Rüterberg is a Stadtteil of Dömitz in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (March 2010) 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 9,119 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:Rüterberg]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Rüterberg}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The community lies in the former East Germany on a portion of the Elbe River that formed part of the border with the former West Germany. By the end of the communist era, Rüterburg was surrounded by a wall that completely cut the community off from the rest of East Germany. From 1988 to 1989, the local residents, led by Hans Rasenberger, raised the idea of creating a free town, with the powers of establishing their own laws, breaking their ties with East Germany. The "Republic" was proclaimed by an assembly of 90 citizens on 8 November 1989, just a day before the fall of the Berlin wall. On 14 July 1991, the secretary of state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern acknowledged the right of the people of Rüterberg to use the title of Dorfrepublik (Village-Republic).^[1][2]