The two countries share 815 km of common borders and both are members of the European Union, NATO, OECD, OSCE, Council of Europe and the World Trade Organization.

After the extinction of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty, the Kingdom of Bohemia was ruled by the House of Luxembourg, the Jagiellonians, and finally the Habsburgs.

In the Thirty Years' War, the Protestant Czechs resisted Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II's attempt to reintroduce Catholicism.

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the Nazi German government sought to inflame nationalistic tensions in neighbouring Czechoslovakia, and instructed local Nazi leader Konrad Henlein, the leader of the German minority in the Czech borderlands, to make unreasonable demands on the Czech government and to attempt to paralyse the First Czechoslovak Republic.

The German occupation of Czechoslovakia destroyed the Czechoslovak state, the only Central European parliamentary democracy, and sought to "reintegrate" Bohemia and Moravia into the Nazi empire.

This Nazi German policy took the form of so-called Grundplanung OA (Basic planning) from the summer of 1938, which included extermination of Czech nation, and later the genocidal Generalplan Ost.

On 27 February 1992, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Czechoslovak President Václav Havel signed a treaty of friendship, known as Czech-German Declaration.