Updated and fact-checked by the Discover Today in History editorial team.
On September 12, 1990, six foreign ministers met in Moscow to sign a treaty whose formal title avoided the word “peace” but resolved the international questions left by the Second World War. The signatories represented the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The document was the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany—usually called the Two Plus Four Treaty.
Its pages did not reunify Germany by themselves. East and West Germany had already negotiated the internal terms of unification. What the treaty supplied was the external settlement: borders, military limits, alliance rights, the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the termination of the four victorious powers’ special rights in Berlin and Germany as a whole. It cleared the international path for German unity on October 3, 1990.
Why four outside powers still had a legal role
Germany’s division after 1945 was not simply a domestic partition. The United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom and France retained rights and responsibilities arising from Germany’s defeat and occupation. Berlin remained governed by a special four-power framework even as two German states developed on opposite sides of the Cold War.
The Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO; the German Democratic Republic entered the Warsaw Pact. Their border became one of the most heavily armed lines in Europe. For decades, reunification appeared less like an approaching negotiation than a distant constitutional aspiration.
That changed rapidly in 1989. Peaceful protests grew in East German cities, neighboring states opened routes westward and the Berlin Wall opened on November 9. The East German political system lost authority at extraordinary speed. By early 1990, free elections in the GDR and negotiations between the German governments made unity a practical question. Yet no German agreement could by itself extinguish the legal position of the four powers or settle the security concerns of neighboring states.
The “two plus four” formula
The format joined the two German states—the “two”—with the four powers that had occupied Germany after the war. Foreign ministers met in Bonn, East Berlin, Paris and Moscow during 1990. Poland participated when the negotiations addressed the German-Polish border.
The central questions were difficult because they connected German self-determination with the European security order. Would a united Germany belong to NATO? What would happen to Soviet forces in the GDR? How large could Germany’s armed forces be? Would the border with Poland be final? When would four-power rights end?
The Soviet government initially resisted a united Germany’s full membership in NATO. Western governments insisted that Germany must be free to choose its alliances. Negotiations unfolded alongside separate German-Soviet talks about troop withdrawal and financial assistance. The speed of political change created pressure, but the treaty still had to produce language acceptable to six governments with different historical memories and security interests.
What the treaty settled
Article 1 defined the territory of united Germany as the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic and all of Berlin. It affirmed that the existing external borders would be final and that united Germany would make no territorial claims against other states. Germany and Poland were to confirm their border in a binding bilateral treaty.
Germany renounced nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and accepted a limit of 370,000 personnel for its armed forces. The treaty also addressed the former GDR’s territory. Soviet forces would withdraw by the end of 1994. During the transition, the deployment of forces and nuclear weapons there would be restricted. After Soviet withdrawal, German forces assigned to NATO could be stationed in the area, but foreign forces and nuclear weapons would not be stationed there under the treaty’s terms.
Article 6 preserved united Germany’s right to belong to alliances. Article 7 ended the four powers’ rights and responsibilities relating to Berlin and Germany as a whole, giving the united country full sovereignty over its internal and external affairs once the settlement entered into force.
The signatures in Moscow
The treaty was signed by Hans-Dietrich Genscher for West Germany, Lothar de Maizière for East Germany, Roland Dumas for France, Eduard Shevardnadze for the Soviet Union, Douglas Hurd for the United Kingdom and James Baker for the United States. Their signatures represented governments that, only months earlier, had not shared a single blueprint for German unity.
The setting in Moscow carried its own symbolism. The Soviet Union had borne catastrophic losses in the war against Nazi Germany and had maintained hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany. Accepting reunification inside NATO required political decisions by Mikhail Gorbachev’s government that reshaped the postwar order and were controversial at home.
The document did not enter into force on the day of signature. Ratification followed, and the treaty took effect on March 15, 1991. To avoid a legal gap, the four powers suspended their rights and responsibilities from the date of German unification until final entry into force.
What happened on October 3—and what did not
Germany unified on October 3, 1990, when the GDR acceded to the Federal Republic under the agreed constitutional process. The Two Plus Four Treaty made that step internationally secure, but it did not instantly erase the economic, social and political divisions created by four decades of separation.
The withdrawal of Soviet forces was completed in 1994. Integrating institutions, infrastructure and lives across the former border became a generational project. Debates about inequality between eastern and western Germany, memory of the GDR and the meaning of 1989 continue.
Nor did the treaty “end the Cold War” in a single moment. It was one of several linked settlements and transformations, including arms-control agreements, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Its importance lies in how concretely it translated a geopolitical revolution into binding rules.
Why the settlement still matters
The treaty is often described as Germany’s peace settlement because no conventional peace treaty with all former enemies had been concluded after 1945. Its title—“final settlement”—was deliberately functional. It closed the legal questions that required the participation of the four powers without reopening every issue created by the war.
It also illustrates a feature of successful diplomacy that is easy to overlook. The agreement did not require the parties to share a single interpretation of the past. It required them to define borders, forces, rights and timelines precisely enough to make the future manageable.
On September 12, 1990, the ministers did more than pose beside a document. They signed away an occupation framework that had survived for forty-five years and replaced it with the sovereignty of a united Germany—bounded by explicit commitments to its neighbors and to the European security order.
Explore the September 12 edition: return to Today in History – September 12, browse Major Historical Events, revisit the fall of the Berlin Wall, or trace the wartime background through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Germany’s invasion of Poland.
Sources and method
The treaty’s provisions were checked against the German federal government’s published official treaty text. The sequence and political context were cross-checked with the government’s documentary overview of the Two Plus Four negotiations and its September 1990 parliamentary statement. The article distinguishes signature, unification and entry into force, which occurred on different dates. No dialogue or private thoughts have been invented.
