[1] A year later, the United Kingdom and the German Empire agreed on their respective spheres of influence in East Africa with the signing of a treaty, allowing Germany to gain control of the port of Dar es Salaam.
[3] After Germany's defeat in World War I, German East Africa was partitioned among the victorious powers by the Treaty of Versailles.
After World War I, however, most of the German settlers, missionaries and officials were expelled, and cultural relations were not re-established until Tanzania gained independence.
[4] After the end of World War II, many of the activists for Tanganyika's independence were the sons of Schutztruppe Askaris, who had fought for the last Kaiser during the East African Campaign.
According to his biographers Leonard Mosley and Robert Gaudi, these activists often travelled to West Germany, during the last decades of European colonialism in Africa, to seek the advice of their fathers' former commanding officer, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.
In December 1961, the country established diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany, and economic cooperation agreements were signed as early as the 1960s.
Since 1982, the German Foreign Office has been promoting projects related to the colonial era as part of a cultural preservation program.
[4] According to Der Spiegel journalists Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, the premature end of the German colonial empire in 1918 placed West Germany's intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which was then led by former Abwehr spymaster Reinhard Gehlen, at a considerable advantage in dealing with the newly independent governments of post-colonial Africa.
This is why the Tanzanian intelligence service was largely built and trained by BND military advisors, which laid the groundwork for close relations that Gehlen attempted to use to steer Tanzania into taking an anti-Soviet stance during the ongoing Cold War and which assisted the West German economic miracle by encouraging and favoring German trade and corporate investment.