Opinion ID: 151499
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: German History

Text: The FRG, as it exists today[,] is the product of a long, contentious, and disparate history. Martin A. Rogoff, The European Union, Germany, and the Länder: New Patterns of Political Relations in Europe, 5 Colum. J. Eur. L. 415, 417 (1999). For many centuries, German territory, then part of the Heiliges römisches Reich (Holy Roman Empire or First Reich), consisted of several hundred discrete political units. Id. The modern German nation-state was formed in 1871, when most of these units were united into one [centralized] state under the leadership of [the Kingdom of] Prussia, id., a monarchy, and officially called the Deutsches Reich (German Reich or Second Reich). In 1919, after World War I ended, the King of Prussia abdicated his throne and the Deutsches Reich was declared the Weimar Republic. [3] The German Reich was made up of several states or Länder, the largest of which was the Free state of Prussia, Michael Stolleis, A History of Public Law in Germany, 1914-1945, 108-09 (Thomas Dunlap trans., Oxford Univ. Press 2004), that encompassed territory later comprising both West Germany and East Germany. In 1933, as a result of growing discontentment with the Weimar government, the Nazi Party rose to power and Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Over the next few years, the Drittes Reich (Third Reich), formally abolished the Länder parliaments, Rogoff, 5 Colum. J. Eur. L. at 418, and became a centralized totalitarian state. Under Hitler's dictatorship, in 1939, the Third Reich invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe, and in 1941, attacked the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States. See generally William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960). In 1949, four years after World War II ended, the western eleven Länder that were controlled by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States merged to form West Germany, a market economy, and the five Länder in the eastern sector occupied by the Soviet Union became East Germany, a communist Eastern block state that remained under the Soviet Union's political and military control. On October 3, 1990, West and East Germany were reunified, thereby creating the present-day FRG.