The concept of Germany as a distinct region in central Europe can be traced to Roman

commander Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania,

thus distinguishing it from Gaul (France), which he had conquered. The victory of the Germanic
tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9) prevented annexation by the Roman Empire,
although the Roman provinces of Germania Superior and Germania Inferior were established along
the Rhine. Following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Franks conquered the
other West Germanic tribes. When the Frankish Empire was divided among Charles the Great's
heirs in 843, the eastern part became East Francia. In 962, Otto I became the first Holy Roman
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval German state.
In the Late Middle Ages, the regional dukes, princes, and bishops gained power at the expense of
the emperors. Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church after 1517,
as the northern states became Protestant, while the southern states remained Catholic. The two
parts of the Holy Roman Empire clashed in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which was ruinous to
the twenty million civilians living in both parts. The Thirty Years' War brought tremendous destruction
to Germany; more than 1/4 of the population and 1/2 of the male population in the German states
were killed by the catastrophic war. 1648 marked the effective end of the Holy Roman Empire and
the beginning of the modern nation-state system, with Germany divided into numerous independent
states, such as Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Austria and other states, which also controlled land
outside of the area considered "Germany".
After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars from 1803–1815, feudalism fell away and
liberalism and nationalism clashed with reaction. The German revolutions of 1848–49 failed.
The Industrial Revolution modernized the German economy, led to the rapid growth of cities and the
emergence of the socialist movement in Germany. Prussia, with its capital Berlin, grew in power.
German universities became world-class centers for science and humanities, while music and art
flourished. The unification of Germany (excluding Austria and the German-speaking areas of
Switzerland) was achieved under the leadership of the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with the
formation of the German Empire in 1871. This resulted in the Kleindeutsche Lösung, ("small
Germany solution", Germany without Austria), rather than the Großdeutsche Lösung, ("greater
Germany solution", Germany with Austria). The new Reichstag, an elected parliament, had only a
limited role in the imperial government. Germany joined the other powers in colonial expansion in
Africa and the Pacific.
By 1900, Germany was the dominant power on the European continent and its rapidly expanding
industry had surpassed Britain's while provoking it in a naval arms race. Germany led the Central
Powers in World War I (1914–1918) against France, Great Britain, Russia and (by 1917) the United
States. Defeated and partly occupied, Germany was forced to pay war reparations by the Treaty of
Versailles and was stripped of its colonies as well as of home territory to be ceded to Belgium,
France, and Poland, and was banned from uniting with German-settled regions of Austria.
The German Revolution of 1918–19 put an end to the federal constitutional monarchy, which
resulted in the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an unstable parliamentary democracy.
In the early 1930s, the worldwide Great Depression hit Germany hard, as unemployment soared and
people lost confidence in the government. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of
Germany. His Nazi Party quickly established a totalitarian regime, and Nazi Germany made
increasingly aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if they were not met. Remilitarization of
the Rhineland came in 1936, then annexation of Austria in the Anschluss and German-speaking
regions of Czechoslovakia with the Munich Agreement in 1938, and further territory of
Czechoslovakia in 1939. On 1 September 1939, Germany initiated World War II in Europe with
the invasion of Poland. After forming a pact with the Soviet Union in 1939, Hitler and Stalin divided
Eastern Europe. After a "Phoney War" in spring 1940, the Germans swept Denmark and Norway,
the Low Countries, and France, giving Germany control of nearly all of Western Europe.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Racism, especially antisemitism, was a central feature of the Nazi regime. In Germany, but
predominantly in the German-occupied areas, the systematic genocide program known as the
Holocaust killed 17 million, including Jews, German dissidents, disabled people, Poles, Romanies,
Soviets (Russian and non-Russian), and others. In 1942, the German invasion of the Soviet Union
faltered, and after the United States entered the war, Britain became the base for massive Anglo-
American bombings of German cities. Following the Allied invasion of Normandy (June 1944), the
German Army was pushed back on all fronts until the final collapse in May 1945.
Under occupation by the Allies, German territories were split up, Austria was again made a separate
country, denazification took place, and the Cold War resulted in the division of the country into
democratic West Germany and communist East Germany, reduced in territory by the establishment
of the Oder-Neisse line. Millions of ethnic Germans were deported from pre-war Eastern
Germany, Sudetenland, and from all over Eastern Europe, in what is described as the largest scale
of ethnic cleansing in history.[1]. Germans also fled from Communist areas into West Germany, which
experienced rapid economic expansion, and became the dominant economy in Western Europe.
West Germany was rearmed in the 1950s under the auspices of NATO but without access to nuclear
weapons. The Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western
Europe in the European Union. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was destroyed, the Soviet Union collapsed,
and East Germany was reunited with West Germany in 1990. In 1998–1999, Germany was one of
the founding countries of the eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of
Europe, contributing about one-quarter of the eurozone's annual gross domestic product. In the early
2010s, Germany played a critical role in trying to resolve the escalating euro crisis, especially
concerning Greece and other Southern European nations. In the middle of the decade, the country
faced the European migrant crisis as the main receiver of asylum seekers from Syria and other
troubled regions.
For more events, see Timeline of German history.