[2][3] The DPG serves the fields of pure and applied physics and aims to foster connections among German physicists, as well as the exchange of ideas between its members and foreign colleagues.

The traditional spring meetings held by the DPG each year at venues across the country are amongst the largest physics conferences in Europe, attended by around 10,000 experts from Germany and abroad.

The Medal for Natural Science Journalism is awarded by the DPG to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to communicating scientific facts to the general public.

[7] Awardees are Vittoria Colizza (2013), Arne Traulsen (2012), Santo Fortunato (2011), Dirk Brockmann (2010), Duncan Watts (2009), Fabrizio Lillo (2008), Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron (2007) for the Sznajd model, Xavier Gabaix (2006), Reuven Cohen (2005), Illes Farkas (2004), Vasliki Plerou (2002) and Damien Challet (2002).

The articles published here have gone through a strict peer review in line with the stringent scientific quality standards propounded by the New Journal of Physics.

And the web portal www.welt-der-physik.de, operated jointly by the DPG and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), provides much information about physics even for nonexperts.

Publications of the DPG have included:[8][9] From the time of its creation in 1845, the DPG published Fortschritte der Physik and its Verhandlungen, but by 1919, the Verhandlungen had become too voluminous, so DPG chairman Arnold Sommerfeld formed a committee consisting of Albert Einstein, Eugen Goldstein, Fritz Haber, E. Jahnke, Karl Scheel, and Wilhelm Westphal, which recommended that a new journal, the Zeitschrift für Physik, should be established for rapid publication of original research articles by established scientists without peer review; it began publication the following year.

Students and cutting-edge scientists through to Nobel Prize winners meet here to share their thoughts and ideas on a scientific level.

Teaching staff also gladly come to Bad Honnef time and again to attend advanced training courses relating to pure physics and the didactic aspects of this discipline, in the seminars held by the DPG.

These policies had significant effects on physics in Germany[13][14] through significant qualitative and quantitative losses of physicists as a result of emigration and through political decisions overriding those based on academic and scientific considerations; 25% of the physicists holding academic positions in the period 1932–1933 were lost due to the policies.

[15] The opposition, for example, the DPG not immediately dismissing Jews after passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Max von Laue's address at the opening of the 1933 physics convention in Würzburg, opposition to Johannes Stark exercising the Führerprinzip in attempting to become the dictator of physics, and Carl Ramsauer's opposition to the politicization of education: After the conclusion of World War II, in 1946, von Laue initiated the founding of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft in only the British Zone, as the Allied Control Council would not initially allow organizations across occupation zone boundaries.