There were scattered attempts to reforge right-wing völkisch political parties in West Germany in the postwar period. The goal of these political parties was to rekindle national socialism as an ideology, which entailed a strident anticommunism, German nationalism, a rejection of German guilt for WWII, and a generalized idea that Nazism had some good ideas poorly implemented such as its soft capitalism (private property was protected, but state industrial regulation in the interests of the German people). They never openly espoused admiration for Hitler, but they did draw in figures who were prominent in the Third Reich like the Stuka pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel who would not accommodate themselves to the new centrist and democratic Germany.

These political parties skirted the line of legality in the Federal Republic, whose constitution erected legal barriers agaisnt the open expression of Nazi ideology. The German federal courts banned the Socialist Reich Party of Germany which was headed by Otto Ernst Remer, the Heer general that crushed the 20 July coup. Other political parties underwent the pattern of infighting and factionalism that typifies a number of extremist movements. The Deutsche Reichspartei, one of the foundational parties for the extreme German right in the late 1940s, split in the 1950s when Remer and his colleagues wanted a more "national-socialist" party. The Reichspartei became the Deutsche Rechtspartei and eventually merged or rebranded itself as the National Democratic Party of Germany in the 1960s.

Overall, these parties remained fringes within the German electoral landscape and never have achieved enough votes to pass the 5% threshold in elections to the national Bundestag. They have achieved local electoral victories that were often transitory and relatively small-scale. There main significance for West German political history is that these electoral votes were something of an embarrassment to the FRG during the Cold War as the Eastern bloc held the position that the FRG's denzified in name only.