United Team of Germany at the Olympics

United Team of Germany at the Olympics
"Olympic" Flag of Germany, defaced with white Olympic rings, used 1960, 1964 (and 1968 by separated teams)
IOC code	EUA
Summer appearances
1956 1960 1964
Winter appearances
1956 1960 1964
Other related appearances
• Germany (all appearances) • East Germany (1968–1988) • West Germany (1968–1988) • Saar (1952)

The United Team of Germany (German: Gesamtdeutsche Mannschaft) competed in the 1956, 1960, and 1964 Winter and Summer Olympic Games as a united team of athletes from West Germany and East Germany. In 1956 the team also included athletes from a third Olympic body, the Saarland Olympic Committee, which had sent a separate team in 1952, but in 1956 was in the process of joining the German National Olympic Committee. This process was completed in February 1957 after the admission of Saarland into the FRG.

As East Germany had introduced its own national anthem in 1949, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 melody to Schiller's Ode an die Freude ("Ode to Joy") was played for winning German athletes as a compromise. In 1959, East Germany also introduced an altered black-red-gold tricolour flag of Germany as the flag of East Germany. Thus, a compromise had to be made also for the flag of the unified sports team. It was agreed upon to superimpose the plain flag with additional white Olympic rings. This flag was used from 1960 to 1968.

At the Games of 1956, 1960, and 1964 the team was simply known as "Germany" and the usual country code of GER was used, except at Innsbruck in 1964, when the Austrian hosts used the German language "D" for Deutschland. Yet, the IOC code EUA (from the official French-language International Olympic Committee (IOC) designation, Équipe Unifiée d'Allemagne) is currently applied retrospectively in the IOC medal database, without further explanation given. Only in 1976 did the IOC start to assign standardized codes. Before that time, the local Organizing Committees of each Olympic Games had chosen codes, often in the local language, resulting in a multitude of codes.