Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, known in German as the Vertrag ueber die abschliessende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland and more commonly as the Two Plus Four Agreement, is the international agreement that allowed Germany to reunify in October 1990. It was negotiated in 1990 between two German states, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and the four powers that had occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The treaty supplanted the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, because in it the four powers renounced all the rights they had held with regard to Germany, which let a reunified Germany act as a fully sovereign state. The two German states also reconfirmed the existing border with Poland, accepting that German territory after reunification would consist only of what West and East Germany then administered and explicitly renouncing claims to the former eastern territories. The treaty entered into force on 15 March 1991, once the last instrument of ratification was deposited.