The German Democratic Republic (GDR; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR; commonly known in English as East Germany) was a socialist state created by the Soviet Union in the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany and the Soviet sector of occupied Berlin. East Germany existed from 1949 until 1990, when its re-established states acceded to the adjacent Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), thus producing the current form of the state of Germany.
Until 1952 it consisted of the German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony. Those were formed by pre-war German provinces or what was left of them with the new borders after the Potsdam Agreement. It claimed East Berlin as its capital.
Prior to reunification, it consisted of 14 smaller districts and East Berlin which received the equivalent status of a district in 1961. The districts were named after their metropolises: Rostock, Neubrandenburg, Schwerin, Potsdam, Frankfurt (Oder), Magdeburg, Cottbus, Halle, Leipzig, Erfurt, Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt (called Chemnitz until 1953 and again after 1990), Gera, and Suhl.
In 1955 the Republic was declared by the Soviet Union to be fully sovereign; however, Soviet troops remained, based on the four-power Potsdam agreement, just as British, Canadian and American forces remained in West Germany. As NATO troops remained in West Berlin and West Germany, East Germany and Berlin in particular became focal points of Cold War tensions. East Germany was a member of the Warsaw Pact and a close ally of the Soviet Union. Following the initial opening of sections of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989, new elections were held on March 18 1990, and the governing party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, lost its majority in the Volkskammer (the East German parliament) soon after. On August 23, the Volkskammer decided that the territory of the Republic would accede to the ambit of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3 1990. As a result of the unification on that date, the German Democratic Republic officially ceased to exist.
