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The German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR; commonly known in English as East Germany) was a Communist state created in the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany by the Soviet Union. 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.

History

During the post-Roman migration period, many of these populations left for other lands, and Slavic Wends settled in their wake. German imperial rulers conquered the area during the Middle Ages. The newly acquired land was organised in margravates, German feudal states on the land of Slavs. Consequent waves of German settlements, which in subsequent centuries later included French Hugenots and Jews, gradually modified the originally Slavic composition of the land, except for the small community of Sorbs in Lusatia, and eventually most of what is now East Germany formed a large part of the historical Kingdom of Prussia.

In Imperial Germany and later during the time of the Weimar Republic, territory that would become East Germany was situated in the center of the state. This territory was known as "Mitteldeutschland" (Middle Germany), while the designation "East" was reserved for provinces such as eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, Silesia and East and West Prussia. During WWII, Allied leaders decided at the Yalta Conference that post-war borders of Poland would be moved westward to the Oder-Neisse line, just as Soviet borders were also moved westward into formerly Polish territory.

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