Socialist Reich Party


The Socialist Reich Party was a West German political party founded in the aftermath of World War II in 1949 as an openly neo-Nazi-oriented split-off from the national conservative German Right Party. The party achieved some electoral success in northwestern Germany.
The SRP was the first party to be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952.

Origins

It was established on 2 October 1949 in Hameln by Otto Ernst Remer, a former Wehrmacht major general who had played a vital role in defeating the 20 July plot,, a former editor of the CDU newsletter in Lower Saxony, and Gerhard Krüger, leader of the German Student Union under the Third Reich, after they had been excluded from the DKP-DRP. The SRP saw itself as a legitimate heir of the Nazi Party; most party adherents were former NSDAP members. Its foundation was backed by former Luftwaffe Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

Party platform

The party claimed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a United States puppet and that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was the last legitimate President of the German Reich appointed by Adolf Hitler. It denied the existence of the Holocaust, claimed that the United States built the gas ovens of the Dachau concentration camp after the War and that films of concentration camps were faked. The SRP also advocated Europe, led by a reunited German Reich, as a "third force" against both capitalism and communism. It demanded the re-annexation of the former eastern territories of Germany and a "solution of the Jewish question". According to Karl Dietrich Bracher, "SRP propaganda concentrated on a vague 'popular socialism' in which the old National Socialists rediscovered well-worn slogans, and also on a nationalism whose championship of Reich and war was but a thinly disguised continuation of the Lebensraum ideology".
According to Martin A. Lee, the SRP never openly criticised the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union funded the SRP as it held anti-American and pro-Soviet views. Lee alleges that the Communist Party of Germany, on the other hand, did not receive Soviet funds because it was purportedly viewed as "ineffectual". Remer said that if the USSR ever did invade Germany, he would "show the Russians the way to the Rhine" and that SRP members would "post themselves as traffic policemen, spreading their arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible".

Election results

Dorls had been elected as a DKP-DRP deputy to the Bundestag parliament in the 1949 election. The SRP gained a second seat in parliament, when MP Fritz Rössler joined the party in 1950. In May 1951 it won 16 seats in the Lower Saxony state assembly election, receiving 11.0% of the votes with strongholds in the Stade region.It included as a member the much decorated Luftwaffe ace Heinz Knoke. In October 1951 it gained 7.7% of the votes in Bremen and won 8 seats in the city's Bürgerschaft parliament.

Membership

The SRP had about ten thousand members. Affiliated associations were the Reichsfront paramilitary organisation and the Reichsjugend youth wing, which were banned by decision of the Federal Minister of the Interior on 4 May 1951. On the same day, the West German cabinet decided to file an application to the Federal Constitutional Court to find the SRP anti-constitutional and to impose a ban. In anticipation of this judgment, the party dissolved itself on 12 September, but this decision was not accepted by the Federal Constitutional Court. Before the ban, Remer had compared the situation of the SRP with that of the early Christians and declared that if the party was banned, he and his party comrades should descend into the catacombs. On 23 October 1952 the court according to Article 21 Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law adjudicated the party unconstitutional and dissolved, prohibited the founding of any successor organisations, withdraw all Bundestag and Landtag mandates and seized the party's assets.