Flag of Germany

The national flag of Germany is a tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands displaying the national colours of Germany: black, red, and gold. The flag was first sighted in 1848 in the German Confederation. The flag was also used by the German Empire from 1848 to 1849. It was officially adopted as the national flag of the German Reich from 1919 to 1933, and has been in use since its reintroduction in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

The federal flag shall be black, red and gold. Following specifications set by the West German government in 1950, the flag displays three bars of equal width and has a width–length ratio of 3:5; the tricolour used during the Weimar Republic had a ratio of 2:3. At the time of the adoption of the flag there were no exact colour specifications other than "Black-Red-Gold". The flag is blazoned in English as, "Tierced in fess sable, gules and or." Vexillology rarely distinguishes between gold and yellow; in heraldry, they are both Or. For the German flag, such a distinction is made: the colour used in the flag is called gold, not yellow. When the black–red–gold tricolour was adopted by the Weimar Republic as its flag, it was attacked by conservatives, monarchists, and the far right, who referred to the colours with spiteful nicknames such as Schwarz–Rot–Gelb (black–red–yellow) or even Schwarz–Rot–Senf (black–red–mustard). When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the black–white–red colours of pre-1918 Imperial Germany were swiftly reintroduced, and their propaganda machine continued to discredit the Schwarz–Rot–Gold, using the same derogatory terms as previously used by the…