German Reich Party

The Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP, English: German Reich Party, German Imperial Party or German Empire Party) was a nationalist political party in West Germany. It was founded in 1950 from the German Right Party (Deutsche Rechtspartei), which had been set up in Lower Saxony in 1946 and had five members in the first Bundestag.

The DRP was established in 1950 when the majority of the Deutsche Rechtspartei members of the Bundestag decided to establish a more formal party network under the DRP name. The new party absorbed the "National Democrats", a splinter group from Hesse. The party took its name from an earlier group of the same name that had existed during the German Empire period. The initial three deputy chairmen, Wilhelm Meinberg, Otto Hess and Heinrich Kunstmann, had all been members of the Nazi Party. From 1951 the group published its own newspaper Reichsruf ("Call of the Reich").

The party moved towards explicit neo-Nazism in 1952, when the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was declared anti-constitutional and disbanded by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Much of its membership then joined the DRP. The membership of Hans-Ulrich Rudel in 1953 was seen as marking out the party as the new force of neo-Nazism and he enjoyed close ties to Savitri Devi and Nazi mysticism.

Stability under Konrad Adenauer and the growth experienced during the Wirtschaftswunder meant that the DRP struggled for support, averaging around only 1% of the national votes in the federal elections of 1953, 1957 and 1961. The party's only major breakthrough came in 1959 in the regional election for Rhineland-Palatinate, where it won 5.1% of the vote and thus was able to send deputies to the assembly.

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