What did Germany used to be called?

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Nazi leader Adolf Hitler imagined his dictatorial regime as the historical successor to two great German empires. By claiming for his government the mantle of the Third Reich, Hitler attempted to position himself within the larger context of German and European history. In his mind, Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” would serve as the natural conclusion of a process that he traced back to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. The concept of such a succession of “Reichs” had its origin just 10 years before Hitler’s rise to power, however, and those living in the retroactively named “First Reich” (the Holy Roman Empire) or “Second Reich” (the German Empire) would not have recognized the validity of such an appellation.

In 1923 German cultural critic Arthur Moeller van den Bruck published Das Dritte Reich (1923; “The Third Empire,” or “Reich”). Written at a time when the Weimar Republic was struggling to contain revolutionary forces from both the right and left, Moeller’s treatise espoused a conservative doctrine that called for the elevation of German intellectualism and nationalism. Both Marxism and Western-style democracy were regarded as impediments to Germany’s rightful ascent to supremacy in Europe, and Moeller proposed that the realization of the Third, or final, Empire would see the harmonious fusion of Germany’s socialist and conservative movements. Positioning his theoretical Reich as the third in a series may have been an attempt to evoke the Hegelian concept of synthesis or an invocation of Joachim of Fiore’s Trinitarian philosophy of history. Moeller’s Third Reich was not, however, overtly national socialist in character.

While Hitler did not explicitly mention the Third Reich in his political manifesto Mein Kampf, early Nazi leader Otto Strasser claimed that Hitler was aware of Moeller’s work, and the phrase Third Reich entered common use throughout Germany after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Although Moeller had coined the name of one of the most feared and reviled regimes in human history, he did not live to see its creation. He committed suicide in 1925. In the introduction to Das Dritte Reich, Moeller warned:

The thought of a Third Empire might well be the most fatal of all the illusions to which they have ever yielded; it would be thoroughly German if they contented themselves with day-dreaming about it. Germany might perish of her Third Empire dream.

The American Embassy in Berlin was established on December 9, 1974, with Brandon H. Grove, Jr. , as Chargé d’Affaires ad interim. John Sherman Cooper presented his credentials as the first U.S. Ambassador to the GDR on December 20, 1974.

Germany Reunified under Auspices of the FRG, .

Following the collapse of one-party rule in East Germany in late-1989, the signing of a Unification Treaty by East and West German Governments on August 31, 1990, and a series of meetings between the foreign ministers of East and West Germany, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in Bonn, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow, a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (the so-called “Two Plus Four Agreement”) was signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990.

On September 25, 1990, President George H.W. Bush submitted the treaty for ratification, and the U.S. Senate obliged unanimously on October 10. The treaty finally went into effect on March 15, 1991. Since the five constituent federal states of the German Democratic Republic were technically absorbed by the Federal Republic of Germany under the terms of Article 23 of the “Basic Law” (which was subsequently abolished under the terms of the Unification Treaty so as to limit any further changes to the borders of Germany), there was no reason for the United States to recognize the reunified Germany as a “new state.” The United States maintained its embassy in Bonn; however, it closed its embassy in Berlin on October 2, 1990.