A territorial dispute or boundary dispute is a disagreement over the possession or control of territories (airspace, land, and water) between two or more political entities.
A territorial dispute or boundary dispute is a disagreement over the possession or control of territories (airspace, land, and water) between two or more political entities.
A war of annihilation (German: Vernichtungskrieg) or war of extermination is a type of war in which the goal is the complete annihilation of a state, a people or an ethnic minority through genocide or through the destruction of their livelihood. The goal can be outward-directed or inward, against elements of one's own population. The goal is not like other types of warfare, the recognition of limited political goals, such as recognition of a legal status (such as in a war of independence), control of disputed territory (as in war of aggression or defensive war), or the total military defeat of an enemy state.
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 Saar Protectorate (German: Saarprotektorat [ΛzaΛΙΜ―pΚotΙktoΛΚaΛt]; French: Protectorat de la Sarre), officially Saarland (French: Sarre), was a French protectorate and a disputed territory separated from Germany. On joining West Germany in 1957, it became the smallest "federal state" (Bundesland), the Saarland, not counting the "city states" (Stadtstaaten) of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. It is named after the Saar River.
The region around the Saar River and its tributary valleys is a geologically folded, mineral-rich, ethnically German, economically important, and heavily industrialized area. It has well-developed transportation infrastructure, and was one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution in Germany. Around 1900, the region formed the third-largest area of coal, iron, and steel industry in Germany (after the Ruhr Area and the Upper Silesian Coal Basin). From 1920 to 1935, as a result of World War I, the region was under the control of the League of Nations as the Territory of the Saar Basin. In 1935, Nazi Germany established its full sovereignty over the territory.