The historical ratio of Catholics to Protestants in unified Germany was approximately 30% to 70%. Catholicism predominated in the western provinces of Prussia on the border with France and Benelux, in the southern states, and in the eastern provinces of Prussia on the former Polish lands.

The creation of a unified German state led by Protestant Prussia prompted German Catholics to form their own party to more effectively defend their confessional interests. Thus, in 1870, the Catholic Centre Party emerged.

The first decade of the German Empire's existence was marked by the "Kulturkampf" – a struggle by the secular governments of the German states against the autonomous rights of the Catholic Church. Priests were banned from political propaganda, the clergy were deprived of the right to oversee schools, church appointments were handed over to state officials, civil marriage was introduced, and the Jesuit order was banned. However, all these repressive measures only united the Catholic community. By the late 1870s, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck considered that socialists posed a greater threat to the internal security of the state than Catholics and ended the "Kulturkampf." Most of the restrictive laws, except for the recognition of civil marriages and the expulsion of the Jesuits, were repealed.

The Catholic Center, united by a common confessional identity thanks to the "Kulturkampf," successfully participated in all subsequent parliamentary elections in the Kaiserreich. Most often, Catholics had the largest faction in the Reichstag. Limited by confessional boundaries, the Center was a cross-class party—supported by all social groups of Catholic Germany from workers and employees to small and large property owners. Just as secularized Social Democrats created socialist trade unions, Catholics also began to form their own Christian trade unions in accordance with the social doctrine of the Roman Church.

After the end of the "Kulturkampf" and Bismarck's resignation, the Center became more loyal to the Kaiserreich government, especially in the field of foreign policy. At the beginning of World War I, Catholics, along with other parties, supported the "Policy of Civil Peace" ("Burgfrieden").

However, advocating for a "defensive war," the Center, together with the Social Democrats and left-wing liberals, rejected the annexationist demands of the expansionists and insisted on the swift conclusion of the war by mutual agreement. The three parties established close cooperation and additionally began to demand the democratization of the regime. As a concession, in November 1917, a representative of the conservative wing of the Center, Georg von Hertling, became the first "party" chancellor in Germany's history.

The Center accepted the November Revolution of 1918 and the overthrow of the monarchy. Party representative Matthias Erzberger became the head of the German delegation at the peace negotiations with the Entente in the Compiègne Forest and signed the armistice on November 11, ending World War I.

In the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1919, the Center consolidated the votes of the majority of the Catholic electorate and received 20% of the votes. Together with the Social Democrats (38%) and the left-liberal German Democratic Party (18.5%), it formed the "Weimar Coalition," named after the Thuringian city of Weimar, where the Constituent Assembly met. Deputies from the Center voted for the acceptance of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and for the ratification of the Weimar Constitution.

The main contribution of the Center to the foundations of the state structure was its opposition to the unification of the Reich, which was advocated by the left-liberal authors of the Constitution. Germany remained a federation of autonomous "Free States" within their old "feudal" borders with their own governments, parliaments, and laws.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Minister of Finance Matthias Erzberger made a significant contribution to the economic centralization of Germany—he took away tax sovereignty from the disparate states and transferred it to Berlin. In retaliation for the financial reform, tax increases, and the signing of the "treacherous" armistice in Compiègne, right-wing terrorists assassinated Erzberger in August 1921.

In the June 1920 elections, all parties of the "Weimar Coalition" lost a significant portion of votes. The Center's result fell from 20% to 13.5%, largely due to the formation of a separate Bavarian People's Party. From then on, the "Weimar Coalition" could no longer form imperial cabinets on its own, although it maintained its dominant position in Prussia until 1932.

However, the Center, true to its name, remained at the center of the political spectrum and could therefore form coalitions with both the left and the right. As a result, it continuously served as a government party from 1919 to 1932. Of the thirteen heads of cabinets that governed the country from November 1918 to January 1933, four were active representatives of the Center. In the 1925 presidential elections, party chairman Wilhelm Marx became the consolidated candidate of the republican forces and received 45% of the votes in the second round, narrowly losing to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who received 48%.

The electoral base of Catholics in the parliamentary elections remained stable, fluctuating between 12 and 13.5% of the votes. Nazism practically did not affect Catholic voters, who largely remained loyal to their old party.

However, the social base of the Center gradually eroded due to urbanization and the subsequent secularization of city dwellers. By the late 1920s, the balance of power within the party shifted from the left wing, focused on maintaining the republican regime and cooperating with the Social Democrats, to the right wing, for whom the issues of consolidating the confessional core were more important. The party leader became priest Ludwig Kaas, who publicly spoke of his support for the authoritarian restructuring of the republic.

In March 1930, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed another representative of the Center, Heinrich Brüning, as Chancellor. Germany was already in the throes of the Great Depression, and Brüning believed that the best way to deal with it was to cut government spending and raise taxes. The country embarked on a harsh deflationary policy, which led to the impoverishment of large segments of the population and the rise in popularity of radical movements—Nazis and Communists. In the opposition press, Brüning was nicknamed the "Hunger Chancellor." In contrast, Hindenburg publicly referred to the head of government as the "best chancellor since Bismarck."

Brüning also hoped to achieve the cancellation of reparations due to the difficult economic situation. And he succeeded! First, in 1931, a one-year moratorium on their payment was announced, and in the summer of 1932, reparations were effectively written off.

Economic historians suggest that domestically, the deflation policy could have led Germany out of the Great Depression by the mid-1930s, provided that Brüning's government had remained in power by then. But deflation caused a political storm that the cabinet did not survive.

In April 1932, Brüning successfully stopped Hitler in the presidential elections and secured Hindenburg's re-election for a second term. However, by May, the chancellor fell victim to intrigues from conservatives. They were dissatisfied that Brüning continued to cooperate with the Social Democrats within the Prussian "Weimar Coalition." Moreover, the chancellor proposed confiscating unprofitable estates from the East Elbian Junkers for compensation and distributing land plots to the unemployed. The landowners considered this "agrarian Bolshevism" and complained about Brüning to Hindenburg, who himself came from this social class. Finally, the old president felt offended that the chancellor made him a candidate from the moderate left, rather than the right, during the re-election. The culmination of all these accumulated grievances against Brüning was his resignation.

The new head of government became another member from the Center, Franz von Papen. However, he did not have strong ties with the party organization and electoral base, which remained loyal to the previous chancellor. Just a few days later, Papen was expelled from the party for "betraying" Brüning. In the last two governments of the Weimar Republic, the Center was no longer present.

Throughout the political crisis of the early 1930s, the party leadership had no fundamental objections to forming a coalition with the National Socialists. However, the Center set conditions such as the inviolability of the Constitution and the exclusion of Nazis from power structures. These conditions were unacceptable to Hitler, and the black-brown coalition did not materialize. Eventually, the Nazis managed to unite with the conservatives, who were less scrupulous, and through this alliance, they came to power.

In March 1933, the Center's votes in the Reichstag became decisive for Hitler in his quest to obtain emergency powers to issue laws bypassing parliament. In negotiations with Kaas, the chancellor promised that the institutions of the president, the Reichstag, and the Reichsrat (the upper "land" chamber of parliament) would remain intact, and the government would not interfere with the autonomy of the Catholic Church and would facilitate the swift conclusion of a concordat with the Vatican. Kaas believed Hitler, and the Center unanimously voted for the emergency powers.

The party dissolved itself in July of the same year. A few weeks later, the Reich concluded the concordat. However, Hitler broke his other promises—he systematically dismantled the Reichsrat and the institution of the presidency, completely stripped the Reichstag of political significance, and soon began openly restricting religious autonomy, persecuting Catholic public organizations and individual clergy.

Several reasons can be identified for the ultimate failure of the Catholic Center in the Weimar Republic:

• The Center limited itself to confessional boundaries as a party of Catholics, who made up 30% of the country's population;

• The victory of the "right" confessional wing over the "left" labor wing made the Center more tolerant of the dismantling of republican institutions;

• The priority of "particular" confessional interest over the national interest – the Center agreed to exchange political subjectivity for the illusion of religious autonomy.

In the "Third Reich," thousands of Catholic priests and laypeople were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps for resisting the totalitarian regime. Some former representatives of the Center, such as Josef Wirmer and Eugen Bolz, participated in the anti-Hitler plot of July 20, 1944. After the plot failed, they were arrested and executed.

After the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945, the limited potential of a purely confessional party was evident to most surviving leaders and activists of the Center. Therefore, former supporters of the Center joined with former supporters of the Protestant conservative German National People's Party to form the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like the Center, this party included representatives from most social classes—from workers and employees to small proprietors and large business owners—but on a common Christian basis. The Christian Social Union (CSU) became the CDU's ally in Bavaria.

In post-war West Germany, the CDU/CSU bloc became the right-centrist pillar of the bipolar party system. The first Chancellor of the FRG from 1949 to 1963 was former high-ranking Center politician Konrad Adenauer, who during the Weimar years was the mayor of Cologne and headed the upper house of the Prussian parliament. The CDU/CSU bloc remains one of the leading political forces in the FRG to this day.