GERMAN leaders will mark the 30th anniversary of unification with a ceremony in Potsdam tomorrow.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will attend the invitation-only event.

Though reunification was widely welcomed, the Morning Star’s sister paper Junge Welt recalls that it prompted “an unprecedented raid through the new eastern territories” which “fed German capital.”

Unemployment in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) soared to over three million within a year, as a body set up in the last months of the GDR, the Treuhandstalt or Trust Agency, almost all of whose board were from the western Federal Republic, liquidated or privatised thousands of former public-sector agencies and sacked 2.5 million workers. 

The implications continue to impoverish the east to this day. 

Ralf Hohmann pointed out yesterday in German communist newspaper Unsere Zeit: “When the Treuhand threw the East German businesses on the market for sale, 80 per cent went to West German buyers, 15 per cent to foreign corporations and only 5 per cent to East German buyers.

“This resulted in a separation of corporate management, ie the place of business in the west, and mere operations in the east.”

Even today just 36 of Germany’s 500 largest companies are based in the former GDR, and as German corporation tax is paid to the regional states based on where companies are registered, western authorities are far richer than eastern ones.

Junge Welt editor Stefan Huth pointed out that the agreement that West Germany could “annex the GDR” included commitments that no Nato troops would be stationed in the former socialist state or to its east.

“The West promised it and broke it. Today there are Bundeswehr soldiers at the Russian border,” he wrote.

Potsdam was the site of the last major Allied conference of the second world war, when the victorious “Big Three,” Winston Churchill — replaced halfway through by Clement Attlee following Labour’s election victory — Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, met to negotiate the postwar settlement.

That conference is seen as marking the division of Germany into east and west, though the military occupation zones were not then considered permanent and Soviet proposals to reunify Germany on condition of its neutrality continued into the 1950s but were consistently rejected by the United States and then West German leaders.