East Germany
From Metapedia
The German Democratic Republic (GDR); commonly known in English as East Germany was a Communist state created by the Soviet Union in the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany and the Soviet sector of occupied Berlin. East Germany existed from 1949 until 1990, when its states acceded to the adjacent capitalist and democratic Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), thus producing the current form of the state of Germany.
It consisted of the current German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony; it claimed the eastern part of Berlin as its capital.
In 1955 the Republic was declared by the Soviet Union to be fully sovereign; however, Soviet troops remained, based on the four-power Potsdam agreement. As NATO troops remained in West Berlin and West Germany, the GDR and Berlin in particular became focal points of Cold War tensions. East Germany was a member of the Warsaw Pact and a close ally of the Soviet Union. Following the initial opening of sections of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, new elections were held on March 18, 1990, and the governing party, the SED, lost its majority in the Volkskammer (the East German parliament) soon after. On August 23, the Volkskammer decided that the territory of the Republic would accede to the ambit of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990. As a result of the unification on that date, the German Democratic Republic officially ceased to exist.
