ABSTRACT
In November 1964 the National Democratic Party (NPD) of Germany was founded in Hanover. In the years between the 1965 and 1969 Federal elections the NPD made the headlines again and again in the German and world press as it got its candidates elected into one regional parliament after another. Geographically speaking, the NPD was over-represented, in terms of number of members per 10,000 of population, in Bavaria, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Thus the NPD was most successful in recruiting where the National Socialist German Workers’ Party had previously been strong. In the Bavarian regional elections of October 1986 the Republican Party scored 3 per cent while the NPD received only 0.5 per cent of the vote. As the NPD was a new attempt to fuse the disparate groups of extreme conservatives, nationalists and neo-Nazis, former Nazis and those too young to have been in Hitler’s party, it attracted some fringe attention and therefore a few more members.
