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East Germany
The German Democratic Republic, the Soviet bloc state behind the Berlin Wall
For 41 years the German Democratic Republic was the westernmost outpost of the Soviet bloc, a socialist state carved from the Soviet occupation zone of defeated Germany. It stood on the front line of the Cold War, its border with the West fortified with fences, mines, and watchtowers and its capital split by the Berlin Wall. The GDR built one of the most extensive secret police networks ever devised, the Stasi, and sent its athletes to the top of Olympic medal tables. It was also the only Soviet bloc country to vanish entirely by joining a Western neighbor, a peaceful transformation set off by crowds in Leipzig and Berlin in the autumn of 1989.
East Germany covered 108,333 square kilometers, about 30 percent of the united country today. In the north it faced the Baltic Sea, with lagoons, sandy spits, and the chalk cliffs of Rügen, the largest German island. Behind the coast lay the lake country of Mecklenburg and the sandy plains and pine forests around Berlin. The Elbe flowed northwest through Dresden and Magdeburg, and to the south the land rose into the Harz, the Thuringian Forest, and the Ore Mountains on the Czechoslovak border, a mining region since the Middle Ages. Leipzig, Dresden, and Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, were its main cities after East Berlin. Its territory now forms the German states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, plus the eastern half of Berlin.
The GDR was founded on October 7, 1949, months after the Western zones became the Federal Republic, and was ruled by the Socialist Unity Party. A workers' uprising in June 1953 was put down by Soviet tanks. As millions left for the West, the government sealed the border and on August 13, 1961, began building the Berlin Wall. When Hungary opened its border in 1989 and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signaled he would not intervene, mass protests forced the opening of the Wall on November 9. Free elections in March 1990 produced a government that chose unification. The deutsche mark replaced the East German mark on July 1, and on October 3, 1990, the GDR acceded to the Federal Republic and ceased to exist.