German Volkische Party

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The German Nationalist Party ( DvP ) was a nationalist , racist and anti-Semitic party at the time of the German Empire and existed from 1914 to 1918. The chairmen were Wilhelm Lattmann (1914–1915) and Ferdinand Werner (1915–1918). General Secretary was Johannes Henningsen .

Party history

The party emerged in 1914 from two anti-Semitic splinter parties, the German Social Party founded in 1889 and the German Reform Party founded in 1890, and in the year it was founded it had around 14,000 members. It saw itself as a "parliamentary political fighting force" of the predominantly extra-parliamentary folk movement . Their agitation was predominantly anti-Semitic and proceeded from “racial knowledge” as a decisive factor in “racially German politics”. Its supporters saw the Völkische as the heiress of the anti-Semitic movement and tried to bring its old party camps together and to mobilize them politically. They used Thor's hammer as a symbol , which before the First World War was the most important national symbol alongside the swastika . From the beginning of 1917, the party also used the swastika as a symbol, for example on the title page of its party organ Deutschvölkische Blätter . Due to the anti-Semitic attitude, the German Nationalist Party was of the opinion that everything “foreign” and “anti-ethnic” should be removed from Germany. For them, the "German blood", the German ancestry and hereditary disposition, so that everything "un-German" had to be fought.

Politically, the party represented expansionist war aims and advocated far-reaching annexations. As with other right-wing organizations, the aim was Germany's hegemonic position in Europe. Domestically, they demanded the expulsion of the Jewish population and an end to all immigration from Eastern Europe. As the war progressed, their propaganda became more and more radical. Its chairman Ferdinand Werner tried to mobilize the authorities to take action against alleged "Jewish war profiteers " and "Jewish slackers". The party was partially successful with this, as in October 1916 the army carried out a " census of Jews ", which was intended to show that the Jewish population was not sufficiently involved in the war effort. The result of the investigation proved the opposite and therefore the study was not published.

The party had five members in the Reichstag . In 1916 they merged with the Free Conservative Party and the Christian Social Workers' Party to form the "German Fraction". In the second half of the war, too, the party stuck to the demand for a so-called “victory peace” and rejected the peace resolution of 1917.

In the course of the November Revolution, the party finally disbanded in 1918. The greater part of the members joined the DNVP . The Reichsverband, later converted into the Deutschvölkischer Bund , remained in existence together with its newspapers until the Deutschvölkischer Bund merged with the German Schutz- und Trutzbund on October 1, 1919 to form the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Uwe Puschner: The völkisch movement in the Wilhelmine Empire. Language - Race - Religion , Darmstadt 2001, p. 387.