German Reich

Instead, the post-war republic stripped the word of its monarchical associations, formalizing the conceptual shift from territory to people. Article 1 of the Weimar Constitution declared that the Reich derived its authority and sovereignty entirely from the German national people, while Article 2 defined its territory simply as the lands currently under its administrative authority. The Reich was no longer a dynastic property; it was the ultimate legal and spiritual vessel of the German citizenry. Throughout the 1920s, international treaties like the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Geneva Conventions were signed not by the "German Republic," but by the "German Reich." Even British politicians and foreign observers referred to the democratic state as the German Reich, leaving the word untranslated to distinguish it from the defunct empire of the Kaiser.

To the National Socialists, however, the democratic republic was a historical aberration, an insult to the very concept of the Reich. Drawing on a historical framework popularized by the nationalist writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in his 1923 book Das Dritte Reich, the Nazis conceptualized German history as a trilogy of realms. The medieval Holy Roman Empire was the first; the Hohenzollern monarchy of 1871 to 1918 was the second; and a new, purified, and expanded state would be the third. When Hitler seized power in 1933, the official name of the state remained, on paper, the Deutsches Reich. But following the Anschluss annexation of Austria in March 1938, the regime began informally using the term Großdeutsches Reich—the Greater German Reich—to signal that the historical separation between the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe had finally been erased. In June 1943, as the tide of the Second World War began to turn against Germany, a decree by Hans Lammers, the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, made the name "Greater German Reich" mandatory in all official government documents.

This version of the Reich, which sought to align the boundaries of the state with the absolute limits of the German Volk through conquest and terror, collapsed de facto on April 30, 1945, with the death of Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Although Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz attempted to establish a successor administration in Flensburg, the Allied powers refused to recognize his legitimacy. On June 5, 1945, the Allies signed the Berlin Declaration, assuming supreme authority over the defeated country through the Allied Control Council.

In the ashes of the post-war world, the name that had defined German statehood for nearly three-quarters of a century was systematically dismantled. The victorious Allies avoided the word Reich in their restructuring of the occupied zones, and during the Nuremberg Trials, prosecutors referred to the state during the Nazi era untranslated as the "Reich," reserving "German Empire" strictly for the pre-1918 monarchy. When the Federal Republic of Germany was established on May 23, 1949, it made a profound constitutional assertion: within its borders, it was not merely a successor to the German Reich, but its direct legal continuation. Yet the founders of this new "Bonn Republic" chose to banish the word Reich from their vocabulary. The prefix Reichs- was systematically replaced by Bundes- (Federal); the Reichskanzler became the Bundeskanzler. During the decades of division, the West German state maintained that the overall Reich existed as a dormant entity, a "nation as a whole" waiting to be restored. However, when reunification finally arrived on October 3, 1990, the expanded nation chose to describe itself simply as "United Germany." The state explicitly renounced any claims to territories formerly within the boundaries of the historic Reich that lay outside its modern borders, finally closing the long, turbulent chapter of the German realm.