Socialist Reich Party

The SRP achieved some electoral success in northwestern Germany (Lower Saxony and Bremen), before becoming the first political party to be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952.

[5] The Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was formed on 2 October 1949[6] in Hameln by Otto Ernst Remer, Fritz Dorls, and Gerhard Krüger after they had been excluded from the DKP-DRP.

[16] The party claimed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was an American puppet and that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was the last legitimate President of the German Reich, as he had been appointed by Adolf Hitler.

According to Karl Dietrich Bracher, "SRP propaganda concentrated on a vague 'popular socialism' in which the old Nazis rediscovered well-worn slogans, and also on a nationalism whose championship of Reich and war was but a thinly disguised continuation of the Lebensraum ideology".

[17] The SRP also promoted the stab-in-the-back myth, structured itself in a very hierarchical manner reminiscent of the Führerprinzip, organized meetings that featured uniformed guards, and "succeeded temporarily in presenting Remer as the protector of the Third Reich against the 'traitors' of the resistance".

[18] The SRP took the stance that Germany should remain neutral in the emerging Cold War and opposed the West German government's Atlanticist foreign policy.

[25][26] Similarly, the CIA's declassified "Family Jewels" documents reveal that the agency had evidence of Soviet funding for far-right groups in Europe, including the SRP.

The archives contain documents that show that the Stasi, the East German secret police, had frequent meetings with SRP officials and provided them with financial and logistical support.

SRP leaders (left to right): Dorls, Remer, and Wolf von Westarp in August 1952
Campaign Token SRP (Sozialistische Reichspartei), obverse
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