German People's Party
독일인민당
A national-liberal party of the Weimar Republic founded in 1918 as the successor of the National Liberal Party. Gustav Stresemann was its founding chairman and led it until his death in 1929, and it took part in most Reich governments from 1920 to 1931. It declined sharply in the early 1930s and dissolved itself in July 1933.
In depth
Early in the November Revolution there were negotiations between the National Liberals and the Progressive People's Party on forming one large bourgeois-democratic party, but they failed on 18–19 November 1918 over the person of Stresemann. On 20 November Stresemann issued, with Robert Friedberg and others, an appeal to form the German People's Party, which was founded provisionally on 22 November and definitively on 15 December 1918 by resolution of the National Liberal central board. The party saw itself not as a new foundation but as a reconstitution of the National Liberal Party.
The party at first rejected the Weimar Constitution and behaved ambiguously during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, but it rose to 13.9 percent in the 1920 election and first joined a Reich government, the Fehrenbach cabinet, in June 1920. It also joined the 'cabinet of business' of the non-party Wilhelm Cuno in November 1922, and on 13 August 1923 Stresemann formed the 'Grand Coalition' with the SPD, Centre and DDP, the only Reich government led by the party. Stresemann then served as foreign minister in every cabinet until his death, pursuing the Dawes Plan, the Locarno treaties and entry into the League of Nations, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.
After Stresemann's death in October 1929 Ernst Scholz became chairman and the party moved to the right. In the September 1930 election it fell back to its 1919 level, and in November 1930 Eduard Dingeldey became chairman. In the elections of 1932 it sank into insignificance, and under Nazi pressure the Reich executive resolved on 27 June 1933 to dissolve the party, which was announced on 4 July.