in Germany, early 1946. The territories east of the
Oder–Neisse line, under Polish and Soviet administration/annexation, are shown in cream, as is the detached
Saar Protectorate.
Bremen was an American
enclave within the British zone. Berlin was a four-power area within the Soviet zone. On 4–11 February 1945 leaders from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the
Soviet Union held the
Yalta Conference where future arrangements regarding post-war Europe and
Allied strategy against Japan in the Pacific were negotiated. They agreed that the boundaries of Germany as at 31 December 1937 would be chosen as demarcating German national territory from German-occupied territory; all German annexations after 1937 were automatically null. Subsequently, and into the 1970s, the West German state was to maintain that these 1937 boundaries continued to be 'valid in international law', although the Allies had already agreed amongst themselves that the territories east of the
Oder–Neisse line must be transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union in any peace agreement. The conference agreed that post-war Germany, minus these transfers, would be divided into
four occupation zones: a French Zone in the far west; a British Zone in the northwest; an American Zone in the south; and a Soviet Zone in the East. Berlin was separately divided into four zones. These divisions were not intended to dismember Germany, only to designate zones of administration. By the subsequent
Potsdam Agreement, the four Allied Powers asserted joint sovereignty over "Germany as a whole", defined as the totality of the territory within the occupation zones. Former German areas east of the rivers
Oder and
Neisse and outside of 'Germany as a whole' were officially separated from German sovereignty in August 1945 and transferred from Soviet military occupation to Polish and Soviet (in the case of the territory of Kaliningrad) civil administration, their Polish and Soviet status to be confirmed at a final Peace Treaty. Following wartime commitments by the Allies to the governments-in-exile of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Potsdam Protocols also agreed to the 'orderly and humane' transfer to Germany as a whole of the ethnic German populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Eight million German expellees and refugees eventually settled in West Germany. Between 1946 and 1949, three of the occupation zones began to merge. First, the British and American zones were combined into the quasi-state of
Bizonia. Soon afterwards, the French zone was included into
Trizonia. Conversely, the Soviet zone became
East Germany. At the same time, new federal states () were formed in the Allied zones; replacing the geography of pre-Nazi German states such as the
Free State of Prussia and the
Republic of Baden, which had derived ultimately from former independent German kingdoms and principalities. In the dominant post-war narrative of West Germany, the
Nazi regime was characterised as having been a 'criminal' state, illegal and illegitimate from the outset; while the
Weimar Republic was characterised as having been a 'failed' state, whose inherent institutional and constitutional flaws had been exploited by
Hitler in his illegal seizure of dictatorial powers. Consequently, following the death of Hitler in 1945 and the subsequent capitulation of the German Armed Forces, the national political, judicial, administrative, and constitutional instruments of both Nazi Germany and the Weimar Republic were understood as entirely defunct, such that a new West Germany could be established in a condition of constitutional nullity. Nevertheless, the new West Germany asserted its fundamental continuity with the 'overall' German state that was held to have embodied the unified German people since the
Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, and which from 1871 had been represented within the
German Reich; albeit that this overall state had become effectively dormant long before 8 May 1945. In 1949 with the continuation and aggravation of the Cold War (for example, the
Berlin Airlift of 1948–49), the two German states that had originated in the Western Allied and the Soviet Zones respectively became known internationally as West Germany and East Germany. Commonly known in English as
East Germany, the former
Soviet occupation zone in Germany, eventually became the
German Democratic Republic or
GDR. In 1990 West Germany and East Germany jointly signed the
Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (also known as the "Two-plus-Four Agreement"); by which transitional status of Germany following
World War II was definitively ended and the Four Allied powers relinquished their joint residual sovereign authority for Germany as a whole including the area of West Berlin which had officially remained under Allied occupation for the purposes of international and GDR law (a status that the Western countries applied to Berlin as a whole despite the Soviets declaring the end of occupation of East Berlin unilaterally many decades before). The Two-plus-Four Agreement also saw the two parts of Germany confirm their post-war external boundaries as final and irreversible (including the 1945 transfer of former German lands east of the
Oder–Neisse line), and the Allied Powers confirmed their consent to German Reunification. From 3 October 1990, after the reformation of the GDR's , the East German states and East Berlin
joined the Federal Republic.
NATO membership With territories and frontiers that coincided largely with the ones of old
Middle Ages East Francia and the 19th-century
Napoleonic
Confederation of the Rhine, the Federal Republic of Germany was founded on 23 May 1949 under the terms of the
Bonn–Paris conventions, whereby it obtained "the full authority of a sovereign state" on 5 May 1955 (although "full sovereignty" was not obtained until the
Two Plus Four Agreement in 1990). The former occupying Western troops remained on the ground, now as part of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which West Germany joined on 9 May 1955, promising to rearm itself soon. West Germany became a focus of the
Cold War with its juxtaposition to
East Germany, a member of the subsequently founded
Warsaw Pact. The former capital,
Berlin, had been divided into four sectors, with the Western Allies joining their sectors to form
West Berlin, while the Soviets held
East Berlin. West Berlin was completely surrounded by East German territory and had suffered a Soviet blockade in 1948–49, which was overcome by the
Berlin airlift. was a German statesman who served as the first
chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The outbreak of the
Korean War in June 1950 led to US calls to rearm West Germany to help defend Western Europe from the perceived Soviet threat. Germany's partners in the
European Coal and Steel Community proposed to establish a
European Defence Community (EDC), with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of its member states. The West German military would be subject to complete EDC control, but the other EDC member states (
Belgium, France, Italy,
Luxembourg and the
Netherlands) would cooperate in the EDC while maintaining independent control of their own armed forces. Though the EDC treaty was signed (May 1952), it never entered into force. France's
Gaullists rejected it on the grounds that it threatened national sovereignty, and when the
French National Assembly refused to ratify it (August 1954), the treaty died. Then other means had to be found to allow West German rearmament. In response, at the
London and Paris Conferences, the
Brussels Treaty was modified to include West Germany, and to form the
Western European Union (WEU). West Germany was to be permitted to rearm (an idea many Germans rejected), and have full sovereign control of its military, called the . The WEU, however, would regulate the size of the armed forces permitted to each of its member states. Also, the German constitution prohibited any military action, except in the case of an external attack against Germany or its allies (). Also, Germans could reject military service on grounds of conscience, and serve for civil purposes instead. The three Western
Allies retained occupation powers in Berlin and certain responsibilities for Germany as a whole. Under the new arrangements, the Allies stationed troops within West Germany for NATO defence, pursuant to stationing and status-of-forces agreements. With the exception of 55,000 French troops, Allied forces were under NATO's joint defence command. (France withdrew from the collective military command structure of NATO in 1966.)
Reforms during the 1960s Konrad Adenauer was 73 years old when he became chancellor in 1949, and for this reason he was initially reckoned as a caretaker. However, he ruled for 14 years. The grand statesman of German postwar politics had to be dragged—almost literally—out of office in 1963. In October 1962 the weekly news magazine published an analysis of the West German military defence. The conclusion was that there were several weaknesses in the system. Ten days after publication, the offices of in Hamburg were raided by the police and quantities of documents were seized. Chancellor Adenauer proclaimed in the that the article was tantamount to high treason and that the authors would be prosecuted. The editor/owner of the magazine,
Rudolf Augstein spent some time in jail before the public outcry over the breaking of laws on freedom of the press became too loud to be ignored. The FDP members of Adenauer's cabinet resigned from the government, demanding the resignation of
Franz Josef Strauss, Defence Minister, who had decidedly overstepped his competence during the crisis. Adenauer was still wounded by his brief run for president, and this episode damaged his reputation even further. He announced that he would step down in the fall of 1963. His successor was to be Ludwig Erhard. In the early 1960s, the rate of economic growth slowed down significantly. In 1962, the growth rate was 4.7%, and the following year it was 2.0%. After a brief recovery, the growth rate slowed again into a recession, with no growth in 1967. A new coalition was formed to deal with this problem. Erhard stepped down in 1966 and was succeeded by
Kurt Georg Kiesinger. He led a
grand coalition between West Germany's two largest parties, the CDU/CSU and the
Social Democratic Party (SPD). This was important for the introduction of new
emergency acts: the grand coalition gave the ruling parties the two-thirds majority of votes required for their ratification. These controversial acts allowed basic constitutional rights such as
freedom of movement to be limited in case of a state of emergency. , student leader During the time leading up to the passing of the laws, there was fierce opposition to them, above all by the
Free Democratic Party, the rising
West German student movement, a group calling itself ("Democracy in Crisis") and members of the Campaign against Nuclear Armament. A key event in the development of open democratic debate occurred in 1967, when the
Shah of Iran,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, visited West Berlin. Several thousand demonstrators gathered outside the Opera House where he was to attend a special performance. Supporters of the Shah (later known as ), armed with staves and bricks attacked the protesters while the police stood by and watched. A demonstration in the centre was being forcibly dispersed when a bystander named
Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head and killed by a plainclothes policeman. (It has now been established that the policeman, Kurras, was a paid spy of the East German security forces.) Protest demonstrations continued, and calls for more active opposition by some groups of students were made. In a massive campaign against the protesters, the press, especially the
tabloid newspaper, described these as a massive disruption to life in Berlin. Protests against the
US intervention in Vietnam, mingled with anger over the vigour with which demonstrations were repressed led to mounting militance among the students at the universities in Berlin. One of the most prominent campaigners was a young man from East Germany called
Rudi Dutschke who also criticised the forms of capitalism that were to be seen in West Berlin. Just before Easter 1968, a young man tried to kill Dutschke as he bicycled to the student union, seriously injuring him. All over West Germany, thousands demonstrated against the Springer newspapers which were seen as the prime cause of the violence against students. Trucks carrying newspapers were set on fire and windows in office buildings broken. In the wake of these demonstrations, in which the question of America's role in Vietnam began to play a bigger role, came a desire among the students to find out more about the role of the parent-generation in the Nazi era. The proceedings of the
War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg had been widely publicised in Germany; the attorney
Fritz Bauer gathered evidence on the guards of the
concentration camp, and
about twenty were put on trial in Frankfurt in 1963. Daily newspaper reports and visits by school classes to the proceedings revealed to the German public the nature of the concentration camp system, and it became evident that
the was of vastly greater dimensions than the German population had believed. The term "Holocaust" for the systematic mass-murder of Jews first came into use in 1979, when a 1978
American mini-series with that name was shown on West German television. The processes set in motion by the Auschwitz trial reverberated decades later. The calling in question of the actions and policies of government led to a new climate of debate. The issues of emancipation, colonialism, environmentalism and grassroots democracy were discussed at all levels of society. In 1979, the environmental party, the Greens, reached the 5% limit required to obtain parliamentary seats in the
Free Hanseatic City of Bremen provincial election. Also of great significance was the steady growth of a
feminist movement in which women demonstrated for equal rights. Until 1977, a married woman had to have the permission of her husband if she wanted to take on a job or open a bank account. Further reforms in 1979 to parental rights law gave equal legal rights to the mother and the father, abolishing the legal authority of the father. Parallel to this, a gay movement began to grow in the larger cities, especially in West Berlin, where homosexuality had been widely accepted during the twenties in the Weimar Republic. Anger over the treatment of demonstrators following the death of Benno Ohnesorg and the attack on Rudi Dutschke, coupled with growing frustration over the lack of success in achieving their aims led to growing militance among students and their supporters. In May 1968, three young people set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt; they were brought to trial and made clear to the court that they regarded their action as a legitimate act in what they described as the "struggle against imperialism".
Willy Brandt In October 1969, Willy Brandt became chancellor. He maintained West Germany's close alignment with the United States and focused on strengthening
European integration in western Europe, while launching the new policy of
Ostpolitik aimed at improving relations with Eastern Europe. Brandt was controversial on both the right wing, for his
Ostpolitik, and on the left wing, for his support of
right-wing authoritarian regimes and of American policies, including the
Vietnam War. The
Brandt Report became a recognised measure for describing the general
North-South divide in world economics and politics between an affluent North and a poor South. Brandt was also known for his fierce
anti-communist policies at the domestic level, culminating in the
Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) in 1972. In 1970, while visiting a memorial to the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising crushed by the Germans, Brandt unexpectedly knelt and meditated in silence, a moment remembered as the
Kniefall von Warschau. Brandt resigned as chancellor in 1974, after
Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides,
was exposed as an agent of the
Stasi, the
East German secret service.
Helmut Schmidt Finance Minister
Helmut Schmidt (SPD) formed a coalition and he served as Chancellor from 1974 to 1982.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a leading FDP official, became Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Schmidt, a strong supporter of the European Community (EC) and the Atlantic alliance, emphasised his commitment to "the political unification of Europe in partnership with the USA". Mounting external problems forced Schmidt to concentrate on foreign policy and limited the domestic reforms that he could carry out. The USSR upgraded its intermediate-range missiles, which Schmidt complained was an unacceptable threat to the balance of nuclear power, because it increased the likelihood of political coercion and required a western response. NATO responded in the form of its
twin-track policy. The domestic reverberations were serious inside the SPD, and undermined its coalition with the FDP. One of his major successes, in collaboration with French President
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, was the launching of the
European Monetary System (EMS) in April 1978.
Helmut Kohl In October 1982 the SPD–FDP coalition fell apart when the FDP joined forces with the CDU/CSU to elect CDU Chairman
Helmut Kohl as Chancellor in a
constructive vote of no confidence. Following national elections in March 1983, Kohl emerged in firm control of both the government and the CDU. The CDU/CSU fell just short of an absolute majority, due to the entry into the Bundestag of the
Greens, who received 5.6% of the vote. In January 1987 the Kohl–Genscher government was returned to office, but the FDP and the Greens gained at the expense of the larger parties. Kohl's CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, slipped from 48.8% of the vote in 1983 to 44.3%. The SPD fell to 37%; long-time SPD Chairman Brandt subsequently resigned in April 1987 and was succeeded by
Hans-Jochen Vogel. The FDP's share rose from 7% to 9.1%, its best showing since 1980. The Greens' share rose to 8.3% from their 1983 share of 5.6%.
Reunification With the
collapse of eastern bloc in 1989, symbolised by the opening of the
Berlin Wall, there was a rapid move towards
German reunification; and
a final settlement of the post-war special status of Germany. Following democratic elections, East Germany declared its accession to the Federal Republic subject to the terms of the Unification Treaty between the two states; and then both West Germany and East Germany radically amended their respective constitutions in accordance with that Treaty's provisions. East Germany then dissolved itself, and its five post-war states () were reconstituted, along with the reunited Berlin which ended its special status and formed an additional . They formally joined the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990, raising the number of states from 10 to 16, ending the division of Germany. The expanded Federal Republic retained West Germany's political culture and continued its existing memberships in international organisations, as well as its Western foreign policy alignment and affiliation to Western alliances like NATO and the European Union. The official German reunification ceremony on 3 October 1990 was held at the
building, including
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, President
Richard von Weizsäcker, former Chancellor
Willy Brandt and many others. One day later, the parliament of the united Germany assembled in an act of symbolism in the Reichstag building. However, at that time, the role of Berlin had not yet been decided upon. Only after a fierce debate, considered by many as one of the most memorable sessions of parliament, the concluded on 20 June 1991, with quite a slim majority, that both government and parliament should move to
Berlin from
Bonn. ==Government and politics==