Flag of the German Empire

The Flag of the German Empire, or Imperial Flag, is a combination between the flag of Prussia and the flag of the Hanseatic League. The flag was first used as the flag of the North German Confederation which was formed in 1867.[1] Later, after the Franco-Prussian War, the German Empire was founded. Germany would continue using it until the German Revolution of 1918–1919, which resulted in the founding of the Weimar Republic.[2] The Weimar Republic did not use it as a national flag though it did see use within the Reichswehr.[3] Immediately after the electoral victory of the Nazi Party in March 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg reinstated the flag by decree as the co-official flag of Germany.[4] In 1935, a year after Hindenburg's death, the Imperial Flag was banned from use as the national flag in favour of the black-red-white swastika flag.[5]

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (May 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,371 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Schwarz-Weiß-Rot]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|de|Schwarz-Weiß-Rot}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Imperial Flag

Use	State flag, civil and state ensign
Proportion	2:3 (3:5 in 1933–1935)
Adopted	1867; 155 years ago (1867) (first 2:3 ratio) 1933; 89 years ago (1933) (second 3:5 ratio)
Relinquished	1919; 103 years ago (1919) (first 2:3 ratio) 1935; 87 years ago (1935) (second 3:5 ratio)
Design	A horizontal tricolour of black, white, and red

During World War II, German exiles in the Soviet Union adopted it as their new flag for a free German state. Due to this, after World War II, East Germany almost adopted the Imperial Flag as their national flag.[6]

Due to the ban on Nazi swastika flag in modern Germany, many German Neo-Nazis instead adopted the Imperial Flag. However, the flag never originally had any racist or anti-Semitic meaning, despite its brief use in Nazi Germany.[7]

The flag is almost graphically identical to the modern flag of the Republic of Yemen, albeit with the colours reversed and a different shade of red. The flag of Upper Volta, used in 1958–1984, had the same colour arrangement but with a slightly different shade of red.

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  War Ensign of Germany (1867–1892)
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  Flag of the Imperial Colonial Office (1907–1919)
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  War Ensign of Germany (1921–1933)
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  Flag of Germany (1933–1935)