In the Battle of Tannenberg (1410), the Teutonic Order was defeated by the forces of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

On March 3, 1918, the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty was signed in the city of Brest between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.

However, the Rada thanked Kaiser Wilhelm II in a telegram for the occupation of Belarus and emphasized that it saw a good fate for its people in the future only under the protectorate of the German state.

In the wake of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the lapse of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the civil war in neighboring Russia, which also spread to Belarus, the eastern part of the country came under the control of the Communists.

In the secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, the territories between Slutsch and Bug (i.e. the whole of Belarus) were assigned to the Soviet sphere of interest.

Weißruthenische Zeitung in Deutschland, which was aimed specifically at Belarusian emigrants, was published in Berlin and promoted by the SS.

[2] In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) and the German Wehrmacht conquered Belarus within a few weeks in the course of the Kesselschlacht near Białystok and Minsk.

Although people in many areas of Belarus were initially happy about the Soviet defeat, the Germans quickly disappointed the local population.

Furthermore, a large part of the ethnic Poles (about 300,000) were forcibly resettled in the German eastern territories that had been annexed to Poland.

Between 1946 and 1950, the emigrants in Michelsdorf ran their own Belarusian-language high school, which at times had 122 students and was named after the national poet Yanka Kupala.

[6] On December 29, 1947, at a meeting in a DP camp in Osterhofen, it was decided to reactivate the Rada of the Belarusian People's Republic under the leadership of Mikola Abramchyk.

[citation needed] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, relations between Belarus and Germany initially developed positively.

[citation needed] As a result of human rights violations and dissonance regarding the opening of the country to a market economy, the administration of the European Union, with the participation of Germany, imposed an entry ban on the Belarusian government in 1997.

On May 18, 2006, the European Union (again including Germany) decided to freeze the accounts of President Lukashenko and 35 other government officials.

[citation needed] Nearly 400 border guards, senior militia officers, and forensic technicians were also trained by German officials directly in Belarus, and in 2010, Belarusian security forces observed German police officers on duty for several days during the transport of Atomic waste to Gorleben in Lower Saxony.

[citation needed] As the EU identified improvements in the country's human rights record in 2015 and 2016, much of the sanctions were gradually lifted following the 2015 presidential election in Belarus.

[11] On June 24, 2024, German citizen Rico Krieger was sentenced to death for six criminal offenses in a secret trial in Minsk.

According to the human rights organization Viasna, the conviction is directly linked to the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment, a unit of Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine.

[13] Belarus was an important transit country between Central Europe and Russia due to its location: 50% of Russian crude oil flows through the Druzhba pipeline ending in Schwedt/Oder, which is serviced on Belarusian territory by the company Gomel Transneft.

The representative office of German business in the Republic of Belarus (the Chamber of Commerce Abroad) exists in Minsk.

[citation needed] The International Aid Fund of the EU and Germany has opened partnerships with three Belarusian universities in the West.