German Volkische Freedom Party

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (short name DVFP , at the time also DFP ) was a radical ethnic party in the Weimar Republic . The party propagated a national dictatorship with a radical racist , anti-communist and anti-Semitic program. The DVFP was formed in December 1922 as a split from the German National People's Party (DNVP). In 1923, the party likely involved in coup plans was temporarily banned. In 1924 the DVFP joined a list association with substitute organizations of the NSDAP , which was banned at the time , which broke up in early 1925. In the competition with the NSDAP, the party that appeared as the German National Freedom Movement (DVFB) from 1925 was soon defeated and sank into insignificance by 1928 at the latest.

founding

After the November Revolution, ethnic groups joined the national conservative DNVP. Tensions within the DNVP became apparent in March 1920 with the Kapp Putsch , which was partly supported but mostly rejected as hopeless. After the failed coup, Völkische emerged as representatives of a radical group in the DNVP that vehemently rejected the Weimar Republic and stood in opposition to the moderate course of chairman Oskar Hergt . After the murder of the then Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922, violent disputes broke out in the DNVP, as a result of which MP Wilhelm Henning was expelled from the parliamentary group, but not from the party. Shortly before his murder, Henning attacked Rathenau in a harsh, anti-Semitic manner. Two leading nationalist DNVP MPs, Albrecht von Graefe and Reinhold Wulle , expressed their solidarity with Henning and formed a German-national working group with him in the Reichstag at the end of November .

On December 16, 1922, the German National Freedom Party (DVFP) was founded, as there was no prospect of an understanding with the DNVP party leadership. Graefe became party leader, Wulle his deputy. One of the leading politicians of the DVFP was Ernst zu Reventlow , who worked on program issues in his journal Reichswart . The chairman of the Pan-Germans , Heinrich Claß , had refused the party leadership offered to him. In an appeal published on December 17th, parliamentary democracy is equated with the rule of money and the Jews; it should be replaced by a national community without opposites of class and class. The party saw itself as the embodiment of the will of the people, a claim that was also made by other groups. According to the party statutes, members had to be of “German blood descent”, which excluded Jews, half-Jews and foreigners. In addition, the party worked towards an internal and external overthrow, the Reichstag was to be replaced by a professional parliament, the executive should be left to a "national dictator". New laws should also reverse the emancipation of the Jews and legalize their expropriation. Medium-sized companies should be given preference over corporations and speculative capital should be regulated by new stock exchange legislation. With this program, the party placed itself in the tradition of the anti-Semite parties of the imperial era.

Emil Julius Gumbel saw the party as an attempt to be "a legal protective cloak for the German nationalist movement". The Greater German Workers' Party, which under Roßbach joined the DFVP as a whole, was already the cover organization for the NSDAP, which was banned in northern Germany. Gumbel in turn regards the DFVP as its successor organization due to the many members who were previously with the GAP. He saw the Thuringian Association of the DVFP in isolation as a cover organization of the NSDAP.

Prominent anti-Semites such as Theodor Fritsch and Artur Dinter supported the new party. Numerous members of the DVFP came from the German Volkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, which was banned in 1922 . In addition, there were personnel overlaps with the Black Reichswehr , and some statements by Reichswehr members before an investigative committee also suggest that the DVFP leadership and the Black Reichswehr have agreed to carry out a putsch. Around two thirds of the DNVP regional association Mecklenburg-Schwerin joined the DVFP immediately after it was founded; however, some of the ethnic and anti-Semites remained in the DNVP. In January 1923, the Greater German Workers' Party (GDAP) around Gerhard Roßbach, active in Berlin, joined the company . The DVFP commissioned Roßbach, who was also a member of the party leadership, to organize its own defense organization, the Völkische Turnerschaften . In addition, she built a "military apparatus" that was disguised as a hall protection organization.

According to Gumbel, by the time it was banned, the party had already set up 165 hundreds in northern Germany alone, trained them militarily, defined codes for the event of a coup and drafted a detailed deployment plan.

Little is known about the composition of DVFP membership, but there was a disproportionately large number of former soldiers, especially officers and Freikorps members, landowners, civil servants, academic professions as well as entrepreneurs, craftsmen and business people.

Prohibition

In March 1923, in negotiations between the DVFP and the NSDAP, areas of action were demarcated: the NSDAP limited itself to southern Germany , the DVFP to northern and central Germany , areas in which the NSDAP was partially banned.

In the Free State of Prussia , the DVFP was banned by Interior Minister Carl Severing on March 23, 1923 . The Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order also came to the conclusion that there were groups within the DVFP who wanted to form a soldiers' party based on the example of the Italian fascists. The prohibition order was justified with the character of the DVFP as a substitute organization for the banned NSDAP. The party's aim is the forcible elimination of parliamentarianism . In the days before the party was banned, the police raided the party office and the homes of leading party members. Documents seized in the process showed links to paramilitary groups headed by Roßbach. During the party ban, the DVFP was represented by the Reichstag MPs Graefe, Wulle and Henning; the party activities continued in illegality. The German Herold , an association and publisher around Wulle, served as substitute organizations : Völkische Kampfgewerkschaften as successors to the gymnastics unions as well as German- Völkisch electoral associations that took the place of local associations. After the ban in Prussia, the DVFP was also banned in Thuringia , Saxony and Baden .

In November 1923, Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee and other leading figures of the DVFP such as Roßbach signaled their ideological closeness to National Socialism and showed their endeavor to overthrow the democratic state by participating in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch . After the attempted coup, the DVFP was banned across the Reich on November 20, 1923 by General Hans von Seeckt .

During the occupation of the Ruhr area , the DVFP supported the passive resistance and rejected negotiations with France and Belgium. After the execution of Freikorps member Albert Leo Schlageter and Karl Radek's so-called Schlageter speech , there was a temporary cooperation between the Germans and the Communists : Reventlow published an article in the Rote Fahne . In addition, high-ranking communist functionaries appeared as speakers at ethnic events. The termination of the Ruhrkampf in September 1923 was viewed by the DVFP as treason and gave impetus to existing plans to establish a dictatorship.

In the course of legal proceedings for the murder of a DVFP member on November 17, 1923, the party leadership of the DVFP was heavily burdened in 1925: The perpetrator, who is also a member of the DVFP, testified that the murder was at the request or on behalf of Reinhold Wulle, Wilhelm Kube and Georg Ahlemann to have committed. The aim was to prevent the betrayal of a coup that the DVFP had planned together with the NSDAP in Bavaria and the Black Reichswehr. In statements to an investigative committee of the Prussian state parliament in 1925 and 1926, leading DVFP politicians denied such plans. Witness statements in the femicide trials and before parliamentary committees of inquiry contain numerous references to connections between the DVFP and the Black Reichswehr . According to current research, joint putsch plans by the Black Reichswehr, DVFP and NSDAP are likely. The planned establishment of a right-wing military dictatorship failed when a state of emergency was declared in September 1923 and executive power was taken over by the Reichswehr .

List association with the NSDAP

At the end of February 1924 the prohibitions of the DVFP in the Reich and in Prussia were lifted. For the Reichstag election in May 1924 , the DVFP joined a list association as a Völkisch-Sozialer-Block with substitute organizations of the NSDAP, which was still banned. This alliance achieved strong results in the state elections and achieved 19.3% in Mecklenburg-Schwerin , in Bavaria it was pulling level with the SPD (17.1%). In the Reichstag elections, the alliance achieved 6.5% and thus 32 seats. At the suggestion of Ludendorff's National Socialist Freedom Party , the parliamentary group calls itself a concession to the Nazis, although of the 32 MPs they do not even make up a third. Ludendorff appoints Albrecht von Graefe "as his confidant" as parliamentary leader. When Ludendorff proclaimed the merger of the parties that form the NSFP to form the National Socialist in May 1924, the North German National Socialists renounced. Rosenberg then accuses the DVFP of only representing a small upper class. In the elections after these disintegration phenomena, the DVFP lost massive votes, meanwhile more and more groups are detaching themselves from the "national basin" that the DVFP wanted to be.

In October DVFP and NSDAP formally merged under the leadership of Erich Ludendorff , Graefe and Gregor Strasser under the name National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB). Hitler, who had been in custody since his attempted coup, refused the connection. In the Reichstag election in December 1924 , the NSFB got 3.0% of the vote and 14 seats.

In February 1925, after this massive loss of votes, the "Reichsführererschaft" resigned, but only two days later called for the foundation of the German National Freedom Movement . This is constituted on February 25, 1925 in Berlin and with Wulle, Henning, Reventlow and von Graefe forms a Reich leadership similar to that of the DVFP. By the end of 1925, this party, which was conceived as an amalgamation of the völkisch movement, like the DVFP before it, was gradually joined by all the larger völkisch associations with the exception of the NSDAP. With 27,500 members, the DVFB is now almost back to the strength of the DVFP 1922.

Decline

After his release from prison in December 1924, Hitler tried in negotiations with the Bavarian Prime Minister Heinrich Held to obtain re-admission to the NSDAP. In doing so, Hitler promised to concentrate on the fight against Marxism. On February 14, 1925, Ludendorff, Strasser and Graefe laid down the leadership of the NSFB, with which the party was de facto dissolved. Two days later, leading politicians of the DVFP founded the German Volkische Freiheitsbewegung (DVFB). The founding appeal turned against “ World Jewry ” and its alleged auxiliary forces as well as against ultramontanism . The aim of the DVFB was the formation of a free, social Greater Germany under the leadership of Prussia. The appeal recognized Hitler as one of the best champions and regretted that he was currently treading a separate path. The NSDAP was re-established on February 27th.

In the competitive struggle between the two parties, the DVFB initially had an advantage because it had more members, more MPs and, in Graefe, an undisputed leader. However, the NSDAP proved to be more effective, especially after it was able to settle its internal party differences at the Bamberg leadership conference in February 1926. The DVFB retained the working style of a nineteenth-century dignitary party and was subject to a tightly organized leader party that had no interest in cooperative partnership. From June 1925, DVFB, NSDAP and a former DNVP member formed the Völkische Arbeitsgemeinschaft in the Reichstag . The collaboration, regarded as a "marriage of convenience", ended in March 1927 when the NSDAP members left the parliamentary group.

Until September 1925 the DVFB developed slowly but steadily. The focus of the party continued to be in northern Germany; the NSFB regional associations in Pomerania, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein joined the DVFB. In southern Germany there were only individual local groups, for example in Nuremberg and Frankfurt am Main . Attempts by the DVFB to gain a foothold in southern and western Germany led from September 1925 to confrontations with National Socialists who, with Hitler's approval, disrupted and blew up the Deutschvölkische events. In the fight against the Locarno treaties , the DVFB formed a working group in November 1925 with the NSFB Württemberg around Christian Mergenthaler and the National Social Volksbund around Anton Drexler , who also joined the German Social Party around Richard Kunze in December . From January 1926 onwards, the union operated as the Völkisch-Sozial Arbeitsgemeinschaft .

Heavy losses in the state elections in Mecklenburg-Schwerin in June 1926 led to a crisis in the DVFB, as a result of which leading politicians and almost half of the members left the party and mostly switched to the NSDAP. In view of the election defeat, a social-revolutionary wing around Reventlow called for a social policy program from the DVFB that should be tailored to the interests of the workers. Employees should participate in the company's profits and should be entitled to half of the supervisory board mandates. With these demands, Reventlow could not prevail against the conservative wing of the party, so that he left the party in February 1927 together with Theodor Fritsch and the Reichstag member Franz Stöhr . In the same month Wilhelm Kube was expelled. As a result of the crisis, the DVFB acquired a distinctly conservative and monarchist character; at the same time, the NSDAP was able to penetrate further into northern Germany. In June 1927 the NSFB Württemberg left the Völkisch-Sozial Arbeitsgemeinschaft and joined the NSDAP. At the turn of the year 1926/27, members of the Roßbach organization had converted from the DVFB to the NSDAP.

A patriotic opposition bloc around the DVFB that had arisen in the run-up to the Reichstag elections in 1928 broke up before the election: after internal disputes in February and March, the Wehrwolf military association , the monarchist black-white-red German banner and the remnants of the German Social Party around Richard Kunze left Alliance. In the Reichstag election in May, the DFVB ran as the Völkischnationaler Block (VNB), which also included the German Reformation Party around the Berlin cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring . The VNB remained without a mandate with almost 270,000 votes. In the elections to the Prussian state parliament held on the same day , the VNB won two seats. In the state elections, the VNB was only ahead of the NSDAP in the constituencies of East Prussia, Magdeburg and East Hanover; In the constituencies of Potsdam I, Pomerania, and Weser-Ems, both parties were roughly equal.

In September 1928 Wulle replaced Graefe as party leader of the DVFB. In January 1933, Wulle welcomed the transfer of power to the National Socialists, but at the same time called for the reintroduction of the monarchy, which should be based on the Prussian state idea. The DVFB was finally banned by the law against the formation of new parties of July 14, 1933. Individual smaller ethnic groups were active in Mecklenburg until the beginning of 1934. A report by the Reich governor in Mecklenburg blamed the activities of the Deutschvölkischer for the comparatively high proportion of no votes in the so-called referendum in November 1933 .

literature

  • Reimer Wulff: The German National Freedom Party 1922–1928. University thesis, Marburg 1968.
  • Manfred Weißbecker : German National Freedom Party (DVFP), 1922–1933. In: Dieter Fricke (Hrsg.): Lexicon for the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789–1945). Volume 2, Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0877-2 , pp. 550-558.
  • Bernhard Sauer: The German National Freedom Party (DvFP) and the Grütte case . (PDF; 4.1 MB). In: Berlin in the past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives , 1994.
  • Gideon Botsch , Christoph Kopke : German National Freedom Party. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Organizations, Institutions, Movements . (= Handbook of Anti-Semitism , Volume 5) de Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-598-24078-2 , pp. 204-206.
  • Stefanie Schrader: From partner to adversary The German National Freedom Party and its electoral alliance with the NSDAP . In: Daniel Schmidt, Michael Sturm , Massimiliano Livi (Hrsg.): Wegbereiter des Nationalozialismus. People, organizations and networks of the extreme right between 1918 and 1933 (= series of publications by the Institute for City History . Volume 19). Klartext, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1303-5 , p. 55 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 7 f.
  2. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 9 f.
  3. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 12, 20-22.
  4. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 15 f, 19.
  5. ^ Stefan Breuer: The radical right in Germany 1871-1945: A political history of ideas . Reclam, Philipp, Ditzingen 2010, ISBN 3-15-018776-1 , p. 255-256 .
  6. ^ A b Emil Julius Gumbel, 1891-: Conspirators: On the history and sociology of the German nationalist secret societies 1918-1924 . 2nd Edition. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1979, ISBN 3-88423-003-4 , p. 97-100 .
  7. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic . Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-06-9 , pp. 332 .
  8. ↑ Botsch, Kopke: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 205.
  9. ↑ a b Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 21 f.
  10. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 319 f.
  11. ^ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic. Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-06-9 , p. 39 f.
  12. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 20 f.
  13. ^ Sauer: Reichswehr , p. 332.
  14. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 27.
  15. ^ Weißbecker: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 554.
  16. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 35 f.
  17. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 26–32.
  18. ^ Sauer: Reichswehr, p. 40 f.
  19. ↑ Assessment by Sauer: Reichswehr, p. 331 f.
  20. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 35 f.
  21. ↑ a b Stefan Breuer: The Völkischen in Germany: Empire and Weimar Republic . Knowledge Buchges, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 3-534-21354-8 , pp. 197-200 .
  22. ↑ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 42–64.
  23. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 66–74.
  24. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 162 f.
  25. ↑ Martin Döring: "Parliamentary arm of the movement." The National Socialists in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. (= Contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties, Volume 130) Droste, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-7700-5237-4 , pp. 79, 84 f.
  26. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 76 f., 85.
  27. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 136, 139.
  28. ↑ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 142–144.
  29. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 148–155, 163 f.
  30. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 156.
  31. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , pp. 158–160.
  32. ^ Herbert Gottwald: German Reformation Party (DReP), 1928. In: Dieter Fricke (Hrsg.): Lexicon for the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789–1945). Volume 2, Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0877-2 , pp. 60-62, here p. 61.
  33. ^ Wulff: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 165 f.
  34. ↑ Weißbecker: Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei , p. 556.