German National People's Party Research Articles

ГУГЕНБЕРГ ПРОТИВ ЭРЦБЕРГЕРА: КРИТИКА ФИНАНСОВОЙ РЕФОРМЫ РЕЙХСМИНИСТРА В ВЕЙМАРСКОМ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОМ СОБРАНИИ

The article deals with the criticism of the financial reform of Reich Minister Matthias Erzberger in the Weimar National Assembly from the right-wing parties that expressed the interests of big proprietors and the industrial elite. Erzberger, seeking to create a centralized tax system, has come across consistent criticism from the leader of the radical wing of the German National People's Party faction Alfred Hugenberg, a Pan-German, experienced financier and former head of the Friedrich Krupp AG concern. The Hugenberg's criticism, who was seeking to make a political career, were the draft laws on socialization and emergency tax, submitted to the deputies of the National Assembly. The campaign against Erzberger, accompanied by sharp attacks and widespread public condemnation, ended with the rejection of part of the Reich Minister's law drafts and the subsequent resignation. The analysis of the published political speeches of Hugenberg and materials from periodicals shed light on the specifics of parliamentary discussions, allowing to reveal the arguments of the right against the continuation of democratization of the Weimar Republic in the early years of its existence.

The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones

Reviewed by: The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones Barry Jackisch The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy. By Larry Eugene Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 636. Cloth $140.00. ISBN 978-1108494076. Larry Eugene Jones's remarkable study of the German Right in the Weimar Republic constitutes an authoritative English-language history of this tremendously important and consequential subject. Based on a vast array of source material compiled over years of research from over thirty different public and private archives, as well as hundreds of other sources, it is hard to imagine another scholar matching the erudition that Jones offers his readers on this subject. [End Page 616] A basic question lies at the book's core: why did a conservative, non-Nazi political party fail to emerge in the Weimar Republic as a viable alternative to the eventual triumph of the Hitler movement? In answering this question, Jones focuses much of his attention on the German National People's Party (or DNVP), the largest and most successful of several conservative political groups in this era. Jones is hardly the first scholar to devote attention to this party. However, his particular contribution explains in detail the larger political universe in which the DNVP operated and shows convincingly why it ultimately failed to assume the mantle of political leadership on the German Right. In studying this broader context, Jones also provides detailed insights into other economic interest groups, radical nationalist and patriotic associations, and a wide range of social and cultural forces that shaped the party's development. Jones clearly stakes out his argument in the introduction: the disunity of the German Right was an essential political factor in the Weimar Republic's collapse and Hitler's ultimate success. He pursues this argument consistently throughout the book's eighteen main chapters and the epilogue. This thesis takes issue with earlier studies stressing stronger lines of continuity between Germany's established political Right and the upstart Nazi movement. As Jones makes very clear, substantial divisions existed both within the DNVP and among the wide array of groups that orbited within the bizarre galaxy of right-wing politics. This disunity made the formation of a stable and long-term conservative political party, one that might have blunted the popular appeal of Nazism later in the 1920s, very difficult indeed. This failure had much to do with the DNVP's inability to resolve a fundamental dilemma. Jones details how the party gained increasing popular support in the republic's first years by stridently opposing government policies that allegedly threatened Germany's national pride and honor. However, after the party's electoral success in the 1924 elections, its leaders faced growing pressure to join a national government. This forced a shift from the comfort of angry opposition to the distinctly more challenging task of shaping government policy and working with other political leaders to advance a broader agenda based on political compromise. The DNVP's participation in two national governments in 1925 and 1927 laid bare its basic inability to move successfully from the national opposition to an effective and popular ruling party. Jones recounts in remarkable detail how key conflicts within the party and between the party and its associated interest groups further undermined the DNVP's development as a unified, popular political force. One of Jones's real strengths is his ability to tease out the often obscure and complex connections between various groups and personalities on the right-wing scene and to explain how their individual actions and views affected the larger political destiny of the German Right. Jones demonstrates that the DNVP's leadership constantly faced various political, economic, cultural, and nationalist factions that sought to push and pull the party in multiple directions to pursue their own agenda. While this is certainly a feature of any modern political [End Page 617] party, the range of interests connected to the DNVP made reaching consensus nearly impossible. For example, could the party effectively represent the economic interests of small farmers, industrialists, shopkeepers...

The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, edited by Larry Eugene Jones

The German in Weimar Republic: Studies in History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, edited by Larry Eugene Jones. New York & Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2014. xxiv, 332 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). What is role and responsibility of political right in Weimar Republic--which consisted of a myriad of political parties, associations, and combat leagues--when it comes to rise of Nazi Party and Hitler's ascendance to chancellorship in Germany in 1933? This new collection of essays, edited by Larry Eugene Jones, on political, organizational, and social history of German right in Weimar Republic offers useful insights into this long-debated question and makes a number of persuasive arguments. The picture that emerges from this book is of a political right characterized by continual quarrelling, disunity, competition, and ongoing and increasing fragmentation. The volume is made up of ten individual chapters that look at some of major players of Weimar's Right. Half of studies deal with history of German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) and that of Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband, ADV); other essays focus on German combat leagues, Catholic right, Reich President von Hindenburg, jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, and Protestant theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, director of Bethel Institutions. The volume is impressively coherent for an essay collection and thus convincingly achieves what Jones claims as its purpose in his cogent and useful (especially historiographically) introduction: to reinforce through several case studies master narrative that the disunity of was every bit as important as a prerequisite for establishment of Third Reich as schism on socialist Left or fragmentation of political middle (2). The organizational and ideological disunity of political right is clearly demonstrated by scholars here, with individual essays often complementing each other by highlighting different shards of fragmenting movements. For example, pieces by Daniela Gasteiger and Jones both look at fissures in German National Party. Gasteiger's essay focuses on DNVP leader Count Guido von Westarp and his relationships with volkisch politician Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee (initially a member of DNVP and then founder of German-Racist Freedom Party [Deutschvolksiche Freiheitspartei, DVP] and Central Association of German Conservatives [Hauptverein der Deutschkonservativen]), closely examining deterioration of both relationships. The collection's next is Jones' analysis of inner-party quarrels within DNVP and inconsistency of party in regard to Jewish question. The reader is convinced by both essays not only of disunity of DNVP, but also of its multiple disunities. The Jewish question is a topic of other essays here as well, and again internal divisions are identified. Brian E. Crim's essay looks at Jewish question in regard to German combat leagues. The anti-Semitism Crim finds in two largest, Stahlhelm, League of Front Soldiers (Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten), and Young German Order (Jungdeutscher Orden, Jungdo), is mostly a strategically chosen ideology, a situational antisemitism derived from opportunism, pragmatism, and vicious competition in a crowed German Right (195). Variations of this diagnosis are also made (implicitly) in essays by Gasteiger and Jones on DNVP and in essay by Bjorn Hofmeister on Pan-German league. …

The German Right in the Weimar Republic: studies in the history of German conservatism, nationalism, and antisemitism from 1918 to 1933

Abbreviations Introduction: The German Right in the Weimar Republic: New Directions, New Insights, New Challenges Larry Eugene Jones Chapter 1. Hindenburg and the German Right Wolfram Pyta Chapter 2. From Friends to Foes: Count Kuno von Westarp and the Transformation of the German Right Daniela Gasteiger Chapter 3. Conservative Antisemitism in the Weimar Republic: A Case Study of the German National People's Party Larry Eugene Jones Chapter 4. Academics and Radical Nationalism: The Pan-German League in Hamburg and the German Reich Rainer Hering Chapter 5. Realms of Leadership and Residues of Social Mobilization: The Pan-German League, 1918-1933 Bjorn Hofmeister Chapter 6. Continuity and Change on the German Right: The Pan-German League and Nazism, 1918-1939 Barry A. Jackisch Chapter 7. Weimar's Burning Question: Situational Antisemitism and the German Combat Leagues, 1918-1933 Brian E. Crimm Chapter 8. Antisemitism and the Jewish Question in the Political Worldview of the Catholic Right Ulrike Ehret Chapter 9. Eugenics and Protestant Social Thought in the Weimar Republic: Friedrich von Bodelschwingh and the Bethel Institutions Edward Snyder Chapter 10. Carl Schmitt and the Weimar Right Joseph W. Bendersky Notes on Contributors Select Bibliography of New and Standard Works on the History of the German Right, 1918-1933 Index

The fateful alliance: German conservatives and Nazis in 1933: the Machtergreifung in a new light

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Burgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Burgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

German Conservatism at the Crossroads: Count Kuno von Westarp and the Struggle for Control of the DNVP, 1928–30

AbstractThe years from 1928 to 1930 witnessed a bitter struggle for the control of the German National People's Party (DNVP), the bastion of German conservatism in the Weimar Republic. One of the principal protagonists in this conflict was Count Kuno von Westarp, chairman of the DNVP from 1926 to 1928 and of the DNVP delegation to the Reichstag from 1924 to 1929. Westarp struggle with great determination to preserve the unity of the party in the face of a concerted effort from the radical Pan-German nationalists around the newly elected party chairman, film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg. But Westarp's efforts on behalf of party unity ultimately failed as the moderates who stood on the DNVP's left wing abandoned the party in two secessions, the first in December 1929 and the second in July 1930. In the second of these Westarp himself left the party. In the meantime the DNVP had been transformed from a conservativeSammelparteiinto an instrument of the radical right.

Professor Dr. Annelise Thimme November 24, 1918–April 5, 2005

O N April 5, 2005, Annelise Thimme died in Gottingen. Trained in Germany in the 1940s, Professor Thimme made her career for the most part in North America. She was a bold and original thinker whose boundless intellectual energy was matched by her profound understand ing of humanity. Professor Thimme's critical reassessment of Gustav Stresemann, the Weimar Republic's most celebrated statesman,1 and her analysis of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German National People's Party) after Germany's defeat in 1918 remain classics in modern German history.2 Her insight, generosity, wit, and strength of character are legendary among those on both sides of the Atlantic fortunate to have been her colleagues, students, and friends. Tributes from some of them-Klaus Schwabe, Gerhard Weinberg, Sally Marks, Isabel Hull, Roger Chickering, and Hartmut and Silke Lehmann are included at the end of this memorial. Annelise Thimme was born in November 1918 in Berlin, just weeks after the armistice that ended the Great War and in the midst of revolutionary upheaval. Her lifetime spanned a tumultuous century in the history of Germany, and she took part in all of its major events-as an actor, observer, commentator, and critic. Growing up in Potsdam in the Weimar years, she enjoyed the intellec tually and politically engaged circles in which her family moved. A trained historian, Annelise's father Friedrich Thimme headed up the German Foreign Ministry's project to publish documents pertaining to the outbreak of World War I, with the goal of disproving accusations of German war guilt.3 Among the family's friends and acquaintances were the Socialist publisher

Visions of the Volk : German Women and the Far Right from Kaiserreich to Third Reich

Visions of the Volk:German Women and the Far Right from Kaiserreich to Third Reich Elizabeth Harvey (bio) An examination of German women's relationship to far-Right politics in early twentieth-century Germany quickly uncovers paradoxes. Conservative, (usually) Protestant women built powerful associations which gave a public voice to women, but they also mounted platforms to proclaim that women's highest duty to the nation lay ultimately through their labors within the home. Claiming to eschew any agenda of women's rights, conservative women fought their way into the most fiercely antifeminist of political milieus, arguing for their inclusion on the basis of their selfless feminine devotion to the higher cause of the nation. Meanwhile, deeply reactionary and instinctively antifeminist men came to accept women as allies in defending their vision of the nation against its foes. Such seeming contradictions invite a closer investigation of what drew women to radical political ideologies and movements that were chauvinistically nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and typically antifeminist; what visions of gender and politics emerged from women's involvement with the far Right; and what impact women had within the far Right in a period of mass politics, war, revolution, and counter-revolutionary backlash. The history of German women and the far Right has tended to be dominated by questions about the place of women within National Socialist ideology, and about the extent and nature of women's support for National Socialism before and after 1933. Pioneering studies of women and Nazism appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, exploring the aims and impact of Nazi policy and asking whether women had been peculiarly resistant, or peculiarly susceptible, to Nazism.1 Debates arose, among other things, about bourgeois feminists in face of Nazism and the reasons why German feminists did not resist more effectively the onslaught of Nazism upon democracy and women's rights.2 Other debates on the impact of Nazi policies after 1933 raised the question whether women should be seen more as the victims of a viciously sexist regime, or as collaborators in the creation and stabilization of the Nazi state, actively involved or at least complicit in the regime's crimes.3 While these debates have moved on and become less polarized, important tasks still remain for historians in assessing women's compromises and complicity with the Nazi regime, and in exploring the experiences and responses of women who were discriminated against and [End Page 152] persecuted on the basis of their political views, "race," ethnicity, sexuality or "hereditary quality."4 Meanwhile, more recent studies have raised new questions about the broader spectrum of the radical Right before Nazism and women's place within it, seeking to illuminate women's involvement in these far Right groupings and to analyze the gendered discourses of far Right culture. This brief overview will highlight some of the findings from that research on the decades from the turn of the twentieth century to the installation of Nazi rule in 1933. Tracing those changes means recounting a story that leads towards the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP) and Hitler's takeover of power, but the aim here is also to bring into view some of the individuals, networks, and groupings that competed, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the Nazi movement in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The light this research sheds on women in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People's Party, DNVP) and on other women belonging to a broader far Right milieu provides an important point of comparison with Nazi ideas and practices concerning the vision of a "national community"—and women's role within it. The far Right in early twentieth-century Germany is hard to demarcate precisely: it was made up of parties and groupings that emerged and refashioned themselves in the course of the upheavals of World War I, revolution, the introduction of democracy, and its demise fourteen years later in 1933. Not so much a cohesive movement as a political and to some extent also a social milieu, the far Right in Wilhelmine Germany could be identified as comprising the Deutsch-Konservative Partei (German Conservative Party), which hovered between loyalty to...

Breaking the Balance: The Debate over Emergency Unemployment Aid in Weimar Germany, 1925-6

In 1925 a recession gripped the Weimar Republic and ignited a debate over unemployment benefits. In order to meet the growing needs of the jobless, the German government had to confront its traditional belief in budget surpluses. The political parties of the left fought those of the right and centre; the state governments fought the central government, and bureaucratic agencies fought each other. In January 1926, this debate came to a head as Chancellor Hans Luther reversed his previous stand, dropped an ultraconservative fiscal policy, and embraced the policy advocated by the left, the states and the Labour Ministry. The German National People's Party (DNVP or Nationalists), which had belonged to the previous government, found itself isolated. The trend was confirmed in March 1926, when the minority government struck a budget deal with the Social Democrats. The breaking of the balanced budget in 1926 had profound implications. The debt was financed at first from reserves, but within a year the government had to float a bond issue. The state governments followed the lead of the national government and covered their debts with foreign loans. The Reich's financial structure grew increasingly precarious until it had to stop payment on the debt during the Depression. Most debate has focused on economic grounds: did productivity gains justify the public and private salary increases which swelled the debt?' If a major disparity existed between wages and productivity, as Knut Borchardt has argued, then wages would have to fall sooner or later and unleash political turmoil. By the same token, if government benefits were too generous, then the Republic would go bankrupt or have to find means of alternative financing. However, these benefits were enacted for good reasons. This article will examine the

'The Greatest Stupidity of My Life': Alfred Hugenberg and the Formation of the Hitler Cabinet, January 1933

On the day after Adolf Hitler's installation as chancellor, Alfred Hugenberg, the chairman of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) and a prominent member of the Hitler cabinet, supposedly remarked: 'I've just committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in world history. Whether apocryphal or not, the remark attributed to Hugenberg nevertheless reflects the uneasiness that the Nationalist Party leader felt upon his entry into the Hitler cabinet on 30 January 1933. After all, Hugenberg had been repeatedly disappointed by his personal experiences with Hitler, first in 1929-30 in connection with the National Committee for the German Referendum against the Young Plan (Reichsausschuss fur das deutsche Volksbegehren gegen den Young Plan) and then more recently in 1931-32 as Hitler's confederate in the short-lived 'Harzburg Front'. Moreover, Hugenberg's party had waged a particularly vitriolic campaign against the Nazi Party in both the July and November 1932 Reichstag elections, and there was strong opposition within party ranks to an accommodation with the nazis that did not sufficiently secure the vital interests of those whom the DNVP purportedly represented. All of this suggests that Hugenberg's decision to enter the Hitler cabinet was not an easy one and that it took place in spite of strong personal reservations both on the part of Hugenberg and many of his most ardent supporters. While the secondary literature on the formation of the Hitler government is by now quite extensive, neither it nor the various studies of Hugenberg's political career have provided an altogether adequate explanation of Hugenberg's role in the negotiations that led to Hitler's installation as chancellor.2 The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to examine the factors that led Hugenberg to set aside his

Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). HisDie Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigungor VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volksparteior DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.

Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics: A Study in the Dissolution of the German Party System, 1923–28

Thedissolution of the German party system during the Weimar Republic was well advanced long before either the world economic crisis descended upon Germany with all of its intensity in the early 1930s or the National Socialists scored their first decisive breakthrough into the ranks of Germany's middle-class parties. While both the onset of the depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, their principal effect was not so much to catalyze this process as to intensify disintegrative factors that had been present ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic. The ultimate cause of the dissolution of the bourgeois party system during the Weimar Republic lay precisely in the inability of established bourgeois parties such as the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Parteior DDP), the German People's Party (Deutsche Volksparteior DVP), the German National People's Party (Deutsdmationale Volksparteior DNVP), and to a somewhat lesser extent the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) to integrate the diverse and increasingly antagonistic social and economic interests which constituted their material base into a viable and effective social force. The emergence of special-interest parties in the second half of the 1920s bore dramatic testimony to the failure of Germany's nonsocialist parties to provide the more traditional elements of the German middle class with the effective political representation they needed in order to maintain their social and economic position in the face of mounting economic adversity. Not only did the formation of such parries reflect the process of social and political decay that was at work within the German party system, but the increasing fragmentation of Germany's established bourgeois parties greatly facilitated the penetration of National Socialism into the ranks of the German middle strata.

Between the Fronts: The German National Union of Commercial Employees from 1928 to 1933

One of the main causes for the increasing paralysis Qf the German parliamentary system toward the end of the 1920s was a breakdown in the functional relationship between economic interest group and political party. The role which economic interest groups played in the political process was greatly increased by the democratization of Germany's political structure after World War I, so that by the middle of the following decade an elaborate and complex system of Querx'erbindungen had developed between the major interest groups and the large, sociologically heterogeneous such as the Center (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), the German Democratic party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), the German People's party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP), and the German National People's party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP). Under the pressure of unrelieved economic distress during the 1920s, however, the level of social conflict within each of these parties was intensified to the point where it was no longer possible to maintain a balance between the various social groups which comprised their popular base. At this point the relationship between organized interests and the established bourgeois parties became increasingly problematic, with the result that the so-called people's parties began to fragment into the separate social groups which comprised them. This process was particularly acute within the German middle strata, where it led to the formation of a series of small splinter parties from the middle of the 1920s on.' Nowhere can a more perfect illustration of the problematic character of the relationship between middle-class interest groups and the established bourgeois parties be found than in the case of the German National Union of Commercial Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband, or DHV). The DHV had been founded in 1893 in the midst of the massive changes then

The Founding of the German National People's Party (DNVP), November 1918-January 1919

WHERE has been a notable lack of interest in the political activity of Conservatives during the early years of the Weimar Republic, except in areas where possible antecedents for nazism can be sought. One result of this neglect has been the tendency in most historical surveys, and even many monographs, to describe the extreme rightwing party that emerged after the November revolution as essentially a party of Junkers, remnants of Prussian Conservatives and other miscellaneous groups. By describing the German National People's party (DNVP) in this way, observers are using the terms of the party's opponents, making it difficult to examine the position of constituent groups in the new party, and obstructing attempts to view the new party as indeed something new.2

Nature and Aims of the National Socialist German Labor Party

The last election to the Reichstag brought the unexpected and rather extraordinary rise of the National Socialist German Labor party from twelve to 107 seats. It is the party of the extreme right. In nationalistic radicalism, it compares with the German National People's party, led by Hugenberg, much as in social radicalism the Communist party compares with the Social Democrats. Until recently, the National Socialists could be passed over as a negligible group of fanatics. But the party's present importance as the second strongest in the Reichstag, and the contradictory and confused ideas that are current about it, make worth while some inquiry into its nature and the causes of its rapid advance.To start with, the party differs from its rivals in that personal leadership and military discipline are at its foundations. Besides having contributed more than any other single man to the building up of the party, Adolf Hitler is also its leader in the strictest sense of the word. A few facts about his life may show how it was that he could become the exponent of so large a number of German people.Hitler was born in Austria in 1889 and until his fifteenth year lived in modest bourgeois surroundings, his father being a lower state official. This explains why he always has been, and still is, at heart a man of the middle classes. After the death of his parents, he was forced to earn his living as an unskilled laborer, and for some five years he lived the life of a proletarian among proletarians, completely cut off from his former middle-class environment.