You know who else had a thing for words formed from the initial letters of other words?
Hitler was a great admirer of Peter Behrens, the father of the concept of modern corporate identity. In 1907 Behrens was the artistic and design consultant for Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft (AEG). He designed the first integrated corporate identity system.
His striking honeycombed logotype with the initials AEG was one of the many components applied to the company’s unprecedented overall branding campaign, which included advertising, packaging, product design, and architecture.
The use of initials as a branding scheme became the model for the Nazis, who reduced all party and government departments to initials and acronyms.
Even the word Nazi is a shortening of the first word in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party name - Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. That’s right NSDAP, or Nazi for short.
The party was originally called the German Workers’ Party - Deutsche Arbeiterpartie - when Hitler joined in 1919 as its public relations officer. Within a year he’d taken it over and renamed it with the Nazi moniker.
Joseph Goebbels was a dramatist, novelist, and journalist who became an avid follower of Hitler when he joined the party in 1924. When the Nazis seized power he became head of the National Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
A mouthful most often referred to in German simply as Propagandaministerium, or its contraction, Promi.