East Germany, in English formally known as the German Democratic Republic, was a Marxist-Leninist one-party state that existed from 1949 to 1990. Its German name was The GDR was formed in the zone once occupied by the Soviet Union, and it was created as a communist republic in the Eastern Bloc. East Germany had the best economy out of all of the Eastern Bloc states, but it suffered from brain drain as the well-educated youths attempted to flee to West Germany during the Cold War. In 1961, East Germany built the Berlin Wall to divide its capital of East Berlin from the west, stopping emigration by setting up landmines along the border and killing those who tried to flee. However, East Germany fell in the 1989 revolutions, which saw the people of both East and West Berlin tear down the Berlin wall with sledgehammers and reunite Germany. The two Germanies united into a federal republic of Germany, and on 3 October 1990 East Germany formally united with West Germany by dissolving the 14 regions of the GDR and reforming them into five states which largely corresponded to the names and aeras historical pre-WW2 counterparts: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the north, Sachsen-Anhalt in the west, Brandenburg and Berlin in the east plus Saxony and Thuringia in the south to the existing 10 states of West Germany. East Germany had a population of 16,111,000 people at the time of reunification in 1990, with state atheism being enforced; by the time of reunification, with 25% of the people being Protestant, 5% Catholic, and 70% atheist.
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