Political Party Summaries (For reference)

Political Parties (Left to Right)

Spartacus party (KPD)
The Spartacists, a radical group of German Socialists, formed c.Mar., 1916, and were led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The name was derived from the pseudonym Spartacus used by Liebknecht in his pamphlets denouncing World War I, the government, and the majority section of the Social Democratic party; the name was used to personify the modern wage slave in revolt like the Roman gladiator. The Spartacists, demanding the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat (working class, public) by mass action, gathered followers among the workingmen. After the overthrow of the German emperor, Wilhelm II (Nov., 1918), the Spartacists continued to oppose the government, then composed of Majority Socialists and Independent Socialists, and headed by President Friedrich Ebert. The Spartacists launched a press campaign against the government and engaged in patchy acts of terrorism. At an organizational meeting (Dec. 29, 1918–Jan. 1, 1919), the Spartacists officially transformed themselves into the German Communist party, and on Jan. 5, 1919, a Communist revolt broke out in Berlin. A general strike was proclaimed (Jan. 6) and the rebels occupied a number of government buildings. Gustav Noske was sent to Berlin to put down the revolt. He marched on the occupied part of the city and, by Jan. 13, had virtually defeated the Communists. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested (Jan. 15) and brutally murdered by counterrevolutionary volunteers on the pre-tense that the two socialists had attempted to escape.

Social Democrats (SDP)
The SDP was Germany’s oldest formally constituted political party (and largest until the rise of the NSDAP). It began in 1875, a Marxist organisation, formed from the union of two workers’ parties. The SPD survived Bismarck’s suppression (for working against Kaiser), and by 1912, had more than a million members. It asserted influence on public policy, achieving improvements in education and healthcare, and better rights and conditions for industrial workers. Its main weakness was ideological diversity; moderate socialist leaders (August Bebel, founder, followed by Ebert), committed to progressive reforms through democratic processes; a right wing, comprised of liberals and centrists; a radical left wing, containing hard-line socialists and Marxists. The divisions within the party were manageable, though at times of controversy the factions tended to turn on each other.

“During the period of the Weimar Republic the SPD remained essentially a party of the working class, and made very little inroad into the middle classes. Part of the problem for the SPD at this stage was that it was limited by attachments to its trade union movement and was concerned that any attempt at a more concerted appeal to the middle classes would lose it votes to the communists.”
Stephen Lee, historian

The divisions were fatally exposed in 1914, during WWI (radical left wing had a strong stance against it, arguing that it was an unnecessary, aggressive and imperialistic). Some were arrested and imprisoned by the government; by 1917 most others had been expelled from the SPD. Some, like Luxemburg and Liebknecht, instigated the Spartacist League that led an unsuccessful revolution in January 1919. Those who survived the German Revolution reformed as the KPD (above), but it loathed SPD leaders for their reliance on the right wing Freikorps and their alleged involvement in the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. As a consequence, the SPD and KPD remained bitter rivals during the 1920s. The SPD remained a strong and consistent supporter of the Weimar Republic and its constitution. By the early 1930s the SPD had lost almost half of its voter base, most of them frustrated at the party’s inability to secure stable and lasting progress in Germany.

The Centre Party (ZP)
The ZP regarded itself as the political voice of the Catholic population. Under the leadership of Matthias Erzberger, the Centre professed allegiance to the republican constitution and worked with the SPD and DDP in the Weimar Coalition to establish parliamentary democracy. Besides its defence of the rights of the Catholic Church and its support for the preservation of the federal states (Länder), the Centre was characterised by a widely diverse political platform. While its left wing favoured the development of the welfare state and international understanding, its right wing advocated a patriarchal corporative system of government at home and a revisionist foreign policy with emphasis on the defence of national interests. The Centre invariably obtained about 15% of the vote, provided a total of five Chancellors of the Reich and participated in every national government until 1932. In 1930, the appointment of Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party as Chancellor of a minority government which could only perform its duties with the support of the President marked the end of government accountability to Parliament and the beginning of a phase of quasi-parliamentary presidential government.
The Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei – BVP) had split from the Centre in a dispute over the party’s attitude to the parliamentary system and established itself as a conservative clerical party with a regional voter base but a national mission. This particularist party was the dominant political force in Bavaria. Nationally, it aspired to participation in Centre-Right coalitions which would keep the SPD out of government. From 1930 onwards the BVP supported National Socialist participation in government.

The German Democratic Party (DDP)
The DDP was the product of a merger between the Progressive People’s Party (FVP) and the left wing of the National Liberals. The DDP upheld the democratic order and played a very influential part in the formulation of the Weimar Constitution. The party, which drew much of its support from middleclass intellectuals and small traders, called for the strict separation of church and state, the restriction of government regulation of the economy and the abolition of economic monopolies and sought a fair balance between the interests of capital and labour. The DDP supported the creation of a League of Nations. In the National Assembly of 1919/20 it was part of the Weimar Coalition with the SPD and the Centre Party and participated in almost every government until 1932. The willingness of the DDP to make unpopular compromises cost it dearly. After winning almost a fifth of the vote (17.3%) in 1919, it rapidly lost support. Despite joining ranks with the Young Teutonic Order (Jungdeutscher Orden) to form the German State Party, it saw its vote dwindle to the level of an insignificant splinter party at about one per cent by the 1930s.

The German People’s Party (DVP)
The DVP, which was formed from the right wing of the National Liberals and parts of the Progressive People’s Party, was indifferent to hostile in its attitude to the new state. As the party of heavy industry, it primarily represented the interests of the upper and merchant classes. Its politics were still strongly rooted in authoritarianism, and it advocated the establishment of a strong central government. In the field of foreign policy, it sought a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. Under the chairmanship of Gustav Stresemann, the DVP came to terms with the democratic system and switched to a policy of accommodation with the victorious powers. The rise of anti-parliamentary forces within the party after Stresemann’s death and its convergence with the right-wing nationalist opposition could do nothing to prevent a steady decline in the electoral appeal of the DVP from 10% of the vote in the Reichstag election of 1920 to about one per cent in the 1930s.

The German National People’s Party (DVNP)
The DVNP, representing the conservative monarchist camp, campaigned against the democratic system and the international order established by the Treaty of Versailles. The DNVP defended the economic and social interests of the large landowners in the area to the east of the River Elbe as well as the interests of the industrial magnates. After initially engaging in limited cooperation, the party became more radical under the chairmanship of Alfred Hugenberg, who cultivated its anti-republican and anti-Semitic tendencies and, through cooperation with the NSDAP in the Harzburg Front, made Hitler acceptable to the bourgeois Right. The coalition government of the DNVP and NSDAP that took office in January 1933 under the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler marked the end of multi-party democracy and the beginning of National Socialist tyranny.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)
It was founded in 1919 and initially drew support from the lower middle classes in Munich, who had suffered an erosion of their social status. Especially after the party chairmanship, invested with dictatorial powers, was conferred on Adolf Hitler in 1921, the NSDAP sought, through chauvinistic nationalist and anti-Semitic demonstrations and acts of violence intended as protests against the Treaty of Versailles and the ‘politics of surrender’ of the Weimar Republic (the ‘stab-in-the-back legend’), to stir up the widespread hostility to the new political order that simmered in nationalist circles and to undermine the democratic system. Following the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 9 November 1923, Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment and a temporary ban on the party, the right-wing extremist NSDAP, which had tasted little electoral success before 1930, polling between 2.6% and 6.5% of the vote, switched to a pseudo-legal approach. The insecurity and social deprivation experienced by broad sections of the population offered considerable scope for the National Socialists’ anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist agitation. In 1930 the NSDAP scored a resounding electoral success as its share of the vote rocketed to 18.3%. Now the second-largest parliamentary group in the Reichstag with 102 seats, the party was able not only to extend its subversive influence on the work of Parliament but also to enhance its own reputation among the middle classes on the right of the political spectrum. The NSDAP was perceived by more and more former supporters of the Conservative and Liberal parties, as well as by many young people and non-voters, as a fresh force which, with its racist, nationalist and collectivist ideology and its aggressive stance in the field of foreign policy, seemed capable of finding solutions to Germany’s economic and political problems. In the autumn of 1931, the NSDAP, the DNVP and nationalist paramilitary associations joined forces in the Harzburg Front in order to step up the fight against parliamentary democracy. The destabilisation policies pursued by the NSDAP and the KPD led to a rapid succession of governments without parliamentary majorities that could only rule with the aid of presidential decrees and to the recurrence of general elections at brief intervals. Finally, the National Socialists had consolidated their position of power to such an extent that President Paul von Hindenburg, partly under pressure from right-wing Conservative circles and in spite of a decline in the NSDAP vote in the last democratic election to the Reichstag, appointed Hitler to serve as Chancellor of a coalition government of NSDAP and DNVP, thereby dealing the death blow to the sorely beleaguered parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic.

https://www.bundestag.de/blob/189776/01b7ea57531a60126da86e2d5c5dbb78/parties_weimar_republic-data.pdf