German Party Deutsche Partei | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chairman | Heinrich Hellwege |
| Founded | 1947 (1947) |
| Dissolved | April 15, 1961 (1961-04-15) |
| Preceded by | |
| Succeeded by |
|
| Ideology | |
| Political position | Right-wing tofar-right[2] |
TheGerman Party (German:Deutsche Partei,DP) was anational-conservative[2] andmonarchistpolitical party in West Germany active during the post-war years. The party's ideology appealed to sentiments ofGerman nationalism and nostalgia for theGerman Empire.[2]
In 1945 theLower Saxony National Party (Niedersächsische Landespartei, NLP) was founded as a re-creation of theregionalistGerman-Hanoverian Party that had been active in the period between the creation of theGerman Empire in 1871 and theNazi Party's seizure of power in 1933. Two groups of people initiated the process: one around Ludwig Alpers and Heinrich Hellwege inStade, the other around Georg Ludewig, Karl Biester, Wolfgang Kwiecinski, and Arthur Menge inHanover.[3] On May 23, 1946,Heinrich Hellwege,Landrat in Stade, was formally elected to serve as chairman of the NLP.[4] The NLP aimed principally at the establishment of a Lower Saxon state within a federal Germany as well as representing Protestant conservatism.[5]
In 1947, a year after the establishment ofLower Saxony as a state, the party renamed itself the German Party and merged with conservative groups that were members of theGerman National People's Party.[1] It soon expanded into neighbouring states under the chairmanship ofHeinrich Hellwege and gained 27 seats (18.1 per cent of the total) in the first Lower SaxonLandtag election in 1947.[6] It sent two delegates to Bonn to serve in the constitutional convention (Parlamentarischer Rat) of 1948/49. The German Party was among the parties that supported a market economy in theBizonal Economic Council, thus laying the groundwork for the "bourgeois coalition" in power in Bonn between 1949 and 1956.
In the1949 federal election, the party received 4% of the national vote and won 18 seats. As a result, it became a coalition partner of theChristian Democratic Union (CDU), theChristian Social Union (CSU) and theFree Democratic Party (FDP) in the government ofKonrad Adenauer. The DP vote fell to 3.3% with 15 seats in the1953 federal election, although it retained its place in the governing coalition and again in1957 federal election when the DP garnered 17 seats with 3.4% of the vote. A short-livedFree People's Party (FVP) had been formed in 1956 byFranz Blücher,Fritz Neumayer and others who had left the FDP, but the following year the FVP merged into the German Party,[7] possibly contributing to a slight increase in the DP vote in 1957. German Party ministers in these governments wereHeinrich Hellwege (1949–1955),Hans-Joachim von Merkatz (1955–1960) andHans-Christoph Seebohm (1949–1960). In 1955 Hellwege resigned his federal office to become theMinister President of Lower Saxony.
The party opposed aplanned economy,land reform andco-determination. The German Party of the 1950s has been characterized as a "party of the indigenous Lower Saxonian middle class", that emphasized states' rights and monarchist and partially also nationalist (völkisch) positions.[8]
The German Party had been instrumental in setting an electoral threshold (either five per cent of the national vote or alternatively three constituency seats) for all parties contesting a federal election and this led to problems when the CDU refused to allow German Party candidates a free run for a reasonable number of constituency seats as it had done in the 1957 election.[9] With the DP facing elimination from theBundestag, nine of its 17 parliamentary incumbents left the party to join the CDU. As a result, the German Party quit the government in 1960, a year before the next federal election, and merged with theAll-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights (GB/BHE) to form the All-German Party (Gesamtdeutsche Partei, GDP).
However, 2.8 per cent of the vote in the1961 federal election did not win the GDP representation in the national parliament (Bundestag).[10] A merger of two parties, which represented opposing voter blocs (indigenous peasants ofLower Saxony andGerman expellees and refugees from the eastern territories), had turned into a political disaster unforeseen by the national party elites.[11] The DP last entered a state parliament by winning four deputies in the Bremen state election of 1963. A year later, however, the deputies were involved in the founding of the far-rightNational Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
| Election | Leader | Constituency | Party list | Seats | +/– | Government | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votes | % | Votes | % | |||||
| 1949 | Heinrich Hellwege | 939,934 | 3.9% (#7) | 17 / 402 | CDU/CSU–FDP–DP | |||
| 1953 | 1,073,031 | 3.9% (#6) | 896,128 | 3.3% (#6) | 15 / 509 |  2 | CDU/CSU–FDP–DP | |
| 1957 | 1,062,293 | 3.5% (#6) | 1,007,282 | 3.4% (#6) | 17 / 519 |  2 | Opposition | |
