The 'German Popular Union (DVU) was founded as a non-profit organization by the extreme right-wing publisher Gerhard Frey in Munich in 1971. It manifested itself as a non-partisan protest movement of the far right and polemicized against the Ostpolitik of the social-liberal coalition. Various right-wing extremist action groups such as 'Oder-Neiße Action,' the 'People's Movement against Anti-German Propaganda,' and the 'Initiative for the Exclusion of Foreigners' successively became affiliated with it. After an unsuccessful career with the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Frey founded the DVU as a party in 1987. The party, which was centered entirely on its founder Frey and financed and led by him in an authoritarian manner, was based in Munich-Pasing, where Frey's publishing empire was also headquartered.
In its loosely formulated program, the DVU, which was being given legal advice by the former Bavarian state ministers Theodor Maunz and Alfred Seidl, formally declared its commitment to the free democratic constitution. However, its right-wing extremist orientation was evident at events and in particular in the unofficial party bodies, the Deutsche National-Zeitung, and Gerhard Frey's Deutsche Wochen-Zeitung (merged with the National-Zeitung in 1999). For example, the party, which was being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, funded lectures by Holocaust denier David Irving, while the newspapers affiliated with the party disseminated xenophobic, anti-Semitic, extreme nationalist, and historical revisionist content.
An electoral pact with the NPD enabled the DVU to win seats in the Bremen State Parliament in 1987, and in 1992 it won seats in the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament. In 1998, it became the first party on the extreme right to enter an East German parliament in the state elections of Saxony-Anhalt, followed by Brandenburg in 1999. In the other federal states, it either did not stand or was unsuccessful, as was the case in federal and European Parliament elections. For a long time, the DVU was the party with the largest membership base on the far right in reunified Germany, with over 26,000 members (1992). It did not fall behind the NPD until 2007, by which point its membership had dropped to 7,000.
In 2009, the NPD canceled the 'Germany Pact' entered into with the DVU four years earlier, which was intended to unite the far-right forces through electoral alliances. That same year, Gerhard Frey stepped down from the DVU's executive board. He left behind a political party that was in disarray organizationally and in dire straits financially. In 2010, the new party executive decided to amalgamate with the national democrats, with the merger with the NPD following in 2012. Some members defected to the party 'The Right' which was established in 2012.
