The Pan-German League (German: Alldeutscher Verband) was a Pan-German nationalist organization which was officially founded in 1891, a year after the Zanzibar Treaty was signed.
Primarily dedicated to the German question of the time, it held positions on German imperialism, antisemitism, the Polish question, and support for German minorities in other countries. The party embraced Völkism, expansionism, pangermanism, militarism, nationalism, and racial ideas.
Pan-Germanism (German: Pangermanismus or Alldeutsche Bewegung), also occasionally known as Pan-Germanicism, is a pan-nationalist political idea. Pan-Germanism seeks to unify all ethnic Germans, German-speaking people, and possibly also non-German Germanic peoples – into a single nation-state known as Greater Germany.
Pan-Germanism was highly influential in German politics in the 19th century during the unification of Germany when the German Empire was proclaimed as a nation-state in 1871 but without Germanophone Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein (Kleindeutsche Lösung/Lesser Germany) and the first half of the 20th century in Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. From the late 19th century, many Pan-Germanist thinkers, since 1891 organized in the Pan-German League, had adopted openly ethnocentric and racist ideologies, and ultimately gave rise to the foreign policy Heim ins Reich pursued by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler from 1938, one of the primary factors leading to the outbreak of World War II. The concept of a Greater Germany was attempted to be put into practice as the Greater Germanic Reich (German: Großgermanisches Reich), fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation (German: Großgermanisches Reich der Deutschen Nation). As a result of the Second World War, there was a clear backlash against Pan-Germanism and other related ideologies. Today, pan-Germanism is mainly limited to a few nationalist groups, mainly on the political right in Germany and Austria.
The German National People's Party (German: Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalist, monarchist, völkisch, and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League. Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism, German nationalism, and monarchism. Until 1931, the party also advocated for national liberal and protectionist economic policies, embracing corporatist economic policies from 1931 onwards. Some members like the populist media mogul Alfred Hugenberg embraced economic nationalism and statism. It held anti-communist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum, it belonged on the right wing. Specifically, it is classified as far-right in its early years and then again in the late 1920s when it moved back rightward. It has also been described as proto-fascist.
It was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that toppled the German Empire and the monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party, Free Conservative Party, and German Fatherland Party, with right-wing elements of the National Liberal Party. The party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles, which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies.