The Nazi Party/Foreign Organization was a branch of the Nazi Party and the 43rd and only non-territorial ("region") of the Party. In German, the organization is referred to as NSDAP/AO, "AO" being the abbreviation of the German compound word ("Foreign Organization"). Although would be correctly written as one word, the Nazis chose an obsolete spelling with a hyphen. Nazi Party members who lived outside the German Reich were pooled in this special Party department. On May 1, 1931 the "AO" was founded on the initiative of Reich Organization Leader () , and its management was assigned to , who resigned from office on May 8, 1933, because he had become head of the Hamburg police authority; he was replaced by Ernst Wilhelm Bohle. Only actual citizens of the German Reich with a German passport could become members of the AO. Persons of German descent, ethnic Germans (), who possessed the nationality of the country in which they lived, were refused entry to the Nazi Party. History In 1928, in Paraguay and in Brazil, party members abroad joined forces for the first time. Similar associations came into being in Switzerland and in the United States in 1930. These groups were officially accepted by the Nazi Party only after the founding of the . On August 7, 1931, Local Group Buenos Aires was accepted. Shortly thereafter followed National Committee Paraguay (August 20, 1931) and Local Group Rio de Janeiro (October 5, 1931). From 1932 until its prohibition in 1934 there existed a national committee in the Union of South Africa, which enjoyed great popularity (see German Namibians) and maintained numerous offices in the former German South-West Africa (today Namibia). Nazi Party Local Groups () included at least 25 "party comrades" (), while the so-called (, literally ) had five members or more. Furthermore, large Local Groups could be partitioned into "Blocs" (). Ideological training and congruity of all party comrades with the interests of the German nation were the principal tasks of the NSDAP/AO. It was assigned the mandate of uniting all Party members (and members of Nazi Party affiliated organizations) living abroad in a loosely affiliated group and to educate them in the philosophy, ideology and political programs of the Nazi Party for the betterment of Germany. The AO was not a Fifth Column organization and had ten basic principles to be followed that included: "Obey the laws of the country