It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled. East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by loosening the borders, making travel easier for East Germans.

The two German States had developed opposing political regimes: liberal democracy in the West and Communist collectivism in the East. Opinions on reunification were further divided by the construction of the Berlin Wall, on 12–13 August 1961, to prevent Germans from the GDR from fleeing to the FRG.

Instead, there were a number of problems, of which the most severe were the comparatively poor productivity of the former East German economy and its links to the collapsing socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The era of partition

• Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate.
• For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones.
• As a result of irreconcilable differences among the Allied powers, however, no peace conference was ever held.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided into four zones of occupation under the control of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Germany became a focus of Cold War politics and as divisions between East and West became more pronounced, so too did the division of Germany.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, also known as the Berlin Wall Speech, was a speech delivered by United States President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987.

After World War II, defeated Germany was divided into Soviet, American, British and French zones of occupation. The city of Berlin, though technically part of the Soviet zone, was also split, with the Soviets taking the eastern part of the city.

Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. It is now located in the Allied Museum in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin.

Germany was divided into four occupation zones and Berlin was divided into four sectors, with each superpower, The United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, responsible for the administration of the respective zone.

After Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, the four main allies in Europe – the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France – took part in a joint occupation of the German state.

This still left Germany with debts it had incurred in order to finance the reparations, and these were revised by the Agreement on German External Debts in 1953. After another pause pending the reunification of Germany, the last installment of these debt repayments was paid on 3 October 2010.

At Yalta, the Allies decided to divide Germany into four zones. The Allies would each have control over a specific zone. The German capital, Berlin, was also divided into four zones. However, Stalin opposed this and wanted to keep the eastern part of Germany under Soviet control.

Europe became divided into the Eastern Bloc of nations and the West. The Eastern Bloc was led and controlled by the Soviet Union (Russia). These countries were run by communist governments and had their own alliance called the Warsaw Pact.

Germany sits in the heart of Europe, and many of the industrial raw materials she can’t supply herself can be imported from her European neighbors. Germany was allowed to exist after WW2 because the victors couldn’t consolidate their gains without her.

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. The brainchild of U.S. Secretary of State George C.

From 1946 to early 1948, the United States provided large loans and aid to a number of European countries. In addition to funds from international organizations, these funds enabled Germany and the rest of Europe to pay for the large inflows of imports that were crucial for postwar recovery.

Today, the US is one of Germany’s closest allies and partners outside of the European Union. The people of the two countries see each other as reliable allies but disagree on some key policy issues. Americans want Germany to play a more active military role, but Germans strongly disagree.

France became, for Germans, the Erbfeind (hereditary enemy), and “holiness” came to be ascribed not only to the river Rhine—which the Erbfeind was ever greedy to rape—but also to Germany itself, widely referred to in song and poetry as a virgin without blemish.

The three principal partners in the Axis alliance were Germany, Italy, and Japan. These three countries recognized German domination over most of continental Europe; Italian domination over the Mediterranean Sea; and Japanese domination over East Asia and the Pacific.

Germany’s most important ally is France by a wide margin. The relationship is economically essential because French and German firms are thoroughly interwoven, with a huge amount of businesses operating on a European level in both countries, and France being the top importer of German goods.