National colours of Germany
[citation needed] The colours black, red, and gold were supposedly used at the election of Frederick Barbarossa as King of the Romans on 4 March 1152 in Frankfurt.
[3] According to contemporary sources, the new king's way from Frankfurt Cathedral to the Römer square was covered with a coloured carpet, which was afterwards cut into numerous small parts and distributed to the crowds.
Following this documented "first-use" by the reigning house of Reuss of the modern tricolor combination, the connection of the black-red-gold tricolour with the Reichsbanner design appears to have been made as early as during the March Revolution.
Uniforms of the Lützow Free Corps during the German campaign (1813–1814) against French occupation under Napoleon also consisted of a combination of black, red, and gold—though mainly for functional reasons: the corps under command of the Prussian major Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow was made up of volunteer university students from all over Germany, whose varied clothing was uniformly coloured in black, festooned with common brass knobs and red facings.
The red and black colours with a golden oak leaf cluster were adopted as couleur by the first German national Urburschenschaft student fraternity established on 12 June 1815 in Jena, and publicly displayed on the 1817 Wartburg Festival.
In Berlin, King Frederick William IV of Prussia had to bow to the fallen insurgents of the liberation movement and to wear a Black, Red and Gold armband while riding through the city.
Even though this medieval international trade organization had lost its influence over two centuries earlier, the city-states of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, all former Free Imperial Cities, took pride in their centuries-old Hanseatic tradition.
Numerous German associations embraced the patriotic tricolour, and sports organisations that were founded prior to World War I often choose white with additional black and/or red as their colours.
The official black, red, and gold colours were refused by wide circles in the Reichswehr armed forces and World War I veterans' associations.
Studentenverbindung organisations emphasized the Greater German meaning of black, red, and gold, which had actually been frustrated by the Allied Powers prohibiting the accession of German-Austria to Germany.
The flag of the Weimar Republic was insulted by conservatives and nationalists, Communists and Nazis alike, who sometimes referred to it as "black-red-yellow" or even "black-red-mustard", if not even worse.
In 1921, even Gustav Stresemann, chairman of the national liberal German People's Party argued for the reintroduction of black, white, and red.
Led by the Social Democrat Otto Hörsing, the defined goal of the organisation was to defend the colours and the parliamentary values they represented.
Upon the Nazi Party's Machtergreifung when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the "democratic" colours quickly fell out of use, though they were not officially abolished.
By order of March 7, two days after the German federal election, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg re-introduced black, white, and red as official decorations on the coming Volkstrauertag public holiday.
Alongside the swastika flag of the Nazi Party, the imperial colours were restored as a provisional national symbol, subject to a final decision by the German government.
In a speech, Reichstag president Hermann Göring called the black, white, and red flag of the German Empire "honorably pulled down".
Right-wing populist and national conservative parties, for example The Republicans, pointedly display black, red, and gold in their logo.
