During the pre-revolutionary Vormärz era, the label conservatism united a loose movement of intellectual and political forces without any party organisation comparable to the British Tories.
In the Reichstag, they had to face the rivalry of the Free Conservative secession, which comprised bureaucratic elite leaders as well as Rhenish business magnates, who had supported Bismarck's politics from the beginning.
Not until the late days of World War I a parliamentary reform was carried out, instigated by the Oberste Heeresleitung (Supreme Army Command) in view of the German defeat.
The thinkers of the conservative revolution, a reaction to the lapse of the once venerated monarchical tradition, strived for an inventive realignment (new world order) based on continuous principles while in the late 1920s the DNVP under press baron Alfred Hugenberg turned towards far-right nationalist policies, culminating in the co-operation with the Nazi Party on the eve of the Machtergreifung in 1933.
The "national revolution" of the Nazis had priority and the racist and social changes in German society were not allowed to be stopped by the conservative forces of "reaction" (Reaktion, see "Horst-Wessel-Lied"), like for instance the Catholic, Christian-democratic Zentrum and the Prussian monarchists.
Several conservative opponents of the Nazi regime like former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher or Edgar Julius Jung were murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
During the German student movement of the late 1960s, CDU/CSU politicians called for a "strong state" and the restriction of individual rights in order to put down the disturbances.
They stressed the subjection of political decisions to the circumstances determined by a technologically advanced civilisation, denying ideological claims to overcome social alienation, which would remain an illusion only advocated by demagogues.