaria as a pet name for Ignaz and (by extension from that) a derogatory word for a backwards peasant, which may have influenced the use of that abbreviation by the Nazis' opponents and its avoidance by the Nazis themselves.
When referring to the historical political party or its members, the word is always capitalized.