The Programme of the National-Democratic Party of Germany

“Americans to America! Germany for the Germans!” The 1951 political programme of the National-Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD), communist East Germany’s party of ‘German nationalism’

DDR - NDPDThe National-Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD) was officially founded at the behest of communist authorities on 16th July, 1948, only a few months after the official conclusion of ‘denazification’ efforts within nascent East Germany. This timing was not a coincidence. Legally-recognized political parties within the DDR were conceived as having an essentially corporatist function; each party represented the interests of a specific social group, and alongside various mass organizations they were welded directly into the organism of the state through their direct incorporation into various collaborative government structures. Following the dénouement of denazification, the dominant Socialist Unity Party, in conjunction with the Soviet Military Authority, was keen to integrate former members of the National Socialist and broader nationalist movements back into the developing East German nation as productive members of a socialist Germany. The NDPD was intended to be their political home, a means of providing a ‘safety net’ for denazification by giving ‘rehabilitated’ NSDAP members, radical-nationalists, professional soldiers, and nationalist bourgeoisie an official mechanism for representing their interests within the system (thus preventing their alienation), as well as a vehicle for ensuring their continued ‘re-education’. The NDPD was thus as much a communist propaganda tool as it was the political representation of a new ‘socialist nationalism’ – at the same time as the new Party was expending its resources on (often quite successfully) lobbying for the provision of employment rights and property reinstatement to former NSDAP, SA, and Wehrmacht members, it was attempting to inculcate in its recruits a revised form of nationalist ideology acceptable to the Marxist-Leninist tenets underpinning the DDR. The NDPD did this in large part by repurposing certain elements of National Socialist and deutschnational ideology for pro-Soviet ends, such as by redefining the word ‘National’ to give it a progressive and democratic flavor, or by redirecting traditional anti-Westernism into a more overt and aggressive anti-American direction. The following translation of the 1951 party programme of the NDPD is instructive in showing the creative way in which the Soviet-backed authorities attempted to recast German nationalist sentiment into a form that was amenable to their goals. Even the triple-oak-leaf emblem adopted by the NDPD was an attempt to overtly appeal to German nationalists: the oak tree and oak leaf have been a symbol of German nationalism for centuries.

Programme of the
National-Democratic Party of Germany
NDPD_Symbol

The National-Democratic Party of Germany arose at a time of deepest national distress. America was preparing to tear Germany apart; then, on 21st April 1948, a group of patriotic1 Germans in Halle raised a call for the founding of a party that should be both national and democratic. On 16th July 1948 the National-Democratic Party of Germany was founded, two days before America split the German currency unit. This marked the beginning of a series of measures which, from the introduction of a separate West German currency to the creation of a separate West German state (that American protectorate on German soil), would lead to the rearmament of West Germany and were intended to end in a German brothers’ war to the benefit and advantage of American world conquest.

This danger demanded the alliance of all patriotic Germans, with the aim of foiling America’s attack against the existence of our nation. We raised the banner of our national liberation-struggle in the name of our living rights:

Unity, Peace, Independence, and Prosperity!

In the three years which have since passed, our Party has tirelessly and without faltering carried on a policy whose principles were, are, and shall remain:

To place the interests of the Nation above everything else; to advance a national policy which is consistent from beginning to end, a policy whose yardstick and justification is the Nation, a policy that always and only commits itself to the Nation and puts it first at every moment, because it represents the safeguarding of the rights of our German Volk2 just as decisively as it respects the rights of other peoples.

Therefore, the 3rd Party Congress of 18 June, 1951 in Leipzig ratifies the following with the votes of all delegates: Continue reading

Right or Left? Right and Left!

“The way of the future involves bringing together the man of the Right with the man of the Left” – a brief 1932 article by conservative-revolutionary intellectual Hans Zehrer

Left_Right_Left_RightHans Zehrer is somewhat of an obscure figure today, at least in comparison with like-minded members of the German national-revolutionary movement such as Ernst Niekisch and Karl Otto Paetel, both of whom have managed to acquire a greater degree of modern celebrity in certain online circles. This is perhaps unfair to Zehrer, who was undoubtedly more widely-known than both during the crucial 1928-1933 period in Germany; certainly he was more influential. Born in 1899, Zehrer fought in the Great War and, after having participated in the 1920 Kapp Putsch, settled down to a fairly respectable life of political journalism. What made Zehrer’s name was his taking over the editorship of foundering national journal Die Tat (‘The Deed’) in October 1929. Die Tat swiftly grew under Zehrer’s stewardship to be the most widely-read political journal in the country, outselling its nearest left-wing competitor by tens of thousands of copies. The key factor in Die Tat’s success was its unique political position. Zehrer and his circle of contributors published detailed critiques of capitalism, advocating its replacement by a mercantilist system of mass nationalization, stringent autarchy, and exclusionary tariff barriers. They rejected not only the concept of parties, but the entire Left-Right divide altogether, arguing instead for a ‘Third Front’ alliance between all militant forces from far-left to far-right. They were also elitists, rejecting the NSDAP for its plebeian roots and its ‘mass party’ character, desiring instead a “revolution from above” led by the army and the President. The high point for Zehrer probably came during the short-lived government of ‘social general’ Kurt von Schleicher, where Zehrer became the Schleicher regime’s ideological ‘man behind the throne’ and Die Tat served as a kind of unofficial journal of state policy. The short article below, taken from a 1932 edition of Die Tat, is a fairly typical example of Zehrer’s position on the ‘Left-Right’ issue, invoking as it does the unifying Volksgemeinschaft ideal as well as stressing the belief that in reality only superficial qualities separate “the man of the Right” from the “man of the Left”.

Right or Left?
Hans ZehrerTAT_logo

First published in Die Tat, vol. 23, no.7, 1932

We ask of ourselves that question which is imposed upon us by today’s era and which appears to be of decisive importance to it: Right or Left? We have guided these absolutely time-bound and, to a later age, surely incomprehensible antitheses back to their authentic intellectual and historical foundations. In the process they have steadily dissipated, been drawn further and further inwards, and in this way we have suddenly arrived at a position which offers us the prospect of something that we only truly experienced for a short period in August 1914, but which otherwise does not belong among those values that today’s System can offer us: a Volksgemeinschaft, a unified nation!1 And from this position we are able to answer that question which the era has posed to us: Right and Left! Only a style of thinking which has affirmed the synthesis between the two, and which has carried it out, is responsive to those problems which the future will present to us, and over which the current era is presently in despair.

A man today, provided he is an active, vital person, is either Right or Left. The commonality of conservative man – who by his nature, traditions, blood, and character could never recognize the current System – with the new men of the Left, whom the current System has chewed up and spat out, is greater, and both are much closer, than they realize. The way of the future involves bringing together this man of the Right with the man of the Left, and vice versa, in order to create out of both a new Volksgemeinschaft under the mythos of a new nation. Continue reading