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1949–1990 country in central Europe, unified into modern Germany
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1949–1990 country in central Europe, unified into modern Germany
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East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally viewed as a communist state and described itself as a socialist workers' and peasants' state.
Before its establishment, the country's territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the Berlin Declaration abolishing German sovereignty in World War II. The Potsdam Agreement established the Soviet-occupied zone, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neiße line. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was established in 1946 through a forced merger of the East German branches of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The SED dominated political life in the GDR following the country's establishment, before being democratized and liberalized amid the revolutions of 1989; this paved the way for East Germany's reunification with West Germany. Unlike the government of West Germany, the SED did not see its state as the successor to the German Reich (1871–1945). In 1974, it abolished the goal of unification in the constitution. The SED-ruled GDR was often described as a Soviet satellite state; historians describe it as an authoritarian regime.
Geographically, the GDR bordered the Baltic Sea to the north, Poland to the east, Czechoslovakia to the southeast, and West Germany to the west. Internally, the GDR bordered East Berlin, the Soviet sector of Allied-occupied Berlin, which was also administered as the country's de facto capital. It also bordered the three sectors occupied by the United States, United Kingdom, and France, known collectively as West Berlin (de facto part of the FRG). The economy of the country was centrally planned and state-owned. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviet Union, its economy became the most successful in the Eastern Bloc. Emigration to the West was a significant problem; as many emigrants were well-educated young people, this trend economically weakened the state. In response, the GDR government fortified its inner German border and built the Berlin Wall in 1961. Many people attempting to flee were killed by border guards or booby traps such as landmines.
In 1989, numerous social, economic, and political forces in the GDR and abroad—one of the most notable being peaceful protests starting in the city of Leipzig—led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of a government committed to liberalization. The following year, a free and fair election was held in the country, and international negotiations between the four former Allied countries and the two German states commenced. The negotiations led to the signing of the Final Settlement treaty, which replaced the Potsdam Agreement on the status and borders of a future, reunited Germany. The GDR ceased to exist when its five states ("Länder") joined the Federal Republic of Germany under Article 23 of the Basic Law, and its capital East Berlin united with West Berlin on 3 October 1990. Several of the GDR's leaders, notably its last communist leader Egon Krenz, were later prosecuted for offenses committed during the GDR era.
The official name was Deutsche Demokratische Republik ('German Democratic Republic'), usually abbreviated to DDR (GDR). Both terms were used in East Germany, with increasing usage of the abbreviated form, especially since East Germany considered West Germans and West Berliners to be foreigners following the promulgation of its second constitution in 1968. West Germans, the western media, and statesmen initially avoided the official name and its abbreviation, instead using terms like Ostzone ('Eastern Zone'), Sowjetische Besatzungszone ('Soviet Occupation Zone'; often abbreviated to SBZ), and sogenannte DDR ('so-called GDR').
In the West, the centre of political power in East Berlin was referred to as Pankow (the seat of command of the Soviet forces in Germany was in Karlshorst, a district in the East of Berlin). Over time, however, the abbreviation DDR was also increasingly used colloquially by West Germans and West German media.
When used by West Germans, the term Westdeutschland ('West Germany') almost always referred to the geographic region of western Germany and not to the area within the boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, this use was not always consistent and West Berliners frequently used the term Westdeutschland to denote the Federal Republic. Before World War II, Ostdeutschland ('East Germany') was used to describe all the territories east of the Elbe (East Elbia), as reflected in the works of sociologist Max Weber and political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Explaining the internal impact of the GDR government from the perspective of German history in the long term, historian Gerhard A. Ritter (2002) has argued that two dominant forces defined the East German state: Soviet communism on the one hand, and German traditions filtered through the interwar experiences of German communists on the other. Throughout its existence, the GDR consistently grappled with the influence of the more prosperous West, against which East Germans continually measured their own nation. The notable transformations instituted by the communist regime were particularly evident in the abolition of capitalism, the overhaul of industrial and agricultural sectors, the militarization of society, and the political orientation of both the educational system and the media.
On the other hand, the new regime made relatively few changes in the historically independent domains of the sciences, the engineering professions, the Protestant churches, and in many bourgeois lifestyles. Social policy, says Ritter, became a critical legitimization tool in the last decades and mixed socialist and traditional elements about equally.
At the Yalta Conference during World War II, the Allies – the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and the Soviet Union (USSR) – agreed to divide defeated Nazi Germany into occupation zones, as well as divide Berlin, the German capital, among the Allied powers. Initially, this meant the formation of three zones of occupation (i.e., American, British, and Soviet). Later, a French zone was carved out of the US and British zones.
The ruling communist party, known as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), formed on 21 April 1946 from the merger between the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The two former parties had previously been notorious rivals before the Nazis consolidated all power and criminalized both of them. Official East German and Soviet histories portrayed this merger as a voluntary pooling of efforts by the socialist parties and as symbolic of the new friendship of German socialists after defeating their common enemy. However, there is much evidence that the merger was more troubled than was commonly portrayed; that the Soviet occupation authorities applied great pressure on the SPD's eastern branch to merge with the KPD; and the communists, who held a majority, had virtually total control over policy. The SED remained the dominant party for the entire duration of the East German state. It had close ties with the Soviets, which maintained military forces in East Germany until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Russia continued to maintain forces in the territory of the former East Germany until 1994), with the purpose of countering NATO bases in West Germany.
As West Germany was reorganized and gained independence from its occupiers (1945–1949), the GDR was established in eastern Germany in October 1949. The emergence of the two sovereign states solidified the 1945 division of Germany. On 10 March 1952 (in what would become known as the "Stalin Note"), the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, issued a proposal to reunify Germany with a policy of neutrality, with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations. The West demurred; reunification was not then a priority for the leadership of West Germany, and the NATO powers declined the proposal, asserting that Germany should be able to join NATO and that such a negotiation with the Soviet Union would be seen as a capitulation.
On October 7, 1949 the German Democratic Republic was formally established and the Soviets Military Administration turned control of East Germany over to the SED, headed by Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960), who became President of the GDR and held the office until his death, while the SED general secretary Walter Ulbricht assumed most executive authority. Socialist leader Otto Grotewohl (1894–1964) became prime minister until his death.
The government of East Germany denounced West German failures in accomplishing denazification and renounced ties to the Nazi past, imprisoning many former Nazis and preventing them from holding government positions. The SED set a primary goal of ridding East Germany of all traces of Nazism. It is estimated that between 180,000 and 250,000 people were sentenced to imprisonment on political grounds.
In the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945, the Allies established their joint military occupation and administration of Germany via the Allied Control Council (ACC), a four-power (US, UK, USSR, France) military government effective until the restoration of German sovereignty. In eastern Germany, the Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ) comprised the five states (Länder) of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. Disagreements over the policies to be followed in the occupied zones quickly led to a breakdown in cooperation among the four powers, and the Soviets administered their zone without regard to the policies implemented in the other zones. The Soviets withdrew from the ACC in 1948; subsequently, as the other three zones were increasingly unified and granted self-government, the Soviet administration instituted a separate socialist government in its zone.
Seven years after the Allies' 1945 Potsdam Agreement on common German policies, the USSR via the Stalin Note (10 March 1952) proposed German reunification and superpower disengagement from Central Europe, which the three Western Allies (US, UK, France) rejected. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a Communist proponent of reunification, died in early March 1953. Similarly, Lavrenty Beria, the First Deputy Prime Minister of the USSR, pursued German reunification but was removed from power that same year before he could act on the matter. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, rejected reunification as equivalent to returning East Germany for annexation to the West; hence reunification was off the table until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.
East Germany regarded East Berlin as its capital, and the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc diplomatically recognized East Berlin as the capital. However, the Western Allies disputed this recognition, and considered the entire city of Berlin to be occupied territory governed by the ACC. According to Margarete Feinstein, the West and most Third World countries largely unrecognized East Berlin's status as the capital. In practice, the Cold War nullified the ACC's authority, East Berlin's status as occupied territory largely became a legal fiction, and the Soviet sector of Berlin fully integrated into the GDR.
The deepening Cold War conflict between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union over the unresolved status of West Berlin led to the Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949). The Soviet army initiated the blockade by halting all Allied rail, road, and water traffic to and from West Berlin. The Allies countered the Soviets with the Berlin Airlift (1948–49) of food, fuel, and supplies to West Berlin.
On 21 April 1946 the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; KPD) and the part of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) in the Soviet zone merged to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED), which then won the elections of October 1946. The SED government nationalised infrastructure and industrial plants.
In March 1948 the German Economic Commission (Deutsche Wirtschaftskomission; DWK) under its chairman Heinrich Rau assumed administrative authority in the Soviet occupation zone, thus becoming the predecessor of the East German government.
On 7 October 1949 the SED established the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik; GDR), based on a socialist political constitution establishing its control of the Anti-Fascist National Front of the German Democratic Republic (Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik; NF), an omnibus alliance of every party and mass organisation in East Germany. The NF was established to stand for election to the People's Chamber (Volkskammer), the East German parliament. The first and only president of the German Democratic Republic was Wilhelm Pieck. However, after 1950, political power in East Germany was held by the First Secretary of the SED, Walter Ulbricht.
On 16 June 1953, workers constructing the new Stalinallee boulevard in East Berlin, according to the GDR's officially promulgated Sixteen Principles of Urban Design, rioted against a 10% production-quota increase. Initially a labour protest, the action soon included the general populace, and on 17 June similar protests occurred throughout the GDR, with more than a million people striking in some 700 cities and towns. Fearing anti-communist counter-revolution, on 18 June 1953 the government of the GDR enlisted the Soviet Occupation Forces to aid the police in ending the riot; some fifty people were killed and 10,000 were jailed (see Uprising of 1953 in East Germany).
The German war reparations owed to the Soviets impoverished the Soviet Zone of Occupation and severely weakened the East German economy. During 1945–46 the Soviets confiscated and transported to the USSR approximately 33% of the industrial plants, and by the early 1950s had extracted some US$10 billion in reparations in agricultural and industrial products. The poverty of East Germany, induced or deepened by reparations, provoked the Republikflucht ("desertion from the republic") to West Germany, further weakening the GDR's economy. Western economic opportunities induced a brain drain. In response, the GDR closed the inner German border, and on the night of 12 August 1961, East German soldiers began erecting the Berlin Wall. Many people attempting to flee were killed by border guards or booby traps such as landmines.
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