Bavarian People's Party
The Bavarian People's Party (German: Bayerische Volkspartei; BVP) was a Catholic political party in Bavaria during the Weimar Republic. After the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, it split away from the national-level Catholic Centre Party and formed the BVP in order to pursue a more conservative and particularist Bavarian course.[3] It consistently had more seats in the Bavarian state parliament than any other party and provided all Bavarian minister presidents from 1920 on. In the national Reichstag it remained a minor player with only about three percent of total votes in all elections. The BVP disbanded shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in early 1933.
Bavarian People's Party Bayerische Volkspartei
Karl Speck (1918–1929)
Fritz Schäffer (1929–1933)
November 1918
4 July 1933
Christian Social Union in Bavaria, Bavaria Party
(not legal successors)
Bayernwacht
Cyan White
Founding[edit]
There had been a Bavarian wing of the Centre Party throughout the years of the German Empire. After Germany's defeat in World War I and the outbreak of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, leading Bavarian members of the Centre Party around Georg Heim founded the Bavarian People's Party in Regensburg on 12 November 1918 as the Bavarian party of political Catholicism.[4] Two main factors drove the split from the Centre Party. The first was the Bavarian members' emphasis on federalism at the national level, in contrast to the Centre that under the leadership of Matthias Erzberger favored a more centralized national government. The second factor was the Bavarians' clearly more conservative stance, including its assessment of the ongoing revolution which was being led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD).[3] The founding members of the BVP included the party's agrarian wing and, after some resistance, the workers' representatives.[5] The BVP's founding program called for a parliamentary government at the Reich level with a strongly federalist structure, the abolition of "Prussian supremacy", voting rights for women and the introduction of plebiscites. At the party level it strove for a corporative structure, with a "farmers' chamber" (Bauernkammer) as the first step. Half of all committee members and parliamentary candidates at both the national and local level had to be members of BVP-affiliated professional organizations. Party leadership was drawn mostly from clerics, the nobility and the middle class.[5]
Rise of the Nazi Party and end of the BVP[edit]
The strong upsurge of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) that began in 1930 did not affect the BVP to the same extent as other middle class parties – the German National People's Party (DNVP), German People's Party (DVP) and the German Democratic Party (DDP; later DStP) – since it had a rural Catholic core electorate with solid local structures that proved largely resistant to the emerging National Socialist movement. Heinrich Himmler, who had been a member since 1919, resigned from the BVP in 1923.[13]
After the Nazi Party seized power in January 1933, all 19 BVP deputies in the Reichstag voted for the Enabling Act of 1933 that gave Hitler as chancellor the power to make and enforce laws without involving the Reichstag. The Bavarian government underwent Gleichschaltung (lit. 'coordination') – essentially Nazification – on 10 April 1933. On the same day, Reich Interior Minister Wilhem Frick named General Franz Ritter von Epp as Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor) of Bavaria, and Minister President Held was forced out of office.[4] The BVP, many of whose members had been arrested, saw itself as deprived of any possibility of action and dissolved itself on 4 July 1933. All of its arrested politicians were then released.[3]