Weimar Parties --> West German Parties

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some maps of the final free-and-fair Reichstag election:





To make further sense of these, some demographic information:





All sorts of things can be noticed and commented on here, but with respect to the late stage rump DNVP:

1. While we tend to associate it with the countryside, and in particular with the long lost world of rural East Elbia, the party retained a degree of support even until the last amongst bourgeois voters in the cities and commuter suburbs. In Berlin, for instance, they always polled a solid share in Zehlendorf, larger than in some of their rural strongholds.

2. Which is not say that the association with rural Lutheranism and large estates is inaccurate: observe that they polled best in overwhelmingly Protestant regions with high proportions employed in agriculture and low or average proportions of the workforce graded as 'family workers'. It is just that this association is not the whole story.

3. A high proportion of the families still backing the DNVP at the end were on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and a high proportion of those were on the wrong side of the Oder-Neisse line. Refugees ended up all over the place, but those from regions closer to the Baltic were more likely to settle in the north of the new Federal Republic. In particular a lot of East Prussian families settled in Schleswig-Holstein. Of course, once one adjusts for the part of the Hamburg metropolitan area in the latter during the 1920s and 30s, voting patterns in East Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein were actually very similar during the last years of Weimar.

4. It is dubious, anyway, that it is even possible to disentangle DNVP supporters who stayed loyal to their old political party (the minority) and those (the majority) who switched to the Nazis. There's some evidence that age may have been a factor, with the elderly more likely to stay loyal. Which further reduces the number of ex-DNVP voters around by the end of the 1940s. A fundamental issue is that while the DNVP was not part of the Völkisch political tradition, it did incorporate Völkisch  elements (and right from the start) into its appeal and propaganda, meaning that the boundary between the two camps was paper-thin. It, of course, why the party and its political heritage was considered beyond the pale after the War, but it is also one of the main reasons why disentangling everything is impossible.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be more accurate to say that the DVP had a significant overlap with the DDP and the DNVP, but the DDP and the DNVP did not have a significant overlap with each other. Any votes the DDP lost to points rightwards were lost permanently and were not contested by them again, in essence.