Greater German Labor Party

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The Greater German Workers' Party ( GDAP , also GAP ) was a short-lived right-wing extremist party of the Weimar Republic . It was founded in the course of an attempt to establish an organizational structure of the NSDAP in northern Germany on November 19, 1922 as a local Berlin branch and cover organization of the now banned NSDAP and as such also banned on January 10, 1923.

history

The Freikorpsführer Gerhard Roßbach and Heinz Oskar Hauenstein , who had fought with their units in Upper Silesia during the Third Polish Uprising , decided on their return to build the National Socialist movement in Northern Germany . This organization should also serve as a collecting tank, as a "political community", for former volunteer corps members.

Roßbach already had excellent contacts with the Bavarian National Socialists. Hauenstein called the former officers of their two formations together to form a “leadership group” in Munich . In August 1922 Roßbach, Hauenstein and other former Freikorps officers such as Albert Leo Schlageter met with Adolf Hitler in Munich to discuss plans for Northern Germany. Following this, it was mainly Roßbach who traveled through northern Germany and held the founding meetings of various local groups, for example in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . After the official dissolution of his Freikorps, Roßbach had already maintained various camouflage and reception organizations there, such as the Rossbach Working Group (after its ban, an association for agricultural vocational training ) to which Martin Bormann and Rudolf Höß belonged. Various other organizations such as the National Social Association with a focus on Potsdam , the Workers' Liberation League with Waldemar Geyer and Kurt Daluege in Berlin and a National Socialist Party for Prussia were added.

On November 19, 1922, Roßbach, Hauenstein and Schlageter invited to the foundation of the NSDAP local group in Berlin in the Kreuzberg restaurant "Reichskanzler" in Yorckstrasse . She had recruited interested parties primarily from the members of the Berlin group of the German Socialist Party (DSP) Julius Streichers and from the German Social Party . They had also held various meetings in Charlottenburg and Steglitz . The Reich Commissioner for Public Order Supervision therefore referred to Roßbach as the “representative of the Führer of the National Socialists for Berlin”. On November 14th, however, the Reich Minister of the Interior dissolved all parts of Roßbach's organization as an armed organization on the basis of the Versailles Treaty and on November 15 the Prussian Ministry of the Interior banned the NSDAP in Prussia on the basis of the Republic Protection Act .

Partial facsimile of a list of members of the GDAP / NSDAP that has been handed down in full in the Federal Archives , holdings of the NSDAP's main archive, NS 26/33 [sic!].

The inaugural meeting was nevertheless held as planned, with Roßbach, who had also been interrogated by the Berlin Political Police shortly before , stayed in the background. The Greater German Workers' Party was founded in place of the NSDAP . The leadership was taken over by the national trade unionist Karl Fahrenhorst and the former DSP and now NSDAP members (the Munich NSDAP) Arno Chwatal and Hermann Kretzschmann . The Hanoverian Bruno Wenzel became political director of the party.

According to the historian Bernd Kruppa, who has evaluated a 194 name list of GDAP members, most of the party members came from middle-class and residential districts. 189 of the 194 Berlin members were men; most of them belonged to age groups who had actively participated in the First World War . For some of the people listed, no occupation is given. However, the occupational groups of salaried employees, traders and other self-employed dominate, while only 18% can be identified as manual workers. The GDAP did not succeed in winning large parts of the workforce for the Volkish camp.

The first local groups were founded in December 1922. In Hanover, for example, the establishment of the GDAP on December 6th formed the seamless continuation of Wenzel's local NSDAP group. The Göttingen local branch of the NSDAP under Ludolf Haase also sought to join the GDAP after the NSDAP ban. In Upper Silesia, local groups of the GDAP were founded in Bytom on December 10th and in Gleiwitz on December 17th. In Gleiwitz, Hitler was celebrated and the swastika was openly displayed .

In fact, Rossbach had not even bothered to revise the statutes of the NSDAP for the GDAP. The club badge - a red armband with a black swastika on a white, circular background - and the flag were kept the same.

The GDAP was therefore correctly viewed by the Prussian government as a continuation of the banned NSDAP and was also banned by the Prussian Interior Ministry on January 10, 1923. The first attempt to bring together political and paramilitary radical-ethnic groups, especially in Berlin and Brandenburg, failed. The GDAP then joined on January 20, 1923, corporately and with Roßbach at the head of the German National Freedom Party (DFP).

Ludolf Haase described the transfer in a letter dated February 17, 1924 as follows:

"1.) The GAP will join the DFP and will remain in this as a closed block under the name of 'Greater German Movement' within the DFP.

2.) The CAP retains its own leadership, its own S. [?] Its own treasury.

3.) MP Henning refrains from stepping forward significantly and holds back.

4.) Two gentlemen from GAP join the board of the DFP in order to enable smooth cooperation. "

In the DFP, Roßbach took care of the development of paramilitary groups, which the police identified as "revolutionary fighting organizations". In Mecklenburg, the GDAP was banned on February 23, 1923 after members had tried to participate at the NSDAP party congress on 26/27. January in Munich.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Jan Striesow: The German National People's Party and the Völkisch Radicals 1918–1922. Volume 1. 1981, p. 426.
  2. ↑ a b Bernhard Sauer: Gerhard Roßbach - Hitler's representative for Berlin. On the early history of right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic. In: Journal of History . Vol. 50, Issue 1, 2002, pp. 5–21, digital version (PDF; 3.8 MB) .
  3. ↑ Beate Behrens, Karl Heinz Jahnke , Kerstin Urbschat, Inge Wendt: Mecklenburg in the time of National Socialism 1933-1945. A documentation. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Neuer Hochschulschriften-Verlag, Rostock 1998, ISBN 3-929544-46-6 , p. 30.
  4. ^ A b c d Martin Schuster: The SA in the National Socialist "seizure of power" in Berlin and Brandenburg 1926–1934. 2005, p. 22 f.
  5. ^ Bernd Kruppa: Right-wing radicalism in Berlin. 1918-1928. 1988, p. 198 f.
  6. ^ Bernd Kruppa: Right-wing radicalism in Berlin. 1918-1928. 1988, p. 199 f. and Thomas Friedrich: The abused capital. Hitler and Berlin. 2007, p. 82.
  7. ^ Bernd Kruppa: Right-wing radicalism in Berlin. 1918-1928. 1988, pp. 200-203.
  8. ^ André König: Köpenick under the swastika. The history of National Socialism in Berlin-Köpenick. Mein Verlag, Mahlow bei Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936607-05-2 , p. 14.
  9. ↑ Hanna Behrend: The relations between the NSDAP headquarters and the Gauverband Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig 1921-1933. A contribution to the leadership structure of the National Socialist Party (= European university publications. Series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences. Vol. 146). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1981, ISBN 3-8204-6867-6 , p. 53, (At the same time: Berlin, Freie Universität, dissertation, 1978).
  10. ↑ Dirk Stegmann : Political radicalization in the province. Situation reports and strength reports from the political police and the regional presidents for East Hanover 1922–1933 (= sources and studies on the general history of Lower Saxony in modern times. Vol. 16). Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1999, ISBN 3-7752-5909-0 , p. 137.
  11. ^ Katrin Stein: Party bans in the Weimar Republic (= writings on the history of the constitution. Vol. 56). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-09508-1 , p. 154, (also: Osnabrück, University, dissertation, 1997/1998).
  12. ^ Ludolf Haase: Circular II. To the local group leaders of the illegal NSDAP. Printed in Werner Jochmann : National Socialism and Revolution. Origin and history of the NSDAP in Hamburg 1922–1933. Documents (= publications of the Research Center for the History of National Socialism in Hamburg. Vol. 3, ZDB -ID 522596-6 ). European publishing company, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 63.
  13. ↑ Andreas Wirsching : From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison (= sources and representations on contemporary history. Vol. 40). Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 319 f.
  14. ↑ Beate Behrens: With Hitler to power. Rise of National Socialism in Mecklenburg and Lübeck 1922–1933. Neuer Hochschulschriften-Verlag, Rostock 1998, ISBN 3-929544-52-0 , p. 22.