Although driven from his cabinet post, Hugenberg was, along with Papen and other former DNVP and Centre Party (Zentrum) members, included on the Nazi list of candidates for the November 1933 election as a concession to middle-class voters. However, his stock with the Nazis had fallen so much that in December 1933 the Telegraph Union, the news agency owned by Hugenberg, was taken over by the Propaganda Ministry and merged into a new German News Office. Hugenberg was allowed to remain in the Reichstag until 1945 as one of 22 so-called "guest" members, who were officially designated as non-party representatives. Given that they shared the assembly with 639 Nazi deputies, and given that the Reichstag met on an increasingly infrequent basis in any event, independents like Hugenberg had no influence.