Reunification Of Germany

German reunification celebrations

The reunification of Germany was a process which occurred in 1989 and 1990 at the end of the Cold War whereby West Germany (The Federal Democratic Republic of Germany) and East Germany (The German Democratic Republic) were joined into a united German state for the first time since the end of the Second World War 45 years earlier. The process began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November 1989 and ended when the decision of the two halves of the country to unite was formally ratified on the 3rd of October 1990. During the Cold War major economic and demographic disparities had developed between the two halves of Germany, with many people leaving East Germany for West Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Reunification did not lead to a correction of this, but instead intensified the economic and demographic divide as people who had been prevented from leaving East Germany in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s left for the more affluent cities of the west of the country in the 1990s and 2000s, a trend that continues down to the present day.

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Reunification of German chronology of events

Allied-occupied Germany

As the Second World War came to an end in the summer of 1945, the leading Allied powers began to occupy four agreed upon sections of Germany. The British took the north and west. The French had the smallest section in the far west along the border with France. The United States occupied the central parts of the country and the large Bavaria region in the south. Finally, the Soviet Union occupied the east of the country around Berlin and the Brandenburg and Saxony region. Although it was the Soviets who had fought the Battle of Berlin against the Germans, they agreed that the city would be divided into four sectors occupied by them, the Americans, the British and the French. These arrangements would cast a long pall over Germany’s post-war history.

Several years of reconstruction occurred in Germany under Allied occupation, as trials were held for tens of thousands of war criminals and a program of de-Nazification was undertaken. Finally, in May 1949 the Americans, British and French formally renounced control of their spheres of occupation, which were declared to be a new Federal Republic of Germany. In response, the Soviets also nominally granted their sphere of influence its independence five months later in October 1949. This became the German Democratic Republic. However, the two parts would very quickly become known informally as West Germany and East Germany. The two new nations were literally at the coalface of the Cold War, the dividing line between the US-dominated west, united through the NATO military alliance, and the Soviet-controlled east, which had responded to western unity by forming the Warsaw Pact out of its allies and vassals in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin was also a city divided between West and East.

The Berlin Wall

For the next decade there was a growing problem for the communist government in East Germany. People kept fleeing into West Germany, where there were greater political freedoms and which was also historically the more affluent part of Germany, the cities of the Rhineland and along the North Sea coast between the Netherlands and Denmark having emerged as the heartland of industrial Germany in the nineteenth century. Nearly two-sevenths of the 68 or so million people that lived in Germany in 1949 lived in East Germany. By 1961, when the government of East Germany started construction of the Berlin Wall to stop migration into West Germany, the population of East Germany had fallen from 18 million in 1949 to 17 million, while in West Germany it had grown from 50 million in 1949 to 56.5 million in 1961. Despite the building of the Berlin Wall and other efforts to curb migration from East Germany to West Germany, in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were just 16.5 million people in East Germany, whereas West Germany’s population had expanded further again to 62 million.

Reunification came about suddenly. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union. He was determined to reform it through his twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (re-structuring). However, his approach ended up bringing the Soviet Union to an end. Revolutions swept across several communist countries in Eastern Europe in 1989. In Germany the country was severely impacted by the opening of the land route between communist Hungary and Austria. This now created a scenario whereby East Germans could circumvent the issue of being unable to travel into West Germany by simply travelling to Hungary, then to Austria and then to West Germany. Once this occurred, the Berlin Wall became superfluous and on the 9th of November 1989 the people of Berlin began peacefully dismantling the wall that had divided their city for 28 years. Less than a year later, with the Soviet bloc collapsing across Europe, West Germany and East Germany united for the first time since the Second World War.

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Extent of migration associated with the reunification of Germany

One might have assumed that unification would have resulted in the population imbalance between east and west that had developed since the late 1940s begin to correct itself. Surely, now that the Stasi and other instruments of state terror no longer had to be dealt with in East Germany people would head there to take advantage of cheaper property and new economic opportunities. However, this was not the case. Instead the population imbalance continued to get worse as more people again migrated from what had been East Germany into West Germany. The migration was at its most intense through the 1990s. By the year 2000 there were just barely over 15 million people living in what had been East Germany, while the population of West Germany had grown by five million people again on what it had been in 1988 to 67 million people. Thus, where the population of East Germany had been two-sevenths of the total population of Germany in 1949, by the year 2000 it was only two-elevenths. Reunification led to even more migration from eastern Germany to western Germany.

Demographic impact of German reunification

The demographic impact of this post-reunification migration is still in evidence today. There has been a slight rebalancing since 2000. There are over 16 million people in eastern Germany today, a minor increase on 2000, while the population of western Germany has fallen by over a million in the last quarter of a century. However, these minor changes aside, the post-reunification situation has been maintained for the most part. As a result, while Berlin is the largest city in Germany today, 8 of the 10 largest cities in Germany are in what was West Germany. Only three of the largest 25 cities in Germany are in the former lands of East Germany, they being Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. Therefore, reunification in 1990 served to deepen and fossilize the economic and demographic division between western and eastern Germany even further.

See also

• Germany
• Cold War
• Fall of the Berlin Wall

Explore more about the reunification of Germany

• Germany Deaths and Burials, 1582-1958 records collection on MyHeritage
• Germany, Emigrants from Southwestern Germany, 1736-1963 records collection on MyHeritage
• Working with German Vital Records You Find on MyHeritage at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Moving, moving, moving! Migration Patterns within Germany at Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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