Weimar Parties --> West German Parties

[Coldstream]

I remember studying this period in first year of uni, I’m not an expert but I remember looking specifically at the DNVP. As I understand by the end of Weimar the DNVP’s support was limited to largely aristocratic or rural voters who felt that the Nazis were too radical and that the SA was an undisciplined rabble.

 I’d also guess that much of the military and police were supporters of the DNVP (Iirc Heydrich noted that Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller was more DNVP than Nazi). Blomberg and Keitel were disliked by members of the army due to their open support for Nazism, Von Schleicher wanted to replace the Nazis with a right wing military dictatorship under his own rule etc, I’d say that the vast majority of the army leadership at least agreed with the DNVP’s anti democratic goals.

Post-1934 the majority of the military and police were supportive of the Nazis (or they didn’t last long in either) so the DNVP were effectively coopted by the Nazi party.

With the military so humiliated/demoralised by WW2 the kind of right wing irredentist nationalism/conservatism based around the military that the DNVP had exemplified didn’t really exist post-1945 so I’d expect many of their former supporters simply gravitated to the CDU as they themselves became less nationalistic/anti-Semitic along with the country.

There were a couple of small National conservative parties in the 40s and 50s, but most of them split up between the mainstream right and those who wanted to rehabilitate former Nazis. Really, there isn’t that much room/need for a party between the Democratic right and the Fascist right. By the 60s it was only really the NDP left. Some ex DNVP voters probably voted NDP but by the 60s I’d guess they were a dwindling number.

[Coldstream]

In the first elections to Bundestag, party ideologies were not always consistent and state branches were be "subverted" by right-wingers, what especially happened to the FDP. Former Nazis and Nazi-affiliated (DNVP included) tried to make career in the beginning of 1950s in the FDP, leading to expulsion of several members.

Besides, there were other smaller parties which could be described as ideological successors of the DNVP. The German Conservative Party/German Reich Party (DKP-DRP) made it into the Bundestag in 1949 and had mostly former NSDAP and former DNVP affiliates as members. The radical Nazi wing split and formed the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which would be the first party to be forbidden by Constitutional Courts later in 1952.

Other DNVP members might found a new home in the CDU/CSU, FDP, the German Party (DP) - a more conservative CDU ally - and the abovementioned expellee party GB/BHE.  

Additionally, in 1950, the Lower Saxony wing of the DKP-DRP split to form the German Reich Party (DRP), without major successes on federal level, albeit entering some regional parliaments. Some branches of DRP were actually forbidden because they were perceived as successors of the forbidden SRP.

In 1962, a new DNVP without great relevance was founded.

In 1964, the GB/BHE successor GDP ("All-German Party"), the DRP and the DP branch in Bremen merged to the NPD.

German party politics 1949-1970 is quite an interesting topic, considering the many splits, mergers and still developing platforms.

In interesting foreshadowing of the 2010s rise of the far right in Europe, the SRP were in league with the Soviets. I think Otto Strasser also formed a party that went nowhere in the late 50s.

[Coldstream]

There’s also the fact that the DNVP were essentially (if not exclusively) a vehicle for the elite of the aristocracy and military to try and subvert or destroy republicanism and maintain power in their hands or return the country to its Pre-WW1 social order. The number of people by 1945 who still thought that a return to the Pre-WW1 German Empire was desirable must have been vanishingly small.

[Coldstream]

Hermann Ehlers was the first Bundestag President post-WW2 and ex-DNVP member, IIRC. Robert Lehr was ex-DNVP and served as Minister of the Interior for several years.

To be fair to him Lehr was quite atypical of the DNVP, he was arrested by the Nazis and was a member of the conservative resistance. He was basically just a Protestant conservative, if he’d been catholic he’d have been in the centre party.

[Coldstream]

Hermann Ehlers was the first Bundestag President post-WW2 and ex-DNVP member, IIRC. Robert Lehr was ex-DNVP and served as Minister of the Interior for several years.

To be fair to him Lehr was quite atypical of the DNVP, he was arrested by the Nazis and was a member of the conservative resistance. He was basically just a Protestant conservative, if he’d been catholic he’d have been in the centre party.

That’s not super atypical. Carl Goerdeler was a prominent DNVP leader, too. And he was pretty anti-Nazi. Reinhold Quaatz, Hugenberg’s chief advisor, was half-Jewish and a founder of the Berlin CDU. The DNVP, DVP, and DDP had a lot of overlap - they competed for the votes of academic, economic, and aristocratic elite, as well as national liberals.

Didn’t Goerdeler leave the DNVP before 1933 because Hugenberg had completely adopted anti democratic politics? Before the depression they had a mainstream conservative wing but I think they’d mostly disappeared by the time they joined up with the Nazis.