Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "German-Hanoverian Party" in English language version.
DHP strategists and newspapers took advantage of rural voters' respect for tradition by reminding the electorate of the good the Guelphs had done for the peasantry and championing agricultural causes such as low tariffs on imported grain and fodder for the cattle industry.
The longing for the revision of the constitution even in republican circles gave federalists and separatists an opening to advance their own ideas for change. Under the auspices of the German Federal League (DFB), the DHP, SchleswigHolstein's Landespartei, the Hessian People's Union, and the Rhenish People's Coalition collaborated with the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) to campaign for a national federation of 'equal states on the basis of tribal allegiance' as the model for a European league of nations.
A pro-independence petition secured 600,000 signatures in December 1918 and the elections for the National Assembly a few months later returned the separatist DHP in second place behind the SPD.
In the same way that the rejection of Bismarckian power politics galvanised legitimists, federalists and even democrats in the Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei (German Hanoverian Party, DHP), liberals remembered their persecution at the hands of the deposed Guelph regime, a trope that was potent enough to keep up their solidarity in Hanover while the movement fractured in the rest of the Kaiserreich after 1878.
Thanks to such family celebrations, the exchange of gifts and letters, royalist clubs, and the political activities of the anti-annexationist German Hanoverian Party, the Guelphs managed to overcome the isolation of their exile by becoming the moderate centre of a 'conservative milieu' (Frank Bösch).
Shouting 'Hanover to the Hanoverians and not the Russian Bolshevists!', they armed supporters and began organising them in civil guards, which at their height counted no fewer than 50,000 members, according to one estimate. Although the free corps put a quick end to the Spartacist uprising, the Guelphs learned an important lesson during the difficult months after the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy: if deployed at the right moment and backed up by convincing rhetoric, force could bring the government to its knees. Barely a year later, the German Hanoverian Party saw a chance to test this insight during the Kapp putsch to launch a secondary coup with the aim of gaining Hanoverian independence from Prussia. Two companies of the DHP's paramilitary affiliate, the Hanoverian Legion, occupied the seat of the provincial administration in the Leine Palace and would have seized control of other facilities had they not been disarmed by the regular army before they could mobilise further civil guards units. The abject failure of what would half-mockingly become known as the Welfenputsch was more the result of poor execution than a lack of commitment on the part of the separatists because subsequent house searches turned up several hundred rifles, machine guns, and a howitzer.
