East Germany, former country in central Europe (created by the post-World War II division of Germany, united with West Germany in 1990), GDR
The German Democratic Republic (GDR; , DDR; commonly and informally known in English as East Germany) was a
Communist state in the
Soviet Zone of
occupied Germany by the
Soviet Union which was adjacent to the
capitalist,
democratic state of
West Germany, and existed from 1949 to 1990.It consisted of the current
German states of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
Brandenburg,
Saxony-Anhalt,
Thuringia,
Saxony and the eastern part of Berlin.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.
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