Despite the 16 year gap between multi-party elections in Germany (and many Weimar-era politicians either dead or discredited), the West German party system that developed from 1949 showed a lot of continuity with Weimar. The SPD continued. The KPD continued, at a far lower level of support, until it was banned in 1956. (I'm guessing KPD supporters then either joined the SPD or didn't vote).
The old Catholic Zentrum formed the base of the CDU, along with some conservative Protestants. There was an attempt to revive the Zentrum as a sort of Christian Left party, but it didn't amount to much. (There were a number of attempts to form Christian Left movements in post-WWII Western Europe, but they tended to either fail or just turn into standard center-right Christian Democrats).
The left-liberal DDP and right-liberal DVP formed the Free Democrats. (I'm guessing some DVP types drifted into the CDU over time).
The one non-Nazi party that did not form a post-WWII equivalent was the DNVP (German National People's Party), which had been positioned awkwardly between throne-and-altar conservatism and the extreme right, eventually helping the Nazis come to power. It's not that surprising that the DNVP didn't see a revival:
-- The Allies opposed any conservative-nationalist party, as being too Nazi-like.
-- The DNVP's cooperation with the Nazis had discredited it retrospectively.
-- The DNVP's electoral base had been in agricultural areas in the East, and its leadership had often been drawn from the Junker aristocracy. So its geographic support was now either in the Soviet Zone or annexed by Poland or the USSR. Many of its voters were probably dead, given that eastern Germany had suffered terribly in the final months of the war. Others had fled to the West to build new lives. Compared to the Socialist and Catholic milleus, the nationalist-Protestant culture that supported the DNVP had been far more devastated by the war.
-- Some religious Protestants (a source of DNVP support) joined the CDU, despite its heavily Catholic flavor, seeing it as the most viable alternative to Marxism. Eventually, some more left-leaning religious Protestants would join the SPD, but I'm guessing few of them had been DNVP voters. Anyway, the number of Protestant churchgoers was already in steep decline, and the Protestant churches always regarded electoral politics with suspicion. I gather some DNVP politicians who founded the CSVD (a more moderate religious-Protestant party) after the Nationalists' turn to the far right did go on to play founding roles in the CDU.
I'm guessing most DNVP voters (who had often switched to the NSDAP late in the Weimar era), if they were living in the West, either backed the CDU, the national-liberal wing of the FDP, or smaller conservative parties like the German Party. Probably by the late 1950s, most of these folks would have found a home in the CDU. I would think stereotypical DNVP voters would have been pretty happy with how Adenauer and Erhard ran the Federal Republic in the 1950s, even while grumbling about the lack of progress on reunification.
So does anyone have any insight on the fate of onetime DNVP voters and politicians in the Bundesrepublik? And is my view of continuity too simplistic?
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In the 1950's there were a few right wing nationalist parties that appealed to expellees from from the east, most notably the "All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights" which managed 6% of the vote in 1953. Many of their voters presumably would have been DNVP voters in the 1920's.
