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On July 1, 1948 the representatives of the Western allied occupation forces handed over a number of documents to the prime ministers and the two ruling mayors of the western zones of occupation. The Frankfurt Documents contained recommendations for establishing a West German state. The main problem with the recommendations was that they did not provide an all-German solution but only a West German state. The Frankfurt Documents formed a working basis for the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. They were created at the London 6-Power Conference, which took place between February and June 1948.
A West German state was to be established under the following conditions:
The borders of military occupied Germany.
There should be a constitutional convention (German: Verfassunggebende Versammlung, literally, "Constituent Assembly") before September 1, 1948, to draft a constitution shaping a federal form of government, while maintaining the rights of people and the participating states.
The constitution should first be approved by the military governments, followed by a referendum in the states to ratify the Constitution.
The respective simple majority in two thirds of eleven West German states should be sufficient for ratification.
Constitutional amendments must be approved by the military governors.
German foreign policy should continue to be controlled by the military governors, in particular with regards to questions regarding the status of the Ruhr, reparations, industrial policy in general, and the rights of the Allied forces.
The boundaries of each state should be reviewed and should, if necessary, take into account traditional forms if new states were created. No state should be allowed to be too large or to dominate the others.
The Frankfurt Documents prompted the prime minister to hold the Rittersturz Conference in Koblenz on the resolutions that had been passed.
West Germany is the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until the reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. During the Cold War, the western portion of Germany and the associated territory of West Berlin were parts of the Western Bloc. West Germany was formed as a political entity during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, established from 12 states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The capital was the city of Bonn, hence the Cold War-era country is sometimes known as the Bonn Republic.
The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The national flag of Germany is a tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands displaying the national colours of Germany: black, red, and gold. The flag was first sighted in 1848 in the German Confederation. The flag was also used by the German Empire from 1848 to 1849. It was officially adopted as the national flag of the German Reich from 1919 to 1933, and has been in use since its reintroduction in Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.
I. G. Farbenindustrie AG, commonly known as IG Farben, was a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. It was formed in 1925 from a merger of six chemical companies: Agfa, BASF, Bayer, Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron, Hoechst, and Weiler-ter-Meer. It was seized by the Allies after World War II and split into its constituent companies; parts in East Germany were nationalized.
The Federal Republic of Germany, as a federal state, consists of sixteen states. Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are called Stadtstaaten ("city-states"), while the other thirteen states are called Flächenländer and include Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia, which describe themselves as Freistaaten.
The North German Confederation was initially a German military alliance established in August 1866 under the leadership of the Kingdom of Prussia, which was transformed in the subsequent year into a confederated state that existed from July 1867 to December 1870. A milestone of the German Unification, it was the earliest continual legal predecessor of the modern German nation-state known today as the Federal Republic of Germany.
The Bizone or Bizonia was the combination of the American and the British occupation zones on 1 January 1947 during the occupation of Germany after World War II. With the addition of the French occupation zone on 1 August 1948 the entity became the Trizone. Later, on 23 May 1949, the Trizone became the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany.
The Parlamentarischer Rat was the West German constituent assembly in Bonn that drafted and adopted the constitution of West Germany, the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, promulgated on 23 May 1949.
The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and former state: after Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, four countries representing the Allies asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.
Carlo Schmid was a German academic and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
The IG Farben Building – also known as the Poelzig Building and the Abrams Building, formerly informally called The Pentagon of Europe – is a building complex in Frankfurt, Germany, which currently serves as the main structure of the Westend Campus of the University of Frankfurt. Construction began in 1928 and was complete in 1930 as the corporate headquarters of the IG Farben conglomerate, then the world's largest chemical company and the world's fourth-largest company overall.
The Republic of Baden was a German state that existed during the time of the Weimar Republic, formed after the abolition of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1918. It is now part of the modern German state of Baden-Württemberg.
The Free People's State of Württemberg was a state which existed in the Weimar Republic and from 1933 in Nazi Germany.
South Baden, formed in December 1945 from the southern half of the former Republic of Baden, was a subdivision of the French occupation zone of post-World War II Germany. The state was later renamed to Baden and became a founding state of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. In 1952, Baden became part of the modern German state of Baden-Württemberg.
The Allied Control Council (ACC) or Allied Control Authority, and also referred to as the Four Powers, was the governing body of the Allied occupation zones in Germany (1945–1949/1991) and Austria (1945–1955) after the end of World War II in Europe. After the defeat of the Nazis, Germany and Austria were occupied as two different areas, both by the same four Allies. Both were later divided into four zones by the 1 August 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Its members were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The organisation was based in Schöneberg, Berlin.
The Constitutional Convention at Herrenchiemsee was a meeting of constitutional experts nominated by the minister-presidents of the Western States of Germany, held in August 1948 at former Herrenchiemsee Abbey in Bavaria. It was part of the process of drafting and adopting the current German constitution, the Basic Law (Grundgesetz). The draft document prepared by the Herrenchiemsee convention served as a starting point for the deliberations of the Parlamentarischer Rat in Bonn during 1948 and 1949.
The Democratic Party of Germany was founded in 1947 as a German liberal party and is the forerunner of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the current Federal Republic of Germany.
The London Six-Power Conference in 1948 was held between the three Western occupation forces in Germany after the World War II and the Benelux countries. The aim of the conference was to pave the way for Germany's participation in the international community through the creation of a democratic and federal government in the area of the U.S., British and French zones of the country. The conference was held in two sessions, the first from 23 February to 6 March, the second from 20 April to 2 June 1948.
A referendum was held on 9 December 1951 in the states of South Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern. Voters were asked whether they favoured a merger of the three states into a single state or the re-establishment of the old states of Baden and Württemberg. 69.7% of voters favoured unification with a turnout of 59.2%.
The American occupation zone in Germany, also known as the US-Zone, and the Southwest zone, was one of the four occupation zones established by the Allies of World War II in Germany west of the Oder–Neisse line in July 1945, around two months after the German surrender and the end of World War II in Europe. It was controlled by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) and ceased to exist after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany on 21 September 1949, but the United States maintains military presence across Germany.
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