GERMANY AT A GLANCE

Few countries have been as devastated by war as Germany was on May 7, 1945, the day

its surviving Nazi leaders surrendered unconditionally to the victorious Allies of World War II. (The announcement was delayed, however, until May 8).

Its cities and towns had been bombed into masses of rubble. The conquered nation was reviled as the horrors of the concentration camps were revealed to the world.

Its beaten, hungry people, once touted as the master race by the Nazi regime, were now under the control of the four Allied powers--the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France, each the ruler of an occupation zone.

Between 3 million and 3.5 million German soldiers, seamen and airmen were dead or missing. About 5 million were wounded, and many thousands of captured soldiers were to spend years in Soviet labor camps before returning home. More than 2 million German civilians were killed, including nearly 600,000 in Allied air raids.

Among the survivors on that day in May, up to about 2 million more Germans were to die in the following weeks by starvation, disease or assault. They were among the more than 12 million refugees who fled or were driven out of various parts of Europe, mainly from the nearly 45,000 square miles of prewar German territory that was taken over by Poland and the Soviet Union.

Still more Germans--over 3 million in all--fled from what had been the Soviet zone and what is now the 41,800-square-mile state of Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, established in 1949. They poured into what became, also in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, a shrunken nation of about 96,000 square miles no bigger than the state of Oregon. The influx compounded the problems of the new nation’s struggle to rebuild.

Yet today, 40 years later, West Germany is considered a pillar of Western democracy with one of the most stable and prosperous societies in the world. It is the front-line state of the Atlantic Alliance. Its armed forces of just under 500,000 men, mostly conscripts, and an elaborate reserve system that could quickly field about five times that number would bear the brunt of any Soviet attack in Europe.

Under Ostpolitik , or Eastern policy, West Germany, beginning in the late 1960s, developed normal relations--and extensive trade--with the Soviet Union and East European states. It maintains a special relationship with East Germany, while clinging to the hope of eventual reunification through peaceful means.

West Germany has achieved an enviable political stability rarely found in nations requiring coalitions to to govern largely because both the major parties--the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats--have pursued moderate policies. Stability was enhanced by the small liberal Free Democratic Party that held the balance of power in the federal coalition governments virtually throughout the postwar period.

The Free Democrats’ position as the third most important party has been taken over by the anti-Establishment Greens party, which has 27 delegates in the 496-seat Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament. Yet despite their radical policies and unconventional manner and appearance, the Greens have been absorbed into the country’s democratic process. Still, their electoral successes, especially among the country’s 10 semi-autonomous states and West Berlin, 110 miles inside East Germany, point to an underlying dissatisfaction with the Establishment.

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, West Germany surmounted the severest test of its shallow-rooted democracy when it was able to withstand the assaults of left radicals intent on destroying its institutions. Although fears over restrictions on civil liberties were raised, it confronted the murderous attacks of the Baader-Meinhoff gang and its successor, the Red Army Faction, with relatively minimal dislocations to its institutions.

West Germany’s quest for domestic consensus is also reflected in the economy. Through the policy of codetermination that gives organized labor a powerful voice in management, the country has suffered little labor strife.

Industrial cooperation, coupled to the early infusion of U.S. Marshall Plan aid, helped bring about the Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, and has brought unprecedented prosperity to the nation’s 62 million inhabitants. It has become the Western world’s third largest economy. Its Gross National Product of about $830 million in 1981 was far higher than that of any other European nation, except for the Soviet Union.

Per capita income in 1981 was $13,450, compared to $12,820 for the United States. The German worker enjoys shorter working hours and longer paid vacations than his American counterpart. Each has available cradle-to-the-grave social benefits to cushion the shock of unemployment, ill health and other dislocations.