Lower Saxony (German: Niedersachsen) is a federal state in northwestern Germany. It is the second largest state by area (47,618 km²) (after Bavaria) and fourth largest by population (8 million in 2021) among the country's sixteen states. It was created after World War II by the British; most of its territory had been the Kingdom, later Province, of Hanover. There are notable differences between the various parts of the state: it took decades for anything akin to a pan-Low Saxon identity to emerge, and even that is often second to attachments to various older and smaller territorial entities.
