Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Escapees had various motives for attempting to flee East Germany. The vast majority had an essentially economic motive: they wished to improve their living conditions and opportunities in the West. Some fled for political reasons, but many were impelled to leave by specific social and political events.
From the mid-1970s, East Germany remained poised between East and West. The 1974 amendment to the Constitution deleted all references to the "German nation" and "German unity" and designated East Germany "a socialist nation-state of workers and peasants" and "an inseparable constituent part of the socialist community of states."
The government of East Germany controlled a large number of military and paramilitary organisations through various ministries. Chief among these was the Ministry of National Defence. Because of East Germany's proximity to the West during the Cold War (1945–92), its military forces were among the most advanced of the Warsaw Pact. Defining ...
Accordingly, before 1961, most of that east–west flow took place between East and West Germany, with over 3.5 million East Germans emigrating to West Germany before 1961, [56] [57] which comprised most of the total net emigration of 4.0 million emigrants from all of Central and Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1959. [58]
The collapse of the East German economy following unification has combined with racism and neoliberalism to feed far right support. How divisions between East and West Germany persist 30 years ...
Geopolitically, the establishment of German Lebensraum in the east of Europe would thwart blockades, like those that occurred during the First World War, which starved the people of Germany. [97] Moreover, using Eastern Europe to feed Germany also was intended to exterminate millions of Slavs, by slave labour and starvation. [ 98 ]
Czechoslovakia's hardline communist government agreed to close its border with East Germany to choke off the exodus. The closure produced uproar across East Germany [160] and the GDR government's bid to humiliate refugees by expelling them from the country in sealed trains backfired disastrously. Torn-up identity papers and East German ...
During the 1945 military campaign in Poland, the Soviet Union interned suspected Nazi party members and government officials in camps in the Soviet-occupied areas east of the Oder-Neisse line. Persons held in these short-lived camps east of the line were subsequently transferred to NKVD special camps in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany or ...