The Canadian Army had been tied down in surrounding the Netherlands until the Germans there surrendered on May 5, 1945 – just two days before the final surrender of the Wehrmacht in Western Europe to General Eisenhower.
After the liberation of the Netherlands and the conquest of northern Germany by the British Army, the bulk of the Canadian Army returna home, leaving northern Germany to be occupied by the British Army and (around Bremen and Bremerhaven) by the U.S. Army.Then in July 1945, the British Army withdraws from small slices of Germany that had previously agreed to be occupied by the Soviet Army.
The Control Commission for Germany - British Element (CCG/BE) cedes some slices of its area of occupation to the Soviet Union – specifically the Amt Neuhaus of Hanover and some exclaves and fringes of Brunswick, for example, the County of Blankenburg and exchanges some villages between British Holstein and Soviet Mecklenburg by the Barber-Lyashchenko Agreement.Within the British Zone of Occupation, the CCG/BE re-establishes the German state of Hamburg, but with borders that had been drawn by Nazi Germany in 1937.
The British also create the new German states of Schleswig-Holstein – emerging in 1946 from the Prussian Province of Schleswig-Holstein; Lower Saxony – the merger of Brunswick, Oldenburg, and Schaumburg-Lippe with the state of Hanover in 1946; and North Rhine-Westphalia – the merger of Lippe with the Prussian provinces of the Rhineland (northern part) and Westphalia – during 1946 – 1947.
Also in 1947, the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen becomes an exclave of the American Zone of Occupation located within the British Zone.Much of the British Zone of Occupation had once been part of the Kingdom of Hanover.
This Kingdom is in a personal union with the United Kingdom (formed in 1707) from 1714 through 1837 – with the same monarch, but otherwise completely separate.
