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Contained Places
Note: In keeping with the 1900-rule at WeRelate, places in Germany are organized as they were in 1900 when Germany was known as the German Empire. In 1900, Bremen was a state (land) in the German Empire. Today (2017), this location is a free state in modern Germany.
[edit] Modern Bremen (from Wikipedia)
Bremen, officially the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, is the smallest and least populous of Germany's 16 states. It is informally called ("State of Bremen"), but that is sometimes used even in official contexts. The state consists of the city of Bremen and its seaport exclave, Bremerhaven, surrounded by the larger state of Lower Saxony in northern Germany. [edit] History
Main articles: History of Bremen (city) and Timeline of Bremen When the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the Free Imperial City of Bremen (as of 1646, after earlier privileges of autonomy of 1186) was not mediatised (incorporated into the enlarged territory of one of the surrounding monarchies) but became a sovereign state officially titled the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. Her currency was the Bremen thaler (until 1873). In 1811, the First French Empire annexed the city-state in an effort to enforce Napoleon's Berlin Decree, closing the European continent to British trade. At the Congress of Vienna of 1815, Bremen's emissary, and later burgomaster, Johann Smidt, lobbied successfully to have the city's independence confirmed as one of the 39 sovereign states within the new German Confederation. In 1827, Bremen bought land at the mouth of the Weser from the Kingdom of Hanover, in order to build a new seaport, Bremerhaven. This ensured that Bremen remained Germany's main port of embarkation for emigrants to the Americas, and later that it developed as an entrepôt for Germany's late developing colonial trade. In 1867, the year following Prussia's defeat of Austria and its annexation of Hanover, Bremen joined the North German Confederation that became the German Empire in 1871, as one of its 26 constituent states. As an international port and industrial centre, Bremen had a strong left and liberal tradition. in January 1913, at the last elections to the Imperial Reichstag in Berlin, the Social Democrats (SPD) secured over half the vote, or 53.4%. Left Liberals (Linksliberale) took another 41.4%. Only 5.1% went to the Conservatives. In November 1932, at the last broadly free election of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats won 31.2% of the vote, and the Communists (KPD) 16.8%, compared to 20.8% for the Nazis. When, after the heavily compromised national elections of March 1933, the Nazis still achieved only a third of the popular vote in Bremen (32.7%),[1] the regime dissolved the state parliament, the Bürgerschaft and its executive Senate. Bremen remained for the next twelve years under the direct authority of a party Gauleiter. During these years, Bremen's small Jewish community (1,438 people registered at the beginning of 1933) was destroyed through coerced emigration and deportation to death camps in the occupied east. Allied bombing destroyed the majority of the historical Hanseatic city as well as 60% of the built-up area of Bremen during World War II. The British 3rd Infantry Division under General Lashmer Whistler captured Bremen in late April 1945. The British handed it over to the Americans; Bremen became an American-controlled port for the supply of the US zones of occupation in west Berlin and southern Germany. Bremen was reestablished as a state in 1947 and, from 1949, was again known as the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, becoming a Land or state of the new Federal Republic of Germany, informally referred to as "West Germany" until 1990.
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