Background As Europe's largest economy and second most populous nation, Germany is a key member of the continent's economic, political, and defense organizations. European power struggles immersed Germany in two devastating World Wars in the first half of the 20th century and left the country occupied by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union in 1945. With the advent of the Cold War, two German states were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The democratic FRG embedded itself in key Western economic and security organizations, the EC, which became the EU, and NATO, while the Communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold War allowed for German unification in 1990. Since then, Germany has expended considerable funds to bring Eastern productivity and wages up to Western standards. In January 1999, Germany and 10 other EU countries introduced a common European exchange currency, the euro. The People | Population | 82,400,996 (July 2007 est.) | | Age structure | 0-14 years: 13.9% (male 5,894,724/female 5,590,373)
15-64 years: 66.3% (male 27,811,357/female 26,790,222)
65 years and over: 19.8% (male 6,771,972/female 9,542,348) (2007 est.) | | Life expectancy at birth | total population: 78.95 years
male: 75.96 years
female: 82.11 years (2007 est.) | Population growth rate | -0.033% (2007 est.) | | Ethnic groups | German 91.5%, Turkish 2.4%, other 6.1% (made up largely of Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish) | | Religions | Protestant 34%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated or other 28.3% | | Population below poverty line | 11% (2001 est.) | | People living with HIV/AIDS | 43,000 (2001 est.) | | HIV/AIDS - deaths | less than 1,000 (2003 est.) | | Mobile phones in use | 79.2 million (2005) | | Internet users | 38.6 million (2006) |
Data (Background & The People) provided by The World Factbook |