[5] The party sought close links with the German National Association of Commercial Employees, a white-collar worker union that had a strong antisemitic current to its thinking.
[8] Wilhelm Giese emerged as a prominent member of the group and was especially noted for his criticism of Zionism, an idea that had some support among contemporary antisemites as a possible solution to the "Jewish problem".
[11] This conservatism made them targets for the left and in 1898 they were criticised in the pages of Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, a Dresden-based left-wing newspaper edited by Rosa Luxemburg, for their support for monarchism and their veneration of Otto von Bismarck as well as for their internal squabbling.
In Hamburg the local branch sought to challenge the Social Democratic Party by campaigning for improved housing, education and trade union rights, as well as antisemitism.
[14] Its 1895 programme called for the reorganisation of the labour force on a national basis as well as an extensive reformation of the legal system aimed at "displacing the capitalist excesses of the present laws".
[19] The party also struggled to get the access to publicity enjoyed by the more mainstream forces of the right, some of whom had come to co-opt elements of antisemitism into their own programmes, thus denting the DSRP's chances.