The German association with the colours black, red, and gold surfaced in the radical 1840s, when the black-red-gold flag was used to symbolise the movement against the Conservative Order, which was established in Europe after Napoleon's defeat.

It has been proposed that the colours were those of the Jena Students' League (Jenaer Burschenschaft), one of the radically minded Burschenschaften banned by Metternich in the Carlsbad Decrees.

[2] Another claim goes back to the uniforms (mainly black with red facings and gold buttons) of the Lützow Free Corps, which were mostly worn by university students and were formed during the struggle against the occupying forces of Napoleon.

[12][13] However on 2 June 1999, the federal cabinet introduced a corporate design for the German government which defined the specifications of the official colours as:[14][15] The flag is blazoned in English as, "Tierced in fess sable, gules and or."

[16] 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 monarchists.

A black mourning ribbon is instead attached, either atop the staff (if hung from a pole) or to each end of the flag's supporting cross-beams (if flown like a banner).

[22] During the Napoleonic Wars, the German struggle against the occupying French forces was significantly symbolised by the colours of black, red, and gold, which became popular after their use in the uniforms of the Lützow Free Corps, a volunteer unit of the Prussian Army.

As the members of this unit came from all over Germany and included a modest but well known number of university students and academics, the Lützow Free Corps and their colours gained considerable exposure among the German people.

More radical students exclaimed that the colours stood for the black night of slavery, the bloody struggle for liberty, and the golden dawn of freedom.

[26] In a memoir, Anton Probsthan of Mecklenburg, who served in the Lützow Free Corps, claimed his relative Fraulein Nitschke of Jena presented the Burschenschaft with a flag at the time of its foundation, and for this purpose chose the black-red-and-gold colours of the defunct secret society Vandalia.

On 18 October 1817, the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, hundreds of fraternity members and academics from across the Confederation states met in Wartburg in Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (in modern Thuringia), calling for a free and unified German nation.

The Ministerial Council of the German Confederation, in its determination to maintain the status quo,[28] enacted the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 that banned all student organisations, officially putting an end to the Burschenschaften.

Such an example is the Ur-Fahne, the flag flown from Hambach Castle during the festival: a black-red-gold tricolour where the red band contains the inscription Deutschlands Wiedergeburt (Germany's rebirth).

This Frankfurt Parliament declared the black-red-gold as the official colours of Germany and passed a law stating its civil ensign was the black-red-yellow tricolour.

To form a continuity between the anti-autocratic movement of the 19th century and the new democratic republic, the old black-red-gold tricolour was designated as the national German flag in the Weimar Constitution in 1919.

On 24 February 1924, the organisation Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold was founded in Magdeburg by the member parties of the Weimar Coalition (Centre, DDP, SPD) and the trade unions.

[34] In the face of the increasingly violent conflicts between the communists and Nazis, the growing polarisation of the German population and a multitude of other factors, mainly the drastic economic sinking, extreme hyperinflation and corruption of the republic, the Weimar Republic collapsed in 1933 with the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor.

The most important requirement was that "the new flag ... should prove effective as a large poster" because "in hundreds of thousands of cases a really striking emblem may be the first cause of awakening interest in a movement."

Nazi propaganda clarified the symbolism of the flag: the red colour stood for the social, white for the movement's national thinking, and the swastika for the victory of Aryan humanity.

[41] An off-centred disk version of the swastika flag was used as the civil ensign on German-registered civilian ships and was used as the jack on Kriegsmarine (the name of the German Navy, 1933–1945) warships.

As a provisional civil ensign of Germany, the Council designated the international signal pennant Charlie representing the letter C ending in a swallowtail, known as the C-Pennant (C-Doppelstander).

This decision was primarily motivated by the proposed constitution by the eastern SED in November 1946,[52] where black-red-gold were suggested as the colours for a future German republic.

Wirmer suggested a variant of the 1944 "Resistance" flag (using the black-red-gold scheme in a Nordic Cross pattern) designed by his brother and 20 July co-conspirator Josef.

[57] To demonstrate the commitment of the Saar to be a part of West Germany, a new flag was selected on 9 July 1956: the black-red-gold tricolour defaced with the new coat of arms, also proposed on this day.

While the use of black-red-gold had been suggested in the Soviet zone in 1946, the Second People's Congress in 1948 decided to adopt the old black-white-red tricolour as a national flag for East Germany.

This choice was based on the use of these colours by the National Committee for a Free Germany,[54] a German anti-Nazi organisation that operated in the Soviet Union in the last two years of the war.

In 1949, following a suggestion from Friedrich Ebert, Jr., the black-red-gold tricolour was instead selected as the flag of the German Democratic Republic upon the formation of this state on 7 October 1949.

As a compromise, a new flag was used by the United Team of Germany from 1960 to 1964, featuring the black-red-gold tricolour defaced with white Olympic rings in the red stripe.

[61] The widespread act of removing the coat of arms from the East German flag implied the plain black-red-gold tricolour as symbol for a united and democratic Germany.

[63] This use of the old flag is almost completely overshadowed by its prevalent use by the far right, however; since the aforementioned ban on all Nazi symbolism (e.g. the swastika), the Schutzstaffel's (SS) double sig rune, etc.)