Allied Control Council in the context of East Germany

The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II, from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Nazi Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and its government was entirely dissolved. After Germany formally surrendered on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, the four countries representing the Allies (the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC).

Germany after the war was a devastated country – roughly 80 percent of its infrastructure was in need of repair or reconstruction – which helped the idea that Germany was entering a new phase of history ("zero hour"). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. The Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line (eastern parts of Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East-Prussia and most of Silesia) and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.

From 1945 to 1990, the divided Germany began with the Berlin Declaration, marking the abolition of the German Reich and Allied-occupied period in Germany on 5 June 1945, and ended with the German reunification on 3 October 1990.

Following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 and its defeat in World War II, Germany was stripped of its territorial gains. Beyond that, more than a quarter of its old pre-war territory was annexed by communist Poland and the Soviet Union. The German populations of these areas were expelled to the west. Saarland was a French protectorate from 1947 to 1956 without the recognition of the "Four Powers", because the Soviet Union opposed it, making it a disputed territory.

The minister-president (German: Ministerpräsident), or prime minister, of Prussia was the head of government of the Prussian state. The office existed from 1848, when it was formed by King Frederick William IV during the 1848–49 Revolution, until the abolition of Prussia in 1947 by the Allied Control Council.

The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (German: Vertrag über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland),more commonly referred to as the Two Plus Four Agreement (Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag),is an international agreement that allowed the reunification of Germany in October 1990. It was negotiated in 1990 between the 'two', the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in addition to the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty supplanted the 1945 Potsdam Agreement: in it, the Four Powers renounced all rights they had held with regard to Germany, allowing for its reunification as a fully sovereign state the following year. Additionally, the two German states agreed to reconfirm the existing border with Poland in the German–Polish Border Treaty, accepting that German territory post-reunification would consist only of what was presently administered by West and East Germany—renouncing explicitly any possible claims to the former eastern territories of Germany including East Prussia, most of Silesia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania.

Air France (French pronunciation: [ɛːʁ fʁɑ̃s]; legally Société Air France, S.A.), stylised as AIRFRANCE, is the flag carrier of France, and is headquartered in Tremblay-en-France. The airline is a subsidiary of the Air France-KLM Group and is one of the founding members of the SkyTeam airline alliance. As of 2013, Air France served 29 destinations in France and operates worldwide scheduled passenger and cargo services to 201 destinations in 78 countries (93 including overseas departments and territories of France) and also carried 46,803,000 passengers in 2019. The airline's global hub is at Charles de Gaulle Airport, with Orly Airport as the primary domestic hub. Air France's corporate headquarters, previously in Montparnasse, Paris, are located at the Roissypôle complex on the grounds of Charles de Gaulle Airport, north of Paris.

Tracing its origins back to the 1910s, Air France was formed on 30 August 1933 through the merger of five existing airlines in France. During the Cold War, from 1950 until 1990, it was one of the three main Allied scheduled airlines operating in Germany at West Berlin's Tempelhof and Tegel airports. In 1990, it acquired the operations of French domestic carrier Air Inter and international rival UTA – Union de Transports Aériens. It merged with KLM to form Air France-KLM in 2003.

The Hitler Youth (German: Hitlerjugend [ˈhɪtlɐˌjuːɡn̩t] , often abbreviated as HJ, [haːˈjɔt] ) was the youth wing of the German Nazi Party. Its origins date back to 1922 and it received the name Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend ("Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth") in July 1926. From 1936 until 1945, it was the sole official boys' youth organisation in Germany (although the League of German Girls was a wing of it) and it was partially a paramilitary organisation. It was composed of the Hitler Youth proper for male youths aged 14 to 18, and the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth (Deutsches Jungvolk in der Hitler Jugend or "DJ", also "DJV") for younger boys aged 10 to 13.

With the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, the organisation de facto ceased to exist. On 10 October 1945, the Hitler Youth and its subordinate units were outlawed by the Allied Control Council along with other Nazi Party organisations. Under Section 86 of the Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Hitler Youth is an "unconstitutional organisation" and the distribution or public use of its symbols, except for educational or research purposes, is illegal.

The abolition of Prussia occurred on 25 February 1947 by decree of the Allied Control Council, the governing authority of post-World War II occupied Germany and Austria. The decision was grounded in the view that Prussia had long embodied the most reactionary and militaristic elements within German political life. As the engine of German militarism and a key promoter of authoritarianism and expansionist policies, Prussia was seen as fundamentally incompatible with efforts to rebuild Germany as a peaceful and democratic state, and its dominance in German affairs had contributed directly to the wars of aggression that devastated Europe. By dismantling Prussia, the Allies aimed to eradicate the institutional structures most responsible for German aggression. This abolition referred strictly to the political entity of Prussia, not to the expulsion of ethnic Germans from East Prussia between 1945 and 1950.

The Allied High Commission (also known as the High Commission for Occupied Germany, HICOG; in German Alliierte Hohe Kommission, AHK) was established by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France after the 1948 breakdown of the Allied Control Council, to regulate and supervise the development of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

The Commission took its seat at the Hotel Petersberg near Bonn and started its work on September 21, 1949. It ceased to function under the terms of the Bonn–Paris conventions, on May 5, 1955.

The Free State of Prussia (German: Freistaat Preußen, pronounced [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈpʁɔʏsn̩] ) was one of the constituent states of Germany from 1918 to 1947. The successor to the Kingdom of Prussia after the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, it continued to be the dominant state in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as it had been during the empire, even though most of Germany's post-war territorial losses in Europe had come from its lands. It was home to the federal capital Berlin and had 62% of Germany's territory and 61% of its population. Prussia changed from the authoritarian state it had been in the past and became a parliamentary democracy under its 1920 constitution. During the Weimar period it was governed almost entirely by pro-democratic parties and proved more politically stable than the Republic itself. With only brief interruptions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) provided the Minister President. Its Ministers of the Interior, also from the SPD, pushed republican reform of the administration and police, with the result that Prussia was considered a bulwark of democracy within the Weimar Republic.

As a result of the Prussian coup d'état instigated by Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932, the Free State was subordinated to the Reich government and deprived of its independence. Prussia had thus de facto ceased to exist before the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, even though a Prussian government under Hermann Göring continued to function formally until 1945. After the end of the Second World War, by decree of the Allied Control Council, the de jure abolition of Prussia occurred on 25 February 1947.

The Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS; German: Amt der Militärregierung für Deutschland (U.S.)) was the United States military-established government created shortly after the end of hostilities in occupied Germany in World War II. Under General Lucius D. Clay, it administered the area of Germany and sector of Berlin controlled by the United States Army. The Allied Control Council comprised military authorities from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France. Though created on January 1, 1946, OMGUS previously reported to the U.S. Group Control Council, Germany (USGCC), which existed from May 8, 1945, until October 1, 1945. OMGUS was eliminated on December 5, 1949, and the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany assumed control of its functions.

The Restitution and Reparations Branch of OMGUS located and returned material to countries from which claimed property had been looted by the Nazis during World War II.

The Four Power Agreement on Berlin, also known as the Berlin Agreement or the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, was agreed on 3 September 1971 by the reconvened Allied Control Council, consisting of ambassadors of the four wartime Allied powers. The four foreign ministers, Sir Alec Douglas-Home of the United Kingdom, Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union, Maurice Schumann of France, and William P. Rogers of the United States signed the agreement and put it into force at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Berlin on 3 June 1972. The agreement was not a treaty and required no formal ratification.