Brief History:

The early inhabitants of Germany are believed to have come from Scandinavia about 100 B.C., The Romans invaded the area in the western bank of the Rhine river and incorporated it into the Roman Empire. Beginning in the fourth century A.D., new westward migrations of eastern peoples caused the Germanic tribes to move into the Roman Empire, which by the late fifth century ceased to exist. Later the area was divided into three kingdoms according to the language spoken. In the course of time the kingdoms were unified and power struggles shattered the region into several small entities, which fought amongst themselves occasionally.

The Thirty Years' religious war, reforms, nationalism, enlightened absolutism, industrialization, social and economic pressures accelerated the unification of the entities and finally by 1871 the German Empire was evolved.

In the beginning of the twentieth century Emperor William II's dynamic expansion of military power contributed to tensions on the European continent. The fragile European balance of power broke down in 1914. World War I and its aftermath, including the Treaty of Versailles, ended the German Empire.

The Weimar Republic, established at the end of World War I, was the first attempt to institute parliamentary democracy in Germany. With the onset of the Great Depression, parliamentary politics became impossible, and the government ruled by decree. Economic crisis favored extremist politicians, and Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party became the strongest party after the summer elections of 1932. In January 1933, the republic's elected president, Paul von Hindenburg, the World War I army commander, named a government headed by Adolf Hitler.

Within a few months, Hitler accomplished the "legal revolution" that removed his opponents. By 1935 his regime had transformed Germany into a totalitarian state. Hitler achieved notable economic and diplomatic successes during the first five years of his rule. However, in September 1939 he made a fatal gamble by invading Poland and starting World War II, which resulted in to the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich in 1945.

With the advent of the Cold War, two German states were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The democratic FRG embedded itself in key Western economic and security organizations, the EC, which became the EU, and NATO, while the communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold War allowed for German unification in 1990. Since then Germany has expended considerable funds to bring eastern productivity and wages up to western standards. In January 2002, Germany and 11 other EU countries introduced a common European currency, the euro.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Green allies were returned to power in the 22 September 2002 parliamentary elections, with a sharply reduced majority.