page_title: History of East Germany
section_title: The Potsdam Conference
hierarchical_section_title: History of East Germany / Creation, 1945–1949 / Division of Germany / The Potsdam Conference
caption_attribution_description: English: Anachronical map pf Germany and Poland border changes during the 20th century.
context_page_description: The German Democratic Republic, German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, often known in English as East Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990. It covered the area of the present-day German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, and Thüringen. This area was occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, with the remaining German territory to the west occupied by the British, American, and French armies. Following the economic and political unification of the three western occupation zones under a single administration and the establishment of the German Federal Republic in May 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded on 7 October 1949 as a sovereign nation.
  East Germany's political and economic system reflected its status as a part of the Eastern Bloc of Soviet-allied Communist countries, with the nation ruled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and operating with a command economy for 41 years until 3 October 1990 when East and West Germany were unified with the former being absorbed into the latter's existing system of liberal democracy and a market economy.
context_section_description: The Potsdam Conference of July/August 1945 officially recognized the zones and confirmed jurisdiction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (German: Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, SMAD) from the Oder and Neisse rivers to the demarcation line. The Soviet occupation zone included the former states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. The city of Berlin was placed under the control of the four powers. The German territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, equal in size to the Soviet occupation zone, was handed over to Poland and the Soviet Union for de facto annexation. This territory transfer was seen as a compensation for Nazi German military occupation of Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. The millions of Germans still remaining in these areas under the Potsdam Agreement were over a period of several years expelled and replaced by Polish settlers (see Expulsion of Germans after World War II), while millions of ethnic Germans from other Eastern European countries poured into Allied-occupied Germany.  This migration was to such an extent that by the time the German Democratic Republic was founded, between a third and a quarter of the population of East Germany was Heimatvertriebene, i.e. ethnic German migrants who fled or were expelled as part of a wider trend of population transfer among the countries and regions of Eastern Europe following World War II.
caption: Map showing the different borders and territories of Poland and Germany during the 20th century, with the current areas of Germany and Poland in dark gray
exif: {}