The town was a part of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg from the 19th century until in 1952 the East German government established the Bezirk Neubrandenburg comprising the former Brandenburg towns of Prenzlau, Templin and Strasburg. Strasburg then was the capital of a district in its own right, which after the East German Peaceful Revolution of 1989 became part of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Wolfgang Samuel's war memoir, German Boy, is partly set in Strasburg, where Samuel and his mother lived from March 1945 to December 1946.