Portal:Germany
Welcome to the Germany Portal!
Willkommen im Deutschland-Portal!
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Germany (German: Deutschland), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland), is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.
Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,596 square kilometres (138,069 sq mi) and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With nearly 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying entirely in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a very decentralized country. Its capital and most populous city is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport.
In 1871, Germany became a nation-state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the Revolution of 1918–19, the empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to World War II, and the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American, British, and French occupation zones, and East Germany, formed from the western part of the Soviet occupation zone, reduced by the newly established Oder-Neisse line. Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990.
Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor. It is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial, scientific and technological sectors, it is a major trading nation. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993. Read more...
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The Hitler Diaries (Hitler-Tagebücher) were a series of sixty volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks (£2.3 million or $3.7 million) by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was The Sunday Times, who asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.
Kujau, born and raised in East Germany, had a history of petty crime and deception. In the mid-1970s he began selling Nazi memorabilia which he had smuggled from the East, but found he could raise the prices by forging additional authentication details to associate ordinary souvenirs to the Nazi leaders. He began forging paintings by Hitler and an increasing number of notes, poems and letters, until he produced his first diary in the mid-to-late 1970s. The West German journalist with Stern who "discovered" the diaries and was involved in their purchase was Gerd Heidemann, who had an obsession with the Nazis. When Stern started buying the diaries, Heidemann stole a significant proportion of the money.
Kujau and Heidemann spent time in prison for their parts in the fraud, and several newspaper editors lost their jobs. The story of the scandal was the basis for the films Selling Hitler (1991) for the British channel ITV, the German film Schtonk! (1992), and the television series Faking Hitler (2021). (Full article...)
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Holy Roman Empire (900–1806)
East Germany (1949–1990)
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Anniversaries for March 31

- 1811 - Birth of chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen
- 1819 - Birth of statesman Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Chancellor of Germany 1894-1900
- 1917 - Death of physician Emil Adolf von Behring, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- 1939 - Birth of film director Volker Schlöndorff
Did you know...
- ... that Russia funded the building of the Russian Memorial Church in Leipzig (pictured) as a monument to the 22,000 Russians who died in the 1813 Battle of Leipzig against Napoleon?
- ... that a word in Wangerooge Frisian, once used to describe loading a gun, later came to be used to describe an invitation to a birthday party?
- ... that Karl Braun and other German scientists played cards with their British colleagues during World War I?
- ... that Rudolf Herzog's novels have been described as characterised by the "sentimentality and harshness, pomp and plainness" of Kaiser Wilhelm II?
- ... that an effort to ban one German political party revealed that it was so heavily infiltrated that the German government partially controlled it?
- ... that in 1994 Kazuyoshi Akiyama conducted the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron with Japanese musicians?
- ... that Hans Dieter Beck (pictured), a co-head of the publisher C. H. Beck, rode a bicycle to work until he was 92?
- ... that John Beaglehole described the appointment of Johann Reinhold Forster as naturalist on Cook's second voyage as "one of the Admiralty's vast mistakes"?
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A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects.
Here are some tasks you can do. Please remove completed tasks from the list.
- Requests: German Archaeological Institute at Rome , Deutsche Familienversicherung , Dietlof von Arnim-Boitzenburg , Rolf von Bargen , Hennes Bender , Eduard Georg von Bethusy-Huc , Rolf Brandt (1886–1953), Jan Philipp Burgard , Lisa Feller , Georg Arbogast von und zu Franckenstein , Georg Gafron , Ferdinand Heribert von Galen , Gundula Gause , Karl-Heinz Hagen , Herbert Helmrich , Nils von der Heyde , Monty Jacobs (1875–1945), Siegfried Kauder , Matze Knop , Wolfgang Kryszohn , Claus Larass , Isidor Levy (1852–1929), Markus Löning , Tobias Mann , Mathias Müller von Blumencron ,Günther Nonnenmacher Anke Plättner , Hans Heinrich X. Fürst von Pless , Gerd Poppe, Günter Prinz , Ulrich Reitz , Hans Sauer (inventor) , Franz August Schenk von Stauffenberg , Paul Schlesinger (1878-1928), Hajo Schumacher , Otto Theodor von Seydewitz , Christoph Sieber (comedian) , Dorothea Siems , Werner Sonne , Udo zu Stolberg-Wernigerode , Christoph Strässer , Joseph von Utzschneider , Jürgen Wieshoff , Hans Wilhelmi , Dietmar Wischmeyer , Alexandra Würzbach
- Unreferenced: especially Unreferenced BLPs
- Cleanup: 53541 issues in total as of 2024-03-03
- Translate: Articles needing translation from German Wikipedia
- Stubs: the largest stub category is Category:German history stubs; see also 117 articles in Category:German MEP stubs
- Update: Deutsches Wörterbuch
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Orphaned articles in Germany
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- Help assess the quality of 921 unassessed articles
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