German Party (1945)

The German Party (Deutsche Partei, DP) was a Conservative political party in West Germany during the post-war years.

In 1945 the Lower Saxony National Party (Niedersächsische Landespartei, acronym: NLP) was founded as a re-creation of the regionalist German-Hanoverian Party (or German Party) that had been active in the period between the creation of the German Empire in 1871 and the Nazi Party's seizure of power in 1933. Two groups of people initiated the process: one around Ludwig Alpers and Heinrich Hellwege in Stade, the other around Georg Ludewig, Karl Biester, Wolfgang Kwiecinski, and Arthur Menge in Hanover. On May 23, 1946 Heinrich Hellwege, Landrat in Stade, was formally elected to serve as chairman of the NLP. The NLP aimed principally at the establishment of a Lower Saxon state within a federal Germany as well as representing Christian conservatism.

In 1947, a year after the establishment of Lower Saxony as a state, the party reverted to its former name of the German Party. It soon expanded into neighbouring states under the chairmanship of Heinrich Hellwege and gained 27 seats (18.1 per cent of the total) in the first Lower Saxon Landtag election in 1947 It sent two delegates to Bonn to serve in the constitutional convention (Parlamentarischer Rat) of 1948/49. The German Party was among the parties that supported a market economy in the Bizonal Economic Council, thus laying the groundwork for the "bourgeois coalition" in power in Bonn between 1949 and 1956.

In the 1949 federal election the party received 4% of the national vote and won 18 seats. As a result, it became a coalition partner of the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Free Democrats (FDP) in the government of Konrad Adenauer. The DP vote fell to 3.3% with 15 seats in the 1953 election, although it retained its place in the governing coalition and again in 1957 when the DP went back up to 17 seats with 3.4% of the vote. A short-lived Free People's Party (FVP) had been formed in 1956 by Franz Blücher, Fritz Neumayer and others who had left the Free Democrats (FDP), but the following year the FVP merged into the German Party, possibly contributing to a slight increase in the DP vote in 1957. German Party ministers in these governments were Heinrich Hellwege (1949–1955), Hans-Joachim von Merkatz (1955–1960) and Hans-Christoph Seebohm (1949–1960). In 1955 Hellwege resigned his federal office to become Premier/ Prime Minister of Lower Saxony.

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