People who as children were forced into state care by the former communist East German regime will more easily be able to obtain compensation, Berlin said Wednesday, as it sought to lift barriers to claims for payment.
Exactly 69 years ago, on February 8th, 1950, the fledgling German Democratic Republic(GDR) officially debuted its security service, dedicated to monitoring and preventing outside influences - particularly from the West.
The Czech Republic has compensated a man for wounds suffered during his 1982 attempt to cross the Iron Curtain, a spokesman has said. But the former East German citizen reportedly said the amount was "not satisfactory".
A new report suggests the number of deaths along the Cold War East German border is much higher than prior estimates. But there are still doubts about the true figure.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's government took a step forward on Wednesday towards atoning for East Germany's murky past by approving €10.5 million of aid for victims of the Communist state's doping programme.
The US Air Force planned to drop 91 atomic bombs in and around East Berlin in the event of the Cold War turning hot, documents released on Wednesday showed.
German reunification has been an expensive 25-year project that hasn't always gone according to plan. Jörg Luyken asks if things would have been better if the two states never united.
A quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lenin made a comeback of sorts on Thursday as authorities unearthed a granite head of the Russian revolutionary to truck it across the German capital.
After the Berlin Wall was destroyed in 1989, East and West Germany still had a long way to go before they could become one nation. But in August 1990, the date was finally set for the birth of reunified Germany.
While "Deutschland 83" gets its permiere as a mini-series at Berlinale on Tuesday and Wednesday, it also makes entertainment history as being the first German series to be broadcast for American audiences.
Left-wing politicians in Thuringia have tried to placate centrist voters in their programme for the first state government led by the Linke (Left) party, the former East German Communist Party.
He's known for his eloquence and rhetoric, although this week he was just a guy being chased into a bathroom. We're naming Die Linke (Left) party leader Gregor Gysi our German of the Week.
Benefit payments to former political prisoners of ex-communist East Germany (GDR) will be raised to send an "important message" 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government said on Wednesday.
Visitors to google.de were greeted with a sombre image of candles on a cobbled street on Thursday in place of the usual colourful logo, as the US search giant commemorated the 'Monday demonstration' in Leipzig 25 years ago.
Berlin is suing one of Switzerland's largest banks in its bid to recuperate hundreds of million euros that went missing during the reunification of East and West Germany, the bank said Thursday.
Wednesday marked the 53rd anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. Yet fewer than a third of Germans under 30 can name the exact date when Germany and the capital were divided in two, a survey showed.
"Night is Life": so runs the title of a book to be published on Friday by Sven Marquardt, the merciless bouncer of Berlin's world-famous Berghain club. He may be hard to get past, but our German of the Week also has a sensitive side.
Supermarket Aldi and carmaker Volkswagen allegedly used East German forced labour during the Cold War. A report broadcast on Tuesday evening also said the communist regime forced prisoners to donate blood to sell to the West.
Germany has long accepted that 137 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall, but new research emerged on Friday that a young father drowned in the river Spree, unnoticed for 40 years.
Thousands of Germans are still driving an East German "travelling cardboard box". More than two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, 32,500 Trabants, are on the country's roads. <b>Alex Evans</b> examines their enduring appeal.
Former victims of East Germany's spying apparatus and a state informant recount their dark memories in a play that, more than two decades after the collapse of the communist regime, aims to exorcise the ghosts of the feared Stasi secret police. AFP's Eloi Rouyer reports.
Revelations that Western drug companies colluded with East Germany's communist regime to use more than 50,000 people as "human guinea pigs" in 1980s medical trials has sparked widespread outrage.
