Part I

There really was no far-right party in the GDR, given that it was effectively a single-party state with a massive internal surveillance apparatus. The minor parties allowed into the GDR political system were all loyal spear-carriers for the ruling SED and tended to incorporate class groups that did not easily fit into the SED's definition as the peasant and worker's party. Far-right organization tended to be much more underground and drifted into the various GDR subcultures. It was only in the 1980s that there was a discrete organization of neo-Nazis among the GDR's counterculture. Taking cues from Western punk and other violent gangs, the late-GDR neo-Nazis proved to be the nucleus for region's post-Wende skinheads. Prior to the end of regime though, neo-Nazi activity was an underground phenomena and did not really form even an outlier power bloc inside the GDR. The MfS monitored very closely for any sign of Nazi irredentism and this tended to push far-right activity further underground. The MfS often used former Nazi officials as IMs in the early decades, in which the threat of punishment for their war crimes was used as a lever for these IMs to spy on their neighbors.

In contrast, the far-right was present at the very inception of the new postwar democracy of the FRG. These parties tended to be quite small and prone to splintering. But their existence existence elicited considerable alarm among both the Allied High Commission and the ruling parties in Bonn. Active measures from both these quarters coupled with the far-right's own incompetence helped minimize the impact of the far-right in the early postwar years.

Much like Weimar SPD and Centre politicians started to restructure amidst the wreckage of defeat, so to did the nationalist and conservative DNVP, which was one of Hitler's partners in the dismantling of the Republic. Unlike the SPD, which could simply carry on the party traditions of Weimar, those in the DNVP could not simply wash away their complicity in Weimar's demise and resume as a normal political party. All political parties had to be licensed and a return to the old DNVP was a dead letter. Thus former DNVP members, plus NSDAP members that slipped through the lax denazification ended up gravitating towards the a miasma of German conservative parties, eventually forming into Deutsche Konservativepartei-Deutsche Rechtspartei (DKP-DRP) in 1946. The DKP-DRP had modest success in the 1949 Bundestag elections, gaining five seats largely from votes in Lower Saxony. The DKP-DRP's platform itself was incoherent melange of boilerplate right-wing talking points, although its members in semipublic and private gatherings could be quite noxious and antidemocratic. The British occupation authorities allowed the DKP-DRP to operate in the hopes that it would act as a sump to drain out such sentiments from the mainstream conservative political parties like the CDU.

The DKP-DRP's limited success in turn encouraged a splintering off of its more radical elements into the Sozialistische Reichspartei(SRP) in October 1949. Both Fritz Dorls, an early NSDAP member, and Otto Ernst Remer, the man who crushed the 20 July Plot, were both frustrated by being locked out of power by the DKP-DRP's leadership and emboldened by the limited electoral success earlier that year. The SRP increasingly styled itself as a successor party to the NSDAP, with ersatz nomenclature displacing earlier Nazi rhetoric, such using Führungsprinzip instead Führerprinzip. The SRP also had a culture of marching and banners, which were uncomfortably close to the SA. More alarmingly, in addition to the SRP's veiled antisemitism and anticommunism, Remer and other SRP leaders argued that Dönitz was the true head of state and that Germany needed to find a third way between the capitalistic America and the communist USSR. Remer would emerge as a media figure in the months after the establishment of the SRP, maligning the 20 July plotters as traitors of the highest order and arguably becoming the most well-known German politician in the world after Adenauer in this period. In 1951, the SRP managed to gain a modest showing in the Lower Saxon Landtag elections as well as Bremen.

These results and the increasingly public profile of Remer prompted action on the part of Bonn and the Allied military commissioners. HICOG chief John McCloy warned Adenauer in a May 1951 meeting that although the SRP was small, the Allies would intervene should it prove necessary to prevent the SRP from gaining power. Adenauer up to then had been playing a waiting game hoping that economic growth and the normalization of the FRG's relationship with the West would denude the SRP of any voters. But the alarm at the SRP's success among some working-class voters plus McCloy's warnings prompted Adenauer to give into elements in his coalition like Minister of the Interior Robert Lehr that called for a more proactive stance by the government.

The result was the then-unprecedented step of using Basic Laws' provisions under Article 21 to ban parties that are a threat to the constitutional order. The government petitioned the Constitutional Court on 19 November 1951 to ban the SRP, and three days later filed a similar request to ban the KPD. The SRP's response to the ban was anemic and the ban was upheld on the basis of the SRP's own rhetoric and literature on October 1952.

The dissolution of the SRP led to the ejecting of its elected delegates and ushered in the coming decades a series of party reformation,unification, and dissolution among the FRG's various far-right parties. Soon after the banning of the SRP came the arrest by the British on 15 January 1953 of Werner Naumann, Goebbels's last deputy, and several acquaintances on the charge they were seeking to infiltrate the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) and turn into into an NSDAP cell inside the government. Naumann's circle, which included prominent former members of the regime like Werner Best and some FDP members, stoked a good deal of alarm among foreign commentators as it appeared that former members of the regime were primed to take control over one of the major coalition partners of the new Germany. How serious the danger of Naumann circle is unclear as its somewhat half-baked plot had not managed to gain much traction in the FDP and win over its leaders like Theodor Heuss. But coming so soon after the SRP banning, this was unwelcome news for Bonn and although the German courts sided with Neumann's claims of innocence, the stigma associated with the affair and the FDP's own house-cleaning nipped the conspiracy in the bud.

As alarming as the SRP and the Naumann Affairs were, what is striking about the far-right in the Adenauer years is not their successes, but their lack of them. The KPD was like the far-right parties in that it was an insurgent party opposed to the establishment of a separate, pro-American Germany, but it achieved much more tangible gains in federal and local elections prior to the 1953 elections in the teeth of much greater opposition on the part of Bonn and the Allied high commissioners. The KPD's post-ban life also showed a degree more party discipline than the far-right, with splintering often over ideological differences rather than over clashes of personalities and fratricidal political sniping.

There were several reasons for this grim state of affairs among the German far-right. One reason was the overall discrediting of National Socialism among the wider German population, especially after the regime started to turn on its own as the war situation worsened. One piece of evidence for this was that public opinion polls in the US occupation zones showed many Germans felt that the Nuremberg trials were a form of victors' justice, most Germans did not protest the executions of the first-wave of defendants who were the surviving elite of the Third Reich. The agonies of the last year of the war further added to a disinterest in reviving the NSDAP, as well as a fear that if Germans turned brown again, there would be further Allied retribution. Another reason for the diminishing returns of the far-right was the policy of streitbare Demokratie (militant democracy) by Bonn in which it would not stomach any attempts to recreate a far-right mass party. This policy was apparent in the provisions of Article 21 and the bans against the SRP and KPD were a signal that the FRG government meant to defend democratic and liberal principles. Streitbare Demokratie sometimes meant that the FRG enforced what were on the surface, anti-liberal measures like curtailing freedom of speech and the dismissal of the SRP's delegates who were elected in an open election process. But the Adenauer years did set a precedent for these higher democratic principles to be superior to individual or party rights.