Frankfurt in the context of "Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region"

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Western and Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen constituent states have a total population of over 83 million, making it the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany borders Denmark to the north; Poland and the Czech Republic to the east; Austria and Switzerland to the south; and France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west. The nation's capital and most populous city is Berlin and its main financial centre is Frankfurt; the largest urban area is the Ruhr.

Settlement in the territory of modern Germany began in the Lower Paleolithic, with various tribes inhabiting it from the Neolithic onward, chiefly the Celts, with Germanic tribes inhabiting the north. Romans named the area Germania. In 962, the Kingdom of Germany formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the German Confederation was formed in 1815.

The Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region, often simply referred to as Frankfurt Rhine-Main, Frankfurt Rhine-Main area or Rhine-Main area (German: Rhein-Main-Gebiet, Frankfurt/Rhein-Main or FrankfurtRheinMain, abbreviated FRM), is the third-largest metropolitan region in Germany after Rhine-Ruhr and Berlin-Brandenburg, with a total population exceeding 5.9 million. The metropolitan region is located in the central-western part of Germany, and stretches over parts of three German states: Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Bavaria. The largest cities in the region are Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Darmstadt, Offenbach, Worms, Hanau, and Aschaffenburg.

The polycentric region is named after its core city, Frankfurt, and the two rivers Rhine and Main. The Frankfurt Rhine-Main area is officially designated as a European Metropolitan region by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs and covers an area of roughly 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 sq mi).

Strasbourg (UK: /ˈstræzbɜːrɡ/ STRAZ-burg, US: /ˈstrɑːsbʊərɡ, ˈstrɑːz-, -bɜːrɡ/ STRAHSS-boorg, STRAHZ-, -⁠burg; French: [stʁasbuʁ] ; German: Straßburg [ˈʃtʁaːsbʊʁk] ) is the prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est region of eastern France, in the historic region of Alsace. It is the prefecture of the Bas-Rhin department and the official seat of the European Parliament.

The city has about three hundred thousand inhabitants, and together Greater Strasbourg and the arrondissement of Strasbourg have over five hundred thousand. Strasbourg's metropolitan area had a population of 860,744 in 2020, making it the eighth-largest metro area in France and home to 14% of the Grand Est region's inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of roughly 1,000,000 in 2022. Strasbourg is one of the de facto four main capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels, Luxembourg and Frankfurt), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the European Parliament, the Eurocorps and the European Ombudsman of the European Union. An organization separate from the European Union, the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights, its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines most commonly known in French as "Pharmacopée Européenne", and its European Audiovisual Observatory) is also located in the city.

Erfurt (German pronunciation: [ˈɛʁfʊʁt] ) is the capital and largest city of the Central German state of Thuringia, with a population of around 216,000. It lies in the wide valley of the River Gera, in the southern part of the Thuringian Basin, north of the Thuringian Forest, and in the middle of a line of the six largest Thuringian cities (Thüringer Städtekette), stretching from Eisenach in the west, via Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar and Jena, to Gera in the east. Together with Kassel and Göttingen, it is one of the cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants lying closest to the geographic centre of Germany. Erfurt is 100 km (62 mi) south-west of Leipzig, 250 km (155 mi) north-east of Frankfurt, 300 km (186 mi) south-west of Berlin and 400 km (249 mi) north of Munich.

Erfurt's old town is one of the best preserved medieval city centres in Germany. The Gera is spanned by the Merchants' Bridge (Krämerbrücke), one of the rare bridges with houses built on it. On the Erfurt Cathedral Hill is the ensemble of Erfurt Cathedral—which houses the world's largest free-swinging medieval bell—and St Severus' Church. Petersberg Citadel is one of the largest and best preserved town fortresses in Central Europe. Erfurt's Old Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in Europe, and together with the Erfurt Mikveh [de], which was only rediscovered in 2007, and the Stone House [de], forms the UNESCO World Heritage Site Jewish-Medieval Heritage of Erfurt.

Annelies Marie Frank (German: [ˈanə(liːs maˈʁiː) ˈfʁaŋk] , Dutch: [ˌɑnəˈlis maːˈri ˈfrɑŋk, ˈɑnə ˈfrɑŋk] ; 12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl and diarist who perished in the Holocaust. She gained worldwide fame posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In the diary, she regularly described her family's everyday life in their hiding place in an Amsterdam attic from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.

Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four and a half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control of Germany. By May 1940, the family was trapped in Amsterdam due to Germany's occupation. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in rooms concealed behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. The family was arrested two years later by the Gestapo, on 4 August 1944.

The Geographer (Dutch: De geograaf) is a painting created by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1668–1669, and is now in the collection of the Städel museum in Frankfurt, Germany. It is closely related to Vermeer's The Astronomer, for instance using the same model in the same dress, and has sometimes been considered a pendant painting to it. A 2017 study indicated that the canvas for the two works came from the same bolt of material.

The seven institutions of the European Union (EU) are seated in four different cities, which are Brussels (Belgium), Frankfurt am Main (Germany), Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and Strasbourg (France), rather than being concentrated in a single capital city. The EU agencies and other bodies are located all across the union, but usually not fixed in the treaties. The Hague is the only exception, as the fixed seat of the Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol). Luxembourg City is the EU capital that can lay claim to having the most of the seven EU institutions based wholly or partly upon its territory, with only the European Council and European Central Bank not having a presence in the city. Over the years, Brussels has become the EU's political hub, with the College of the Commissioners — the European Commission's politically accountable executive — and the European Council both meeting at their Brussels-based headquarters, and the European Parliament and Council of the EU holding the majority of their meetings annually within the city. This has led media to describe it as the de facto "capital of the EU."

The seats have been a matter of political dispute since the states first failed to reach an agreement at the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. However, a final agreement between member states was reached in 1992, and later attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam.

The Reichsautobahn system was the beginning of the German autobahns under Nazi Germany. There had been previous plans for controlled-access highways in Germany under the Weimar Republic, and two had been constructed, but work had yet to start on long-distance highways. After previously opposing plans for a highway network, the Nazis embraced them after coming to power and presented the project as Hitler's own idea. They were termed "The Fuehrer's roads" ("German: Straßen des Führers") and presented as a major contribution to the reduction of unemployment. Other reasons for the project included enabling Germans to explore and appreciate their country, and there was a strong aesthetic element to the execution of the project under the Third Reich; military applications, although to a lesser extent than has often been thought; a permanent monument to the Third Reich, often compared to the pyramids; and general promotion of motoring as a modernization that in itself had military applications.

Hitler turned the first sod on 23 September 1933, at Frankfurt, and work officially began simultaneously at multiple sites throughout the Reich the following spring. The first finished stretch, between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, opened on 19 May 1935, and the first 1,000 km (620 mi) were completed on 23 September 1936. After the annexation of Austria, the planned network was expanded to include the Ostmark, and a second soil-breaking ceremony for the first Reichsautobahn on formerly Austrian territory took place near Salzburg on 7 April 1938. When work ceased in 1941 because of World War II, 3,819.7 km (2,373.5 mi) had been completed.

The imperial election of 1519 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on 28 June, Charles V was elected and crowned Holy Roman Emperor the next year.