GERMANY (Deutschland), since Nov. 9, 1918, the German Republic, retaining its older name of Deutsches Reich, a country of central Europe, inhabited by the majority of the German speaking peoples of Europe; German groups are, however, old established in several other States beyond its borders, and the proportion of these has been increased as a result of changes of territory following the World War of 1914-1918.
These terms reduced the area of the reich from 208,83o sq.m. to 181,714 sq.m., including the Saar district which was placed under a special regime.
By annexing Austria in March 1938, the Sudeten districts of Czechoslovakia in the following October, and the larger part of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, under the name of "German Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia," Hitler created a "Greater Germany" larger than in 1914.
After invading Poland in Sept. 1939, he annexed Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Posen, and districts along the Silesian frontier; he also conquered about half of the rest of Poland, with a popu lation of some 15,000,000, and placed it temporarily under a German governor.
Between the old rocks of the Rhine on the west and the ancient massif of Bohemia on the east a vast area of Triassic beds extends from Hanover to Basle and from Metz to Bayreuth. Over the greater part of this region the Triassic beds are free from folding and are nearly horizontal, but faulting is by no means absent, especially along the margins of the Bohemian and Rhenish hills. The Triassic beds must indeed have covered a large part of these old rock masses, but they have been preserved only where they were faulted down to a lower level. Along the southern margin of the Triassic area there is a long band of Jurassic beds dipping towards the Danube ; and at its eastern extremity this band is con tinuous with a synclinal of Jurassic beds, running parallel to the western border of the Bohemian massif, but separated from it by a narrow strip of Triassic beds. Towards the north, in Hanover and Westphalia, the Triassic beds are followed by Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, the latter being here the more important. As in the south of England, the lower beds of the Cretaceous are of estuarine origin and the Upper Cretaceous overlaps the Lower, lying in the valley of the Ruhr directly upon the Palaeozoic rocks. In Saxony also the upper Cretaceous beds rest directly upon the Palaeozoic or Archaean rocks. Still more to the east, in the province of Silesia, both Jurassic and Cretaceous beds are again met with, but they are to a large extent concealed by the recent accumulations of the great plain. The Eocene system is unknown in Germany except in the foothills of the Alps ; but the Oligocene and Miocene are widely spread, especially in the great plain and in the depression of the Danube. The Oligocene is generally marine. Marine Miocene occurs in north-west Germany and the Miocene of the Danube valley is also in part marine, but in central Germany it is of fluviatile or lacustrine origin. The lignites of Hesse, Cassel, etc., are interstratified with basaltic lava-flows which form the greater part of the Vogelsberg and other hills. The trachytes of the Siebengebirge are probably of slightly earlier date. The precise age of the volcanoes of the Eifel, many of which are in a very perfect state of preservation, is not clear, but they are certainly Tertiary or Post-tertiary. Leucite and nepheline lavas are here abundant. In the Siebengebirge the little crater of Roderberg, with its lavas and scoriae of leucite-basalt, is posterior to some of the Pleistocene river deposits.
A glance at a geological map of Germany will show that the greater part of Prussia and of German Poland is covered by Quaternary deposits. These are in part of glacial origin, and con tain Scandinavian boulders; but fluviatile and aeolian deposits also occur. Quaternary beds also cover the floor of the broad depression through which the Rhine meanders from Basle to Mainz, and occupy a large part of the plain of the Danube. The depression of the Rhine is a trough lying between two faults or system of faults. The broader depression of the Danube is asso ciated with the formation of the Alps, and was flooded by the sea during a part of the Miocene period. (P. LA. ; X.) Physical Features.—Germany may be described broadly as the country from the Alps to the North and the Baltic seas, and it includes a number of very diverse zones and physical units ; even less than many other countries does it approach any real unity of structure or physical geographical character. The country from the Alps to the Baltic may be divided into six sub-parallel zones: (I) the Alps which stretch across the south of Bavaria; (2) the upper Danube basin framed on the south mainly by the Alps and on the north by (3) the Alpine foreland or the Swabian Jura roughly parallel to the Alps, and the Franconian Jura turning northward as if in face of the resistance of the old block of Bohemia; (4) the basins of the Main and the Neckar between the Jura and (5) the broken highlands of mid-Germany running from the Ardennes to the northern side of the Bohemian block and (6) the broad northern lowland between the north edge of the broken highlands on the south and the coasts of the North sea and Baltic on the north. A seventh physical region stands apart from this series of sub parallel zones; it is that of the Rhine rift valley, mainly Baden. It will be convenient to describe (7) after (4) rather than in its numerical order.
The Alps.—It is only the northern fringe of the Alps from Lake Constance to about Hallein that is in Germany, and the frontier here lies along the northernmost of the east-west ridges of the Alps (highest point in Germany—Zugspitze, g, 738f t.) . None the less the Bavarian Alps are of great beauty, with some exquisite mountain lakes, and farther down the northward valleys long lakes behind morainic dams, one of which, the Wurmer See, has given its name to a moraine held by Penck to mark one of the ice-maxima of the Pleistocene glaciation. The slopes towards the Danube have much boulder clay, and there are large swampy areas called Moose, but the better drained valleys are relatively rich. The chief streams are the Iller, Lech, Isar and Inn, right-bank tributaries of the Danube.
The Upper Danube Basin.—The main river rises in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) and the basin is framed by the lake of Constance and the Bavarian Alps on the south, and by the Alpine foreland (Jura) and the south-west border of the Bo hemian block on the north. The river flows near the northern side of its basin, and from its left bank arise the dip slopes of the Jura, the scarp slopes of which face north or north-west and are steep where they face the Neckar. The river follows the line of the Jura down to Regensburg (Ratisbon), beyond which it flows beneath and parallel to the granitic edge of the Bohemian block, and then onward past Passau. The large tributaries of the right bank have been named; on the left bank the Wornitz flows through the Jura zone between the Swabian and Fran conian Jura, and the Altmuhl and its feeders utilize a number of minor breaks in the sharp curve of the Franconian Jura. The Wornitz joins the Danube at Donauworth, and parts of it may be called upon to help make the ship canal from Main to Danube which is being built. The Altmi hl has been utilized in parts in connection with the small Ludwigskanal through the passes of the Franconian Jura linking Main and Danube. The ways through the Franconian Jura lead to the Danube, near Regensburg, and to the basin of the Main at Nurnberg, which is on the Regnitz; and the historic importance of these two centres is thus to some extent interpreted. The Naab valley between Franconian Jura and Bohmer Wald also joins the Danube near Regensburg. The uppermost part of the Danube is in Baden, and then it crosses Wurttemberg and Hohen zollern and WUrttemberg again to Ulm. The upper basin of the Danube from the Iller eastwards to Passau forms one of the main elements of Bavaria. Much land on the south is poor, but some areas towards the centre of the basin where the sub soil is loess are fertile. Though Ulm on the west, Regensburg and Passau, all on the Danube, are historic and important, they are far surpassed by Munich and Augsburg on tributary streams and on somewhat higher land which permitted early cross-river communication.
The fare is built mainly of porous, Mesozoic rock dipping southward and the drainage is in many parts in deep cut valleys. The ridge exceeds 3,000ft. in only a few places in Germany. but the south-west border of Bohemia reaches nearly 4,9ooft. in the Bohmer Wald, which has the lower Bayrischer Wald in front of it. The Swabian Jura is higher and less broken than the Franconian, and from the rawness of winter on it a large part is known as the Rauhe Alb, its ridge forming a part of the boundary between Bavaria and WUrttemberg. Farther west, be tween the Neckar and the Danube, astride of the Jura lies the district of Hohenzollern, the early home of the late German reigning family, for which reason this territory is politically a part of Prussia though widely separated from the main area.
The Basins of Main and Neckar, right-bank tributaries of the Rhine, lie north and west of the Jura ridge, their basins being otherwise framed by the Black Forest on the west and the mid German hills on the north. The Neckar escapes to the Rhine south of, and the Main north of, the Odenwald. The basin of the upper Neckar forms the essential Wurttemberg, but that State has stretched across the Jura right away to Lake Con stance to include a large area of high land. Though the upper Danube basin from Ulm (a border city of Wurttemberg) to Passau is the essential Bavaria, that political unit has grown across the broken Franconian Jura to include most of the Main basin. The lowest sections of Neckar and Main, under the in fluence of the Rhine, are excluded from Wurttemberg and Bavaria respectively. In the Neckar basin Stuttgart is the chief focus, and the basin has much loess in its subsoil; in that of the Main, so far as it is Bavarian, Nurnberg, Bamberg and Wurzburg are the great centres.
It is advisable to consider here No. 7 of the introductory list. The Rhine from Basle to Mainz flows through a remarkable rift valley, that is a block with parallel sides let down while the sections beyond its parallel edges remain upstanding. On the east the upstanding edge is the sharp western slope of the Schwarzwald (the Feldberg is 4,898ft. high) as far north as the latitude of Carlsruhe; recognizable again farther north is the Odenwald (c. 1,7ooft.). `Vest of the Rhine the upstanding edge is the Vosges (in France), becoming lower and smoother north of Saverne but rising again in the Hardt. The continuous block that once included Vosges and Black Forest was a Hercynian Massif, and the rift has given a section of the Rhine with a broad valley floor and parallel sides. The course of the river is rough in places, and a volcanic mass, the Kaiserstuhl, stands out in the middle; the banks of the rapid river are rough land with few towns in the south, but from Speyer northwards they abound. On the west side Alsace, now in France, is essentially the basin of the Ill, a left-bank feeder of the Rhine; on the east Baden is the land beneath the scarp edge of Schwarzwald which forms part of the boundary against Wurttemberg. But the State of Baden extends north as far as the Odenwald, and in the region between Schwarz wald and Odenwald lies Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, on a main express route eastwards from the Rhine to Munich, Vienna and beyond. West of the Rhine the country becomes more and more influenced by the Rhine as the Vosges weakens north of Saverne, and the Pfalz or Bavarian Palatinate is a political unit around the Hardt (2, 24of t.) .