During the mid-1920s, the DNVP moderated its profile, accepting republican institutions in practice while still calling for a return to monarchy in its manifesto, and participating in centre-right coalition governments on federal and state levels.

Under the leadership of the populist media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg from 1928, the party moved to the far-right and reclaimed its reactionary nationalist and anti-republican rhetoric and changed its strategy to mass mobilisation, plebiscites, and support of authoritarian rule by the president instead of work by parliamentary means.

After 1929, the DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931, forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany (Reichskanzler) in January 1933.

As a result, the DNVP found itself joining forces with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in denouncing the end of the Ruhrkampf as treason and as a cowardly surrender to "a half-sated irreconcilable France".

Part of the restructuring was an 800 million Reichsmark loan provided primarily by a consortium of Wall Street banks led by the House of Morgan that would help stabilize the currency after the hyper-inflation of 1923 that had all but destroyed the economy.

Helfferich, the DNVP's leading economic expert, had published two detailed critiques in Die Kreuzzeitung that purported to prove that the Dawes Plan existed only to "enslave" Germany by allowing the Allies to take control of and exploit the German economy forever.

[81] The spring 1924 campaign was largely led and organized by charismatic, media savvy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who was presented as the "savior" type figure, able to rally together the entire nation to both win the election and then restore Germany back as a great power.

[46] In the summer of 1924, these tensions came out in the open with a vigorous display of party in-fighting over the question of whether the DNVP's MdRs (German MdR: Mitglied des Reichstags—Member of the Reichstag) should vote for the Dawes Plan or not.

[91] Finally, President Friedrich Ebert applied more pressure by warning the DNVP that if the Dawes Plan were rejected, he would dissolve the Reichstag for early elections, and the party would then face the wrath of angry voters.

[105] During its time in the government, the DNVP made a major push for higher tariffs on agricultural products from abroad, which pleased the party's powerful rural wing, but came to grief over the Locarno Treaties.

[107] Another problem for the DNVP was the 1926 referendum, in which the Communists proposed to confiscate without compensation all of the property belonging to the former Imperial and royal families of Germany and give it to small farmers, homeless people and those living on war pensions.

[119] The American historian John Leopold noted that the local offices "...tended to accept hard-line propaganda literally, but the interest groups which filled the party's coffers insisted on coalition and compromise.

Hugenberg was utterly devoid of personal charisma or charm, but he was a successful industrialist and media magnate, a fabulously wealthy man whose talents at devising business strategies which had made him a millionaire many times over were felt to be equally applicable to the arena of politics.

[121] Hugenberg was elected leader largely through the support of the faction associated with the Pan-German League who had been steadily taking over the party's grass-roots ever since the Dawes Plan vote of 1924, and who wanted a return to the politics of the early 1920s.

[122] Reflecting this background, Hugenberg proved himself to be a consistent champion of German imperialism, and one of the major themes of his time as leader was the call for Germany to resume overseas expansion and to regain the lost colonies in Africa.

[130] This was especially the case because the "Grand Coalition" government of the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller was composed of the left-wing SPD, the right of center Catholic Zentrum, the liberal DDP and the moderate conservative DVP—in short all of the parties that Hugenberg was seeking to destroy by forcing them to defend the Young Plan, and therefore making it seem they were in favor of paying reparations and the Treaty of Versailles.

In fact, the parties of the "Grand Coalition" were in favor of a gradualist, step-by-step approach of doing away with Versailles by negotiation instead of the confrontational Katastrophenpolitik (catastrophe politics) of the early 1920s that led to the disastrous Ruhrkampf and hyper-inflation of 1923, a nuance that did not interest Hugenberg in the slightest.

[135] In the summer of 1929, two prominent DNVP Reichstag deputies Gottfried Treviranus and Hans Schlange-Schöningen resigned from the party's caucus in protest against the "Freedom Law" as Hugenberg's referendum bill was known which they called irresponsible in the extreme.

The NSDAP were one of the groups which joined Hugenberg's campaign against the Young Plan, and the resulting wave of publicity brought Adolf Hitler back into the limelight after five years of obscurity following his trial for high treason in 1924.

[140] At the various campaign rallies against the Young Plan in the autumn of 1929, the charismatic Hitler easily out-shone the stuffy Hugenberg, who as one of his aides Reinhold Quaatz wrote in his diary had "no political sex appeal".

The media mogul Hugenberg used his vast press empire to wage a hysterical campaign warning his papers' mostly middle-class readers that Marxist SPD and KPD were going to mobilize the millions of unemployed created by the Great Depression to stage a bloody revolution and that only an authoritarian regime willing to use the most drastic means could save Germany.

[154] During the summer of 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP and the KPD all joined forces in campaigning for a yes vote in the Prussian referendum, which led the liberal Berliner Morgenpost newspaper to write of an alliance of "the swastika and the Soviet star" who were engaging in Katastrophenpolitik.

[24] On 11 October 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP, the Pan-German League, the Reichslandbund, the German People's Party and the Stahlhelm paramilitary organisation briefly formed an uneasy alliance known as the Harzburg Front.

[156] Wheeler-Bennett called the Harzburg rally "the formal declaration of war by the parties of the Right against the Brüning government-a concentration of all the forces of reaction, both past and present, in one great demonstration of hostility to the Weimar System".

The American historian Henry Ashby Turner wrote that Hugenberg was driven in January 1933 by "...opportunistic considerations...a desperate desire to gain a measure of power as he approached the end of a frustrating political career".

[186] Performing badly in subsequent elections, the party chose to be a junior coalition partner to the NSDAP in the so-called, short-lived Regierung der nationalen Konzentration (Government of National Concentration) upon Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933.

[192] The decree was based largely on a proposal by Ludwig Grauert, a DNVP member who had recently been named chief of the Prussian state police, to provide legal cover for the mass arrests of Communists on the night of the fire.

This led to furious, but futile protests by youth wing's director Admiral Adolf von Trotha asking for help from President Hindenburg while declaring his loyalty to the "national revolution" and the new regime.

[214] Unknown to Hugenberg and acting on the initiative of the party executive, Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven had opened talks with the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in late June 1933 on what terms the DNF might best dissolve itself.

[219] In accounts of its own history and origins, the CDU tended to downplay its DNVP roots, while stressing its continuities from the Centre Party and the small Protestant Christian Social People's Service.