German Reunification

German reunification was the process that re-established Germany as a single sovereign state. It began with the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and culminated at midnight on 3 October 1990, when the German Democratic Republic dissolved itself and its five re-established states joined the Federal Republic of Germany. The whole thing took less than eleven months — a speed almost no one predicted when the Wall came down.

What Reunification Actually Was

Legally, reunification was not a merger of equals. East Germany acceded to the Federal Republic, dissolving itself as a state, while West Germany’s constitution, currency, legal code, and alliance memberships carried forward largely unchanged. This is why some historians describe the event as an expansion of the Federal Republic rather than the creation of a new country.

East Berlin merged with West Berlin to form a single reunited city, which became the capital of the enlarged state. Because East Germany joined an existing member, the former GDR territory entered the European Economic Community and NATO automatically — no separate accession process was needed.

Timeline of Events, 1989 to 1994

The pace of the eleven months between the Wall and Unity Day is the single most striking fact about the process.

Date	Event
9 November 1989	The Berlin Wall is opened; the reunification process effectively begins
28 November 1989	Chancellor Helmut Kohl presents his ten-point programme for German unity
22 December 1989	The Brandenburg Gate reopens
13 February 1990	The two Germanys and the four wartime powers agree to the “two plus four” framework
18 March 1990	East Germany’s first free elections return a pro-unification government
18 May 1990	The monetary, economic, and social union treaty is signed in Bonn
1 July 1990	Monetary union takes effect; the Deutsche Mark becomes East Germany’s currency
16 July 1990	Gorbachev agrees at Arkhyz in the Caucasus that a united Germany may choose its own alliances
31 August 1990	The Unification Treaty is signed by both German governments
12 September 1990	The Two Plus Four Treaty is signed in Moscow
1 October 1990	The four powers suspend their remaining rights in a joint declaration in New York
3 October 1990	Germany is reunited at 00:00 CEST; the GDR ceases to exist
2 December 1990	The first all-German federal elections since 1932; Kohl becomes chancellor of united Germany
15 March 1991	The Two Plus Four Treaty enters into force, restoring full sovereignty
31 August 1994	The withdrawal of Soviet, then Russian, troops is completed

The Two Legal Instruments

Reunification required solving two separate problems at once: how the two German states would fuse internally, and how the four powers that had occupied Germany since 1945 would relinquish their rights. Each got its own treaty.

	Unification Treaty	Two Plus Four Treaty
Full name	Treaty on the Establishment of German Unity	Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
Signed	31 August 1990	12 September 1990, in Moscow
Parties	The Federal Republic and the GDR	Both Germanys plus the USA, USSR, UK, and France
Purpose	Internal terms of accession — law, property, institutions, states	External and security settlement; end of Four Power rights
Effect	In force 3 October 1990	In force 15 March 1991

The Two Plus Four Treaty was signed by foreign ministers Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Roland Dumas, Eduard Shevardnadze, Douglas Hurd, and James Baker, with Lothar de Maizière signing for the GDR. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2011, alongside documents recording the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall.

What Germany Gave Up to Get Unity

The Two Plus Four Treaty was as much a set of German concessions as a grant of sovereignty. In ten articles it settled the questions that had made a united Germany unacceptable to its neighbours for four decades.

• Final borders. United Germany comprises the territory of the Federal Republic, the GDR, and all of Berlin, with those external borders declared definitive and no territorial claims on any other state.
• The Polish border. Germany reconfirmed the existing frontier in the German–Polish Border Treaty of 1990, explicitly renouncing claims to East Prussia, most of Silesia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania.
• A capped military. German armed forces were limited to 370,000 personnel.
• No weapons of mass destruction. Germany renounced the manufacture, possession, and control of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and renounced wars of aggression.
• Soviet withdrawal, with conditions. All Soviet troops were to leave eastern Germany by the end of 1994, after which only German NATO forces — not foreign troops — could be stationed there.
• Freedom of alliance. In exchange, Germany kept the right to choose its alliances, meaning NATO membership for the whole country.

That last point was the hinge of the entire negotiation. Gorbachev conceded it at his meeting with Kohl and Genscher in the Caucasus on 16 July 1990, and everything else fell into place within eight weeks.

The Five New States

East Germany had abolished its federal states in 1952 in favour of centralised districts. Reunification required re-establishing them so they could accede as constituent states of the Federal Republic.

• Brandenburg
• Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
• Saxony
• Saxony-Anhalt
• Thuringia

Berlin was handled separately, with the two halves of the city merging into a single state and national capital. Together these five states plus Berlin are still referred to in German political shorthand as the neue Bundesländer, the new federal states.

Monetary Union and Its Consequences

Economic union arrived three months before political union. The treaty signed on 18 May 1990 took effect on 1 July, replacing the East German mark with the Deutsche Mark and extending West German economic and social law eastward overnight.

Politically it was necessary — East Germans were emigrating westward in numbers that threatened to depopulate the country. Economically it was brutal. East German firms suddenly had to compete at hard-currency prices with wage costs they could not support, and industrial employment collapsed across the region, producing unemployment and out-migration that shaped eastern German politics for a generation.

The Long Tail of Unity

Several strands of reunification took years or decades to finish, which is why the process is often described as continuing well past 1990.

1. Sovereignty, 1991. The Two Plus Four Treaty only entered into force on 15 March 1991, after ratification.
2. Troop withdrawal, 1994. The last Russian forces left eastern Germany on 31 August 1994, four and a half years after the Wall opened.
3. Capital relocation, 2000. Moving the federal government from Bonn to Berlin was only completed at the turn of the millennium.
4. Economic convergence, ongoing. Wage, productivity, and wealth gaps between east and west narrowed substantially but never fully closed.

Reunification also reshaped Europe beyond Germany’s borders. It put a formal legal end to the Second World War, guaranteed Poland’s western frontier, and gave direct impetus to deeper European integration — the Maastricht negotiations followed almost immediately, with a reunified Germany at the centre of them.

Why 3 October and Not 9 November

The fall of the Wall is the more emotionally powerful date, but 9 November is also the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and the failed 1923 Munich putsch — a day too freighted to serve as a national holiday. Germany therefore observes the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, German Unity Day, on 3 October, the legal date of accession.

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