Saar (protectorate)
The Saar Protectorate was a short-lived protectorate (1947–56) partitioned from Germany after its defeat in World War II; it was administered by the French Fourth Republic. On rejoining West Germany in 1957, it became the smallest Federal German Area State (Flächenland), the Saarland, not counting the city-states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. It is named after the Saar River.
The region around the Saar River and its tributary valleys is a geographically folded, mineral rich, ethnically German, economically important, heavily industrialized area. It possesses well-developed transportation infrastructure that was one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution in Germany and formed, around 1900, from the Ruhr Area and the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, the third-largest area of coal, iron and steel industry in Germany. From 1920 to 1935, as a result of World War I, the region was under the League of Nations mandate of the Saar. Near the end of World War II it was heavily bombed by the Allies as part of their strategic bombing campaigns.
Territorially, the post World War II protectorate corresponded to the current German state of Saarland (established after its incorporation into West Germany on January 1, 1957). A policy of industrial disarmament and dispersal of industrial workers was officially pursued by the allies after the war until 1951 and the region was made a protectorate under French control in 1947. Cold War pressures for a stronger Germany allowed renewed industrialization, and the French returned control of the region to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.