Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
| Type | Independence treaty / Peace treaty |
|---|---|
| Signed | 12 September 1990 |
| Location | Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Effective | 15 March 1991 |
| Signatories | Two: Plus Four: |
| Languages |
The Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany (German: Vertrag über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland), or the Two Plus Four Agreement (German: Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag; short: German Treaty), was negotiated in 1990 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (the eponymous "Two"), and the Four Powers which occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the treaty the Four Powers renounced all rights they held in Germany, allowing a united Germany to become fully sovereign the following year.
On 2 August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement, promulgated at the end of the Potsdam Conference, among other things agreed on the initial terms under which the Allies of World War II would govern Germany. A provisional German–Polish border known as the Oder–Neisse line awarded, in theory within the context of that "provisional border", most of Germany's eastern provinces to Poland and the Soviet Union. Those agreements reached were provisional and the agreement stipulated that the situation would be finalised by "a peace settlement for Germany to be accepted by the Government of Germany when a government adequate for the purpose is established" (Potsdam Agreement 1.3.1). Parts of those above mentioned agreements were burdened with controversy from several sources e.g., Churchill's comment about stuffing the Polish goose too full (of German lands). The overall "German Question" became one of the salient and crucial issues of the long-running Cold War, and until it ended in the late 1980s, little progress had been made in the establishment of a single government of Germany adequate for the purpose of agreeing to a final settlement. This meant that in some respects (largely, but not only, technical), Germany did not have full national sovereignty.
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