thin the Prussian Rhine Province, the town became part of the German Empire in 1871 during the Prussian-led unification of Germany. Bonn was of little relevance in these years.
During World War II, Bonn acquired military significance because of its strategic location on the Rhine River, which formed a natural barrier to easy penetration into the German heartland from the west. The Allied ground advance into Germany reached Bonn on 7 March 1945, and the US 1st Infantry Division captured the city during the battle of 8�9 March 1945.
Following World War II, Bonn was in the British zone of occupation, and in 1949 became the capital of West Germany. The choice of Bonn was made mainly due to the advocacy of West Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, a former Cologne Mayor and a native of that area. This was despite the fact that Frankfurt already had most of the required facilities and using Bonn was estimated to be 95 million DM more expensive than using Frankfurt. It was thought, however, that locating the capital in a major city like Frankfurt or Hamburg would imply a permanent capital.
Because of its relatively small size for a capital city, Bonn was sometimes referred to, jokingly, as the Bundeshauptstadt ohne nennenswertes Nachtleben (Federal capital without noteworthy night-life) or the Bundesdorf (Federal Village). At one point in the post-WWll/Cold War era, the U.S. Embassy in Bonn was America's largest, "comparable, with its thousands of staff, to the [U.S.] Baghdad embassy today."
German reunification in 1990 made Berlin the nominal capital of Germany again. This decision did not mandate that the republic's political institutions would also move. While some argued for the seat of government to move to Berlin, others advocated leaving it in Bonn�a situation roughly analogous to that of the Netherlands, where Amsterdam is the capital but The Hague is the seat of government. Berlin's previous history as united Germany's capital
