The Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) was a nationalist, far-right, and later neo-Nazi political party in West Germany. It was founded in 1950 from the German Right Party (), which had been set up in Lower Saxony in 1946 and had five members in the first Bundestag, and from which it took the name. In the second Bundestag election (1953), the DRP got 1.1 % of the votes.
A certain success and only major breakthrough came in the 1959 Rhineland-Palatinate regional election, when it got 5.1 % of the votes and sent a deputy to the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate.
With its lack of success, the party was symbolically liquidated and followed by the establishment of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
Development
On 6 May 1951, the party won 2.2 percent of the vote in Lower Saxony state election and with that, three deputies (as the state did not have an electoral hurdle before 1959). However, they were overshadowed by the explicitly neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which received 11% of the vote.
The party moved towards explicit neo-Nazism in 1952, when the SRP was declared unconstitutional and disbanded by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Much of its membership then joined the DRP.
Stability under chancellor Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the growth experienced during the 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 the 1959 Rhineland-Palatinate state election, where it won 5.1% of the vote and thus was able to send one deputy, , to the assembly.
On Christmas Eve 1959, two DRP party members, Arnold Strunk and Josef Schönen, defaced the Roonstrasse Synagogue in Cologne with swastikas and the inscription "Deutsche fordern: Juden raus" ("Germans demand: Jews out"). They were sentenced to 14 and 10 months in prison, respectively, with loss of civil rights for two years.
The party's Rhineland-Palatinate branch was declared to be an SRP successor organization and banned by the state's interior minister (CDU) on 26 January 1960. The federal party leadership held Schikora responsible for this legal punishment and expelled him from the party. The SRP-associated members of party's previous state executive committee were also expelled, and the party ban was lifted on 24 November 1960. At the party's state delegates' conference in October 1961, the national-neutralist wing achieved a majority and re-elected Schikora as state chairman; however, he was again dismissed two months later and the party began to dissolve. By 1962, the state association had lost around 30% of its members, and in the 1963 state elections, the party fell below the 5% vote threshold and left the Landtag.
This initiative did not take off as Mosley had hoped, as few of the member parties, including the DRP, were interested in changing their name to National Party of Europe, as he had hoped they would. One of the party's last acts in 1964 saw it sponsor a tour of Germany by controversial American historian David L. Hoggan, a prominent Holocaust denier.
Dissolution
Their lack of national success saw the leaders of the DRP seek to extend their influence further, and they made contact with the leaders of other rightist parties, such as the German Party and its successor (following that organisation's merger with the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights), the seeking close ties. It was soon decided that a more formal union with other rightist groups was desirable. They held their final party conference in Bonn in 1964 in which they voted to form a new union of "national democratic forces".