X-Nico

unusual facts about West German



Adelheid Schulz

Adelheid "Heidi" Schulz (born 31 March 1955 in Lörrach) was a member of the West German terrorist Red Army Faction.

Alwin Wagner

Alwin Josef Wagner (born 11 August 1950 in Melsungen, Hessen) is a West German discus thrower and weight lifter, who was affiliated with University Sportclub Mainz (USC Mainz).

Ameli Koloska

Ameli Koloska, née Isermeyer (born 28 September 1944 in Dessau) is a retired West German javelin thrower.

Anni Pede-Erdkamp

Anni Pede-Erdkamp (born January 14, 1940) is a former West German long-distance runner who is recognized by the International Association of Athletics Federations as having set a world best in the marathon on September 16, 1967 with a time of 3:07:27 in Waldniel, West Germany.

Balthasar Schwarm

Balthasar Schwarm (born 11 September 1946 in Bruckmühl, Bavaria) is a West German former luger who competed from the early 1970s to the early 1980s.

Bernd Cullmann

Bernd Cullmann (born 11 October 1939) is a former West German athlete, winner of gold medal in 4×100 m relay at the 1960 Summer Olympics.

Brigitte Holzapfel

Brigitte Elisabeth Holzapfel (born 10 April 1958 in Krefeld) is a retired West German high jumper.

Christian Zirkelbach

Christian Zirkelbach (born 20 December 1961 in Würzburg) is a retired West German sprinter who specialized in the 100 metres.

Christoph Herle

Christoph Herle (born 19 November 1955 in Königstein im Taunus, Hessen) is a retired West German long-distance runner who specialized in the 10000 metres and cross-country running.

DUX

A large number of these weapons were produced for the West German Border Police, and was later licensed to be produced by Anschütz and Mauser until the mid-1950s.

Edgar Itt

Edgar Itt (born June 8, 1967, Gedern) was a West German athlete who competed for West Germany at the 1988 Summer Olympics held in Seoul, South Korea where he won the bronze medal in the 4 x 400 metre relay with his team mates Norbert Dobeleit, Jörg Vaihinger and Ralf Lübke.

Emílio Garrastazu Médici

Official censorship tightened its grip over the media, and the import of the men's magazines Playboy, Penthouse and Lui, as well as the West German news magazine Der Spiegel, was banned because they offended “morality and proper behavior”.

Franco Fabbri

Born in São Paulo in 1949, from 1965 Fabbri was guitarist, vocalist and composer for Stormy Six, regarded as one of the most interesting Italian progressive bands, and one much admired by the specialist press: in 1980 the group received an award for best rock album of the year from the West German record critics, coming ahead of Police.

Frank Hemmer

Frank Hemmer (born 28 April 1963 in Hagen-Hohenlimburg) is a West German-German slalom canoer who competed from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

Franz Schöbel

Franz Schöbel (born April 6, 1956 in Weilheim, Bavaria) is a West German cross country skier who competed from 1982 to 1984.

Hans Estner

Hans Estner (born 7 April 1951 in Tegernsee) is a West German former biathlete who competed in the 1980 Winter Olympics where he won a bronze medal in the 4x7.5 km relay.

Hans Schweitzer

He was boycotted as "Goebbel's illustrator", but nonetheless found work designing posters for West German federal press and information office and as an illustrator in the far-right press.

Hans-Joachim Walde

Hans-Joachim Walde (born 28 June 1942; died 18 April 2013 in Jever) was a West German track and field athlete who competed mainly in the decathlon.

Hans-Jürgen Riemenschneider

Hans-Jürgen Reimenschneider (born May 4, 1949 in Bad Nauheim) is a West German sprint canoer who competed in the early 1970s.

Hans-Otto Schumacher

Hans-Otto Schumacher (born February 17, 1950 in Grevenbroich) is a West German slalom canoer who competed in the 1970s.

Harald Elschenbroich

Harald Elschenbroich (born 19 June 1941, in Mönchengladbach) is a former West German international tennis player.

Heinfried Birlenbach

Heinfried Birlenbach (born May 24, 1940 in Siegen) is a retired West German shot putter.

Hitler's Children

Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang is a 1977 book about the West German militant left-wing group, the Red Army Faction (also known as The Baader-Meinhof Gang), by the British author Jillian Becker.

Ingrid Becker

Ingrid Mickler-Becker (née Ingrid Becker; born September 26, 1942 in Geseke, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a former West German athlete and a double Olympic champion.

Josef Duchac

After the party merged with the West German CDU following the German reunification, he was elected Thuringias first post-reunification minister-president on October 14, 1990.

Jutta Heine

Judith ("Jutta") Heine (born September 16, 1940 in Stadthagen) is a West German athlete who mainly competed in the sprint events.

Klaus-Peter Hildenbrand

Klaus-Peter Hildenbrand (born 11 September 1952 in Dörrebach) was a West German athlete who competed mainly in the 5000 metres.

Leeds United Service Crew

When striker Peter Lorimer had a goal disallowed in a game which ended in a 2-0 defeat to the West German side, and having already seen their team have two penalty appeals rejected by French referee Michel Kitabdjian, scores of Leeds fans ripped seats from the stands and threw them onto the pitch.

Love Now, Pay Later

Love Now, Pay Later is a 1959 West German drama film directed by Rudolf Jugert and starring Belinda Lee, Walter Rilla and Karl Schönböck.

Ludwig Leitner

Ludwig Leitner (February 24, 1940 – March 21, 2013) was a West German alpine ski racer and world champion, born in Mittelberg, Austria.

Martin Jellinghaus

Martin Jellinghaus (born 26 October 1944 in Lauf an der Pegnitz, Bayern) is a West German former athlete who competed mainly in the 400 metres.

Richard Weiss

Richard Alfred "Rich" Weiss (September 18, 1963 in Munich - June 25, 1997, White Salmon River) was a West German-born, American slalom kayaker who competed from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

Straßenserenade

Straßenserenade is a 1953 West German musical comedy film directed by Werner Jacobs and starring Otto Gebühr, Paul Heidemann and Walter Janssen.

The Goose of Sedan

The Goose of Sedan (German: Die Gans von Sedan) is a 1959 French-West German comedy war film directed by Helmut Käutner and starring Hardy Krüger, Jean Richard and Dany Carrel.

The Treasure of San Teresa

The Treasure of San Teresa is a 1959 British-West German thriller film directed by Alvin Rakoff and starring Eddie Constantine, Dawn Addams and Marius Goring.

The Wonderful Years

The Wonderful Years (German:Die wunderbaren Jahre) is a 1979 West German drama film directed by Reiner Kunze and starring Gabi Marr, Martin May, Dietrich Mattausch and Christine Wodetzky.

Thomas Loose

Thomas Loose (born 19 January 1964 in Bottrop) is a West German-German slalom canoer who competed from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

Ulrike Deppe

Ulrike Deppe (December 9, 1953 in Lippstadt) is a former West German slalom canoeist who competed from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Vauxhall Astra

Production began at Opel's West German plant at Bochum in August 1979, and the first British customers took delivery of their cars in February 1980.

Virgins of the Seven Seas

Virgins of the Seven Seas, also styled as Virgins of the 7 Seas, is a 1974 Hong Kong-West German martial arts-comedy film directed by Kuei Chih-Hung and Ernst Hofbauer.

Waldemar Kraft

From 1953 to 1961 he was subsequently elected a member of the West German Bundestag.

Werner Lueg

Werner Lueg (born 16 September 1931 in Brackwede, near Bielefeld) is a former West German middle distance runner who equalised Lennart Strand's and Gunder Hägg's 1500 m world record in 3:43.0 min in Berlin in 1952.

Wilhelm Baues

Wilhelm "Willi" Baues (born November 21, 1948 in Mönchengladbach) is a West German slalom canoer who competed in the 1970s.

Wilhelm Burgdorf

Erik Frey in the 1955 West German film Der Letzte Akt (Hitler: The Last Ten Days).


see also

1973 Thomas Cup

In the European zone England was upset 4–5 by a solid West German squad that featured a world class singles player in Wolfgang Bochow who won both of his matches, as well as a world class doubles team in Roland Maywald and Willi Braun who won the last match of the tie to clinch the victory.

A Small Town in Germany

The West German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was, like Karfeld, a former committed Nazi, who had joined the NSDAP in 1933.

Anne Tardos

Tardos is the author of the multilingual performance work Among Men, which was produced by West German Radio Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), in Cologne.

Außerparlamentarische Opposition

A watershed in the history of the West German APO commenced on June 2, 1967 during demonstrations against the official visit of the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a policeman.

Different from You and Me

The West German premiere in Stuttgart on October 31, 1957, was followed by protest actions and demonstrations.

Dokumenta

the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic writing system of West German Platt languages

Euroradar CAPTOR

An agreement was reached after the British Defence Secretary Tom King assured his West German counterpart Gerhard Stoltenberg that the British government would underwrite the project and allow GEC to acquire Ferranti Defence Systems from its troubled parent.

Expo 58

The West German pavillon was built by the architects Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf.

Frohnau

The receiving tower on the West German side was in Gartow, Lower Saxony.

Goods for Catalonia

Several detectives launch an investigation, revealing that a West German criminal named Hasso Teschendorf has been forging documents and using them to illegally obtain the goods, which he sold to the Spanish Army and to costumers in Barcelona.

Göttingen Manifesto

The Göttingen Manifesto was a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany (among them the Nobel laureates Otto Hahn, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue) against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s, the early part of the Cold War, as the West German government under chancellor Adenauer had suggested.

Hans-Peter Ferner

Hans-Peter Ferner (born June 6, 1956, Neuburg an der Donau, Bavaria) is a (West) German former middle distance runner who won the gold medal over 800 m at the 1982 European Championships in Athletics in Athens where he unexpectedly defeated world-record holder Sebastian Coe.

Heinrich Krone

In 1949 he served in the first post-war West German Bundestag.

Heinrich von Brentano

In the federal elections of 1949, he obtained a seat in the West German Bundestag parliament by directly winning the mandate of the Bergstraße constituency.

Hellmut Lange

Hellmut Lange started his acting career on radio drama shows for the West-German Radio Station SFB (Sender Freies Berlin= Radio Free Berlin).

HMS Riviera

A notable member of her crew was Robert Erskine Childers whose knowledge of the west German coast was considered very important in the raid.

Höfle

Heiderose Wallbaum (born 1951), full name Adelhied Wallbaum-Höfle, West German sprint canoer

Ich zähle täglich meine Sorgen

Ich zähle täglich meine Sorgen is a 1960 Austrian / West German film directed by Paul Martin.

International Commission of Jurists

One of the key areas of concern for the 106 Congress delegates was the case of Dr. Walter Linse, a West German lawyer and the Acting President of the ICJF.

International Mathematical Olympiad selection process

IMO team selection in Germany is based on the main national mathematical competitions: The Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik (BWM, the former west German olympiad), the Deutsche Mathematik-Olympiade (DeMO, the former east German olympiad), and Jugend forscht (a research competition).

Jeder stirbt für sich allein

Everyone Dies Alone (1975) a West German film released in English in 1976, directed by Alfred Vohrer

Josef Mattauch

Mattauch was one of the Göttinger Achtzehn (Göttingen eighteen), a group of eighteen leading nuclear researchers of the Federal Republic of Germany who in 1957 wrote a manifesto (Göttinger Manifest, Göttinger Erklärung) opposing chancellor Konrad Adenauer and defense secretary Franz-Josef Strauß's move to arm the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons.

Karl Fleschen

Karl Fleschen (born 28 June 1955 in Daun, Rhineland-Palatinate) is a retired West German runner who specialized in the 3000, 5000 and 10,000 metres.

Kurt Schumacher

Kurt Schumacher (13 October 1895 – 20 August 1952), was a German social democratic politician, who served as chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1946 and was the first Leader of the Opposition in the West German Bundestag from 1949 until his death.

Left-wing terrorism

In Western Europe, notable groups included the West German Red Army Faction (RAF), the Italian Red Brigades, the French Action Directe (AD), and the Belgian Communist Combatant Cells (CCC).

Lennart Geijer

Geijer was Swedish Minister of Justice during the occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm in 1975, when Holger Meins's commando, of the armed left extremist organization Red Army Faction (RAF) took the West German Embassy in Skarpö Street in Gärdet in Stockholm.

Lothar Fendler

As part of the intensified discussion of West German rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, on 31 January 1951 High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy assessed the 15 death sentences handed down at Nuremberg on the recommendation of the "Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals".

Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof (1934–1976), West German left-wing militant, co-founder of the Red Army Faction, daughter of Werner Meinhof

Oberpfaffenhofen

The village is home to a major site of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) and became hence known to a wide audience when, in 1983 the first West-German astronaut, the physicist Ulf Merbold flew to space on board a Space Shuttle in the context of the Spacelab missions.

Ortenaukreis

Offenburg district already had a city partnership with Altenburg so, after German reunification in 1990, Ortenaukreis chose to help modernize the Altenburger Land administration to the West German standard.

ORWO

In 1953 the plant became the property of East Germany, and in a trade agreement settlement, the East German company, VEB Film- und Chemiefaserwerk Agfa Wolfen, was given the right to sell its products under the Agfa brand in Eastern Europe, while the newly re-established Agfa in West German Leverkusen had the right to the name in the rest of the world.

Pakistan Steel Mills

In June 1966, another West-German steel firm, the Salzgitter AG produced ~5,000 tonnes of quality steel from 15,000 tonnes of Kalabagh iron ore in the presence of some international experts, and sold it to Volkswagen.

People Are People

In West Germany the song was a #1 hit and was used as the theme to West German TV's coverage of the 1984 Olympics, alluding to East Germany's participation in the Soviet-led boycott of the games.

Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française

In an attempt to counter the spread in Alsace of the viewing of programmes from regional television in the neighbouring German Land of Baden-Württemberg – the inhabitants of Strasbourg had, for example, been able to watch the coronation in June 1953 of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom only on West German television – Télé-Strasbourg began broadcasting on 15 October 1953.

Raul Hilberg

Since most of the early functionalist historians were West German, it was often enough for intentionalist historians, especially for those outside Germany, to note that men such as Broszat and Hans Mommsen had spent their adolescence in the Hitler Youth and then to say that their work was an apologia for National Socialism.

Rick Kiefer

He spent the first half of the 1970s as a member of the James Last Orchestra, as well as with the Peter Herbolzheimer band, and from the late 70s onwards became a permanent member of the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, or West German Radio) big band.

Robert Skeris

Skeris was appointed Director of the Hymnology Section at the International Institute for Hymnological and Ethno-Musicological Studies in Maria Laach in 1978, where he worked for the West German Bishops' Conference and the Academy of Science in Mainz as researcher in charge of the Roman Catholic contribution to the joint ecumenical project Das Deutsche Kirchenlied, a critical edition of congregational hymns printed in the German language area between 1481 and 1800.

Rudolf Kargus

That was the last cap (of three) Kargus won in his career, although he was one of three goalkeepers in the West German squad for the 1978 FIFA World Cup.

Saunders-Roe SR.177

This Lockheed coup, known as the "Deal of the Century", caused major political controversy in Europe and West German Minister of Defence Franz Josef Strauss was almost forced to resign over the issue.

Schützenpanzer SPz 11-2 Kurz

The Schützenpanzer SPz 11-2 Kurz armored reconnaissance vehicle was developed for the West German army and was a minor modification of a French designed vehicle (Hotchkiss SP1A).

Standard German

Duden 6 Das Aussprachewörterbuch (Duden volume 6, The Pronunciation Dictionary) by Max Mangold and the training materials at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting) and Deutschlandfunk (Radio Germany).

Stéphane Abrial

From 1977 to 1991, he served as a fighter pilot both in France (in Cambrai, Dijon and Orange) and, from 1981 to 1984, in a West German Luftwaffe unit.

Treaty of Brussels

Trying to avoid the need for West German rearmament, a treaty aimed at establishing a European Defence Community was signed by the six ECSC members in May 1952 but failed when it was rejected by the French National Assembly in August 1954.

Walter Pichler

At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Pichler won a bronze medal with the West German relay team consisting of Peter Angerer, Ernst Reiter and Fritz Fischer.

Wola massacre

After a West German court released him citing a lack of evidence, Reinefarth enjoyed a successful post-war career as a lawyer becoming the mayor of Westerland, and a member of the Landtag parliament of Schleswig-Holstein.

Wolfgang Overath

As well as the World Cup victory in 1974, he was at the heart of the West German midfield when they reached the final in 1966 and achieved third place in 1970.

Wöller

Klaus Wöller (born 1956), former West German handball player who competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics