Deutsche Demokratische Republik

German Democratic Republic
East Germany, officialy the German Democratic Republic was a state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in eastern Germany and Prussia as part of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Commonly described as a communist state, it described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state". Its territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the end of World War II—the Soviet occupation zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by Silesia and an enclave west of Lithuania and north of Poland known as "East Prussia". The GDR was established in the Soviet zone while the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany, was established in the three western zones. A satellite state of the Soviet Union, Soviet occupation authorities began transferring administrative responsibility to German communist leaders in 1948 and the GDR began to function as a state on 7 October 1949, although Soviet forces remained in the country throughout the Cold War.

In an attempt to strengthen East Germany as a soviet vassal and gain a strong foothold in central europe, the Soviet Union fulfilled many initial irredentist goals of the Nazi regime in an attempt to gain public support and secure more soviet land, as well as surpass West Germany (The Federal Republic of Germany) in size. This included keeping control of most of Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, as well as annexation of north-western Czechoslovakian territories holding ethnic German minority concentrations in a historical region known as the Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia was in turn given the Ukrainian Transcarpathian province and joint control over most of the Sudetenland in a soviet collaborative program known as the Sudetenland Collaborative administration committee.

The Sudetenland Collaborative administration committee saw many issues during it's lifetime, as it was already highly controversial, border tensions rose during the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution when East German soldiers commanded by the Kyiv administration occupied the Joint-controlled Sudetenland regions and declared a formal annexation in a response to Soviet influence being lost in the Eastern Bloc. After two minor border skirmishes between East German and Czech authorities resulted in 4 casualties, the newly-proclaimed Federal Republic of Czechoslovakia and East Germany entered negotiations and came to an agreement to establish a demilitarized zone in the joint-controlled Sudetenland and continue the Collaborative administration committee.

After the unification of East and West Germany, the Prussian enclave was seperated and given independence from the now-dissolved DDR as a Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR. The Prussian SSR would later go on to gain independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union, but no significant political effort to be reunified with the Federal republic of Germany was made due to demographic changes under Soviet rule resulting in Prussia becoming a partially multinational state due to Rothiyan, Polish, & Lithuanian majority groups living in the country.