Pan-German League
[4] In the following year, colonist Carl Peters, who had acquired the majority of Germany's colonial holdings up to this point, returned from Africa, and, using the public awareness following the steamboat subsidy debate to initiate a congress on German overseas interests.
The treaty was the first major sign of the new foreign policy of Emperor Wilhelm II, following the dismissal of chancellor Bismarck earlier in the year.
Peters, who had just recently returned from Africa, originally refused, not wanting to antagonise the German government, which he hoped would fund his further East African endeavours.
[8] The first official meeting of the organisation that would become the Pan-German League took place in Frankfurt am Main on 28 September 1890, presided over by university professor John Wislicenus and attended by seven people.
After the initial political struggles over the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty had subsided, Peters eventually agreed to join forces, on the condition that the remnants of the earlier General German Society were included.
On 25 January 1891, Peters personally invited a number of members of the Reichstag, the German federal parliament, and several other people to meet with Hugenberg and Wislicenus.
The League took a quotation by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg as its motto: Gedenke, daß Du ein Deutscher bist ("Remember that you are a German").
Expansion of the League outside of Berlin and Prussia was also scarce, partly due to improper management as well as bans on political associations in states like Saxony and Bavaria.
Additionally, von der Heydt and his general manager, along with other members of the League, attempted to form a new political party towards the end of 1892.
[11] A crisis meeting in Frankfurt am Main in the summer of 1893 was called by West-German branches of the League, against the declared will of the leadership, with the intention of dissolution.
The Verband wanted to uphold German racial hygiene and were against breeding with so-called inferior races like the Jews and Slavs.
[14] The agitations of the Alldeutscher Verband influenced the German government and generally supported the foreign policy developed by Otto von Bismarck.
[16] He publicly attacked the Belgian annexation policy and unrestricted submarine warfare and later supported calls for constitutional reform, democratisation and universal suffrage.
Influential figures in the Alldeutscher Verband founded the Vaterlandspartei in 1917 following the request of the majority of the German parliament to begin peace negotiations with the allies.
After the Nazis came to power, the Pan-Germans were for a time tolerated due to their ideological closeness, but on the eve of the Second World war were finally dissolved by Reinhard Heydrich on March 13, 1939, on the grounds that their program (namely the unification of all Germans in one Greater Germany) had been fulfilled with the Austrian Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenlands.
