36 Facts About East Germany

East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, was a country that existed from 1949 to 1990.

GDR was established in the Soviet zone, while the Federal Republic of East Germany, commonly referred to as West East Germany, was established in the three western zones.

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.

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, after 1950, political power in East Germany was held by the First Secretary of the SED, Walter Ulbricht.

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The poverty of East Germany, induced or deepened by reparations, provoked the to West Germany, further weakening the GDR's economy.

From 1949 to the early 1970s, West Germany maintained that East Germany was an illegally constituted state.

East Germany was recognized primarily by socialist countries and by the Arab bloc, along with some "scattered sympathizers".

Especially after the Ninth Party Congress in 1976, East Germany upheld historical reformers such as Karl Freiherr vom Stein, Karl August von Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst as examples and role models.

The impetus for this exodus of East Germany Germans was the removal of the electrified fence along Hungary's border with Austria on 2 May 1989.

The GDR leadership in East Germany Berlin did not dare to completely lock down their own country's borders.

On 9 November 1989, a few sections of the Berlin Wall were opened, resulting in thousands of East Germans crossing freely into West Berlin and West Germany for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Until 1952, East Germany comprised the capital, East Berlin, and the five German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony, their post-war territorial demarcations approximating the pre-war German demarcations of the Middle German Lander and Provinzen .

East Germany Berlin was made the country's 15th Bezirk in 1961 but retained special legal status until 1968, when the residents approved the new constitution.

Government of East Germany had control over a large number of military and paramilitary organisations through various ministries.

East Germany pursued an anti-Zionist policy; Jeffrey Herf argues that East Germany was waging an undeclared war on Israel.

Until the 1960s, East Germany Germans endured shortages of basic foodstuffs such as sugar and coffee.

In 1961, the renowned philosophical theologian Paul Tillich claimed that the Protestant population in East Germany had the most admirable Church in Protestantism, because the Communists there had not been able to win a spiritual victory over them.

East Germany, historically, was majority Protestant from the early stages of the Protestant Reformation onwards.

In 1948, freed from the influence of the Nazi-oriented German Christians, Lutheran, Reformed and United churches from most parts of East Germany came together as the Evangelical Church in East Germany at the Conference of Eisenach .

East Germany won the regional elections for the Brandenburg state assembly at the head of the SPD list in 1990.

Smaller Catholic Church in eastern Germany had a fully functioning episcopal hierarchy in full accord with the Vatican.

East Germany's culture was strongly influenced by communist thought and was marked by an attempt to define itself in opposition to the west, particularly West Germany and the United States.

Critics of the East Germany German state have claimed that the state's commitment to Communism was a hollow and cynical tool, Machiavellian in nature, but this assertion has been challenged by studies that have found that the East Germany German leadership was genuinely committed to the advance of scientific knowledge, economic development, and social progress.

However, Pence and Betts argue, the majority of East Germans over time increasingly regarded the state's ideals to be hollow, though there was a substantial number of East Germans who regarded their culture as having a healthier, more authentic mentality than that of West Germany.

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East Germany Germans accepted hip hop as more than just a music form.

Prolific cinema of East Germany was headed by the DEFA, Deutsche Film AG, which was subdivided in different local groups, for example Gruppe Berlin, Gruppe Babelsberg or Gruppe Johannisthal, where the local teams shot and produced films.

East Germany became an honorary Sioux chief when he visited the United States in the 1990s, and the television crew accompanying him showed the tribe one of his movies.

East Germany was very successful in the sports of cycling, weight-lifting, swimming, gymnastics, track and field, boxing, ice skating, and winter sports.

Television and radio in East Germany were state-run industries; the Rundfunk der DDR was the official radio broadcasting organisation from 1952 until unification.

East Germany had a revolutionary technology for two-stroke engines called expansion chamber allowing them to win motorcycle races with little competition.

East Germany was assigned telephone country code +37; in 1991, several months after reunification, East German telephone exchanges were incorporated into country code +49.

In 1976 East Germany inaugurated the operation of a ground-based radio station at Furstenwalde for the purpose of relaying and receiving communications from Soviet satellites and to serve as a participant in the international telecommunications organization established by the Soviet government, Intersputnik.

West Germans often acted as if they had "won" and East Germany Germans had "lost" in unification, leading many East Germany Germans to resent West Germans .

East Germany Germans find 'Wessis' arrogant and pushy, West Germans think the 'Ossis' are lazy good-for-nothings.

East Germany warns German society should watch out in case Ostalgie results in a distortion and romanticization of the past.