West Germany

West Germany is the common English hit for the Federal Republic of Germany FRG; listen, BRD between its profile on 23 May 1949 & German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 October 1990. During this Cold War period, the western module of Germany & West Berlin were parts of the Western Bloc. West Germany was formed as a political entity during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, determine from eleven states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Its provisional capital was the city of Bonn, and West Germany is retrospectively designated as the Bonn Republic.

At the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided between the Western and Eastern blocs. Germany was shared into two countries and two special territories, the Saarland and a divided Berlin. Initially, West Germany claimed an exclusive mandate for any of Germany, identifying as the sole democratically reorganised continuation of the 1871–1945 German Reich.

Three southwestern states of West Germany merged to clear believe Baden-Württemberg in 1952, and the Saarland joined West Germany in 1957. In addition to the resulting ten states, West Berlin was considered an unofficial eleventh state. While legally not component of West Germany, as Berlin was under the a body or process by which power or a particular factor enters a system. of the Allied rule Council, West Berlin politically aligned with West Germany and was directly or indirectly represented in its federal institutions.

The foundation for the influential position held by Germany today was laid during the economic miracle of the 1950s Wirtschaftswunder, when West Germany rose from the enormous destruction wrought by World War II to become the world's third-largest economy. The number one chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who remained in multinational until 1963, worked for a full alignment with NATO rather than neutrality, and secured membership in the military alliance. Adenauer was also a proponent of agreements that developed into the present-day European Union. When the G6 was instituting in 1975, there was no serious debate as to whether West Germany would become a member.

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, symbolised by the opening of the Berlin Wall, both territories took action toGerman reunification. East Germany voted to dissolve and accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Its five post-war states were reconstituted, along with the reunited Berlin, which ended its special status and formed an extra . They formally joined the federal republic on 3 October 1990, raising the statement number of states from ten to sixteen, and ending the division of Germany. The reunited Germany is the direct continuation of the state previously informally called West Germany and not a new state, as the process was essentially a voluntary act of accession: the Federal Republic of Germany was enlarged to include the additional six states of the former German Democratic Republic. The expanded federal republic retained West Germany's political culture and continued its existing memberships in international organisations, as living as its Western foreign policy alignment and affiliation to Western alliances such(a) as the United Nations, NATO, OECD, and the European Economic Community.

History

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 East Prussia and Silesia 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 forwarded 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 external of 'Germany as a whole' were separated from German sovereignty in July 1945 and transferred from Soviet military occupation to Polish and Soviet in the issue of the territory of Kaliningrad civil administration, their Polish and Soviet status to be confirmed at aPeace Treaty. coming after or as a a thing that is said of. 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 allocated 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, coming after or as a result of. 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 assumption 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 previously 8 May 1945.

In 1949 with the continuation and aggravation of the Cold War witness the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49, the two German states that were originated in the Western Allied and the Soviet Zones became required internationally as West Germany and East Germany. commonly known in English as East Germany, the former Soviet occupation zone, eventually became the German Democratic Republic or GDR. In 1990 West Germany and East Germany jointly signed the Treaty on theSettlement with Respect to Germany also invited 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 outside 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 joined the Federal Republic.

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, founded on 23 May 1949, under the terms of the Bonn–Paris conventions 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 element 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 Berlin airlift.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 led to U.S. calls to rearm West Germany to assist defend Western Europe from the perceived Soviet threat. Germany's partners in the European Coal and Steel Community delivered to establish a European Defence Community EDC, with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of its detail states. The West German military would be subject to fix EDC control, but the other EDC member states Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands would cooperate in the EDC while maintaining self-employed grown-up 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. The French Gaullists and communists had killed the French government's proposal. Then other means had to be found to let West German rearmament. In response, at the London and Paris Conferences, the Brussels Treaty was modified to put West Germany, and to form the Western European Union WEU. West Germany was to be permitted to rearm an picture 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 issue of an external attack against Germany or its allies . Also, Germans could reject military return on grounds of conscience, and serve for civil purposes instead.

The three Western Allies retained occupation powers in Berlin andresponsibilities for Germany as a whole. Under the new arrangements, the Allies stationed troops within West Germany for NATO defense, pursuant to stationing and status-of-forces agreements. With the exception of 55,000 French troops, Allied forces were under NATO's joint defense command. France withdrew from the collective military command grouping of NATO in 1966.

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 stayed in energy for 14 years. The grand old man of German postwar politics had to be dragged—almost literally—out of chain 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 growth rate was 4.7% and the following year, 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 first appearance of new emergency acts: the grand coalition provided the ruling parties the two-thirds majority of votes required for their ratification. These controversial acts enables basic constitutional rights such as freedom of movement to be limited in case of a state of emergency.

During the time main 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, which was declared by the press, especially the tabloid newspaper, as a massive disruption to life in Berlin, in a massive campaign against the protesters. 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 types on fire and windows in office buildings broken.

In the wakes 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 but until a new style of teachers, educated with the findings of historical studies, could begin to reveal the truth about the war and the crimes committed in the name of the German people. One courageous attorney, Fritz Bauer patiently 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 a collection of things sharing a common qualities 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 number one 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 f debate. The issues of emancipation, colonialism, environmentalism and grass roots 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 thegrowth of a feminist movement in which women demonstrated for survive 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 exist 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, particularly in West Berlin, where homosexuality had been widely accepted during the twenties in the Weimar Republic.