United Team of Germany
Encyclopedia
The Unified Team of Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, competed in the 1956, 1960, and 1964 Winter
Winter Olympic Games
The Winter Olympic Games is a sporting event, which occurs every four years. The first celebration of the Winter Olympics was held in Chamonix, France, in 1924. The original sports were alpine and cross-country skiing, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, ski jumping and speed skating...

 and Summer Olympic Games
Summer Olympic Games
The Summer Olympic Games or the Games of the Olympiad are an international multi-sport event, occurring every four years, organized by the International Olympic Committee. Medals are awarded in each event, with gold medals for first place, silver for second and bronze for third, a tradition that...

 as a united team of athletes from the Federal Republic of Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....

(FRG, West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

(GDR, East Germany). In 1956 the team also included athletes from a third Olympic body, the Saarland Olympic Committee, which had sent a separate team in 1952, but in 1956 was in the process of joining the German National Olympic Committee
Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund
Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund was founded on 20 May 2006 by a merger of the Deutscher Sportbund , and the Nationales Olympisches Komitee für Deutschland which dates back to 1895, the year it was founded and recognized as NOC by the IOC.Seated in Frankfurt , it represents 89,000...

. This process was completed in February 1957 after the admission of Saarland into the FRG.

As the GDR in 1949 had introduced its own national anthem, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 melody to Schiller's Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy
Ode to Joy
"Ode to Joy" is an ode written in 1785 by the German poet, playwright and historian Friedrich Schiller, enthusiastically celebrating the brotherhood and unity of all mankind...

) was played for winning German athletes as a compromise. In 1959, the GDR also introduced an altered black-red-gold tricolour
Tricolour
A tricolour is a flag or banner more-or-less equally divided into three bands of differing colours...

 flag of Germany
Flag of Germany
The flag of Germany is a tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands displaying the national colours of Germany: black, red, and gold....

 as flag of East Germany. Thus, a compromise had to be made also for the flag of the unified sports team. It was agreed upon to superimpose the plain flag with additional white Olympic rings
Olympic symbols
The Olympic symbols are icons, flags and symbols used by the International Olympic Committee to promote the Olympic Games. Some—such as the flame, fanfare, and theme—are more common during Olympic competition, but others, such as the flag, can be seen throughout the year.-Motto:The Olympic motto is...

. This flag was used from 1960 to 1968.

At the Games of 1956, 1960, and 1964 the team was simply known as "Germany" and the usual country code of GER was used, except at Innsbruck in 1964
1964 Winter Olympics
The 1964 Winter Olympics, officially known as the IX Olympic Winter Games, were a winter multi-sport event which was celebrated in Innsbruck, Austria, from January 29 to February 9, 1964...

, when the Austrian hosts used the German language
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 "D" for Deutschland
Deutschland
Deutschland is the German language word for Germany.Deutschland may also refer to:, a blockade-breaking German cargo submarine used during World War I, first of the 1930s Panzerschiffe , later renamed Lützow; involved in the 1937 Deutschland incident, a steamship wrecked in 1875 and commemorated in...

.
Yet, the IOC code EUA (from the official French-language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 IOC designation, Équipe Unifiée d'Allemagne) is currently applied in hindsight in IOC medal database, without further explanation given. Only in 1976 did the IOC start to assign standardized codes. Before that time, the local Organizing Committees of each Olympic Games had chosen codes, often in the local language, resulting in a multitude of codes.

In the 1968 Winter Olympics
1968 Winter Olympics
The 1968 Winter Olympics, officially known as the X Olympic Winter Games, were a winter multi-sport event which was celebrated in 1968 in Grenoble, France and opened on 6 February. Thirty-seven countries participated...

, East and West German athletes competed as separate teams while still using the compromise Olympic flag and Beethoven anthem. While today listed under the IOC codes of FRG and GDR, respectively, in 1968 they were asymmetrically called in French Allemagne (Germany) and Allemagne de l'Est (East Germany), and in Spanish Alemania and Alemania del Este. The codes for Germany (West) were ALL (in Grenoble) and ALE (in Mexico City), and ADE for East Germany.

The separation was completed at the 1972 Summer Olympics
1972 Summer Olympics
The 1972 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 11, 1972....

 with the use of separate flags and anthems. Because of the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 summer games, only in 1972, 1976, and 1988 did two different German teams with different symbols compete against each other at Summer Olympics (not counting the Saar team of 1952). The German Democratic Republic ceased to exist after 1989, with its states joining the Federal Republic of Germany in the process of German reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...

 in 1990.

See also

  • Germany at the Summer Olympics
    Germany at the Summer Olympics
    Athletes from Germany have appeared in 23 of the 26 Summer Olympic Games, having competed in all Games except those of 1920, 1924 and 1948, when they were not permitted to do so...

  • Germany at the Winter Olympics
    Germany at the Winter Olympics
    Athletes from Germany have appeared in only 18 of the 20 editions of the Winter Olympic Games as they were not invited to two events after the World Wars, in 1924 and 1948...

  • Unified Team
    Unified Team
    The Unified Team was the name used for the sports team of the former Soviet Union at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville and the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. The IOC country code was EUN, after the French name, Équipe Unifiée...

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