“Wall-peckers” at work on the Berlin Wall, November 1989
As the Wall came down, so did all the additional trappings of the former border regime: watchtowers, guardhouses, dog-runs, light stanchions, and signal systems. The guards’ hut at Checkpoint Charlie was removed in a special ceremony on June 22, 1990. British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd took this occasion to declare that, “at long last, we are bringing Charlie in from the cold.”
The Checkpoint Charlie hut, which eventually went to a museum, proved easier to relocate than the thousands of guard dogs that had once patrolled the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border. After months of negotiation between East German officials and representatives of the West German Animal Protection Association, it was agreed that 2,500 former guard dogs would be sent to new homes in the West. News of this decision provoked howls of protest in the West German media, which warned that dogs raised under Stalinism would be unable to adjust to peaceable conditions in the West. Undoubtedly they would treat the mailman like a would-be escapee. The West German Shepherd Dogs Association, meanwhile, worried that a flood of East German Schäferhunde on the Western market would force down the price for locally bred dogs. East Germans were outraged over these complaints, insisting that their dogs were just as civilized as Western dogs. They agonized over stories that some of the dogs shipped to the West were being purchased by pimps looking for “killer beasts,” or by New Yorkers who wanted trophy animals for their Fifth Avenue apartments, or, much worse, by Asians who regarded the pups as dinner items. The Wall dogs, East Germans said, were “the last victims of Stalinism.”
Other signs of the changing times in the summer and fall of 1990 included the elimination of the restricted air corridors into Berlin and the dismantling of the American listening posts along the inner-German border. It is significant that these measures were undertaken by the Western powers, for it was they, and their former Russian allies, who had the final say on the question of German unification and the status of Berlin. The Germans could take some important steps toward unity on their own, but they could not become a fully sovereign and unified state without the acquiescence of the powers that had defeated them in 1945.
In February 1990 the powers agreed to a mechanism for negotiating the unity question: the “Two Plus Four Talks,” involving the two Germanys along with the Americans, British, French, and Soviets. It soon became apparent that Britain and France were coming around to an acceptance of German unification, a development for which Helmut Kohl deserves most of the credit. To gain French approval, Kohl promised to push for a single European currency, a pet idea of Mitterrand’s. At every opportunity the chancellor stressed the idea that German unification would be accompanied by—and be cocooned in—greater European unity. Just as West Germany had rearmed in the mid-1950s as an integral part of NATO and the Western European Union, so the two Germanys would now come together “in Europe’s name.”
Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall), the seat of government for Greater Berlin
The major question still to be resolved concerned Germany’s place within the international security framework. Would a united Germany join NATO, declare its neutrality, or take some other course? Washington and Bonn insisted that unified Germany be a member of NATO, just as West Germany had been. The Soviets, as was noted above, hoped to keep Germany out of the Atlantic Alliance, preferring that the new nation assume a stance of neutrality. If this proved impossible, Russia was willing to countenance Germany’s membership in both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, a very odd proposition.
Washington took the lead in pressuring Moscow to accept the NATO solution. When Gorbachev visited America for a summit meeting in late May 1990, Bush stressed to him that NATO would be a stabilizing force for the Germans, that it would help keep them in check. The Russian president countered with Moscow’s dual alliance option, insisting that “if one anchor is good, two anchors are better.” As an accomplished sailor, Bush knew something about anchors, and he also knew how to change tack. Aware that Gorbachev had often employed the rhetoric of national self-determination, he now asked his counterpart if he agreed that nations had the right to choose which alliances they might belong to, and, if so, whether Germany also had this right. To his astonishment, Gorbachev said yes, he agreed. Recognizing the significance of this agreement, Gorbachev’s aides tried to get him to take it back. They did not understand that their president had already given up on the hope of keeping Germany out of NATO and was concerned now to extract rewards for his compliance in the form of loans and more favorable trade arrangements. True, the Soviets would have to pull their troops out of East Germany and Berlin, but Gorbachev hoped to receive compensation for that as well.
The final details of the unification package were worked out in various diplomatic meetings over the course of the next few weeks. Crucially, Bonn promised that after German reunification it would confirm the sanctity of the Oder-Neisse border with Poland, a guarantee that Kohl had hitherto avoided making for fear of alienating right-wing voters in the Federal Republic. Throughout these final negotiations, the East German delegation had little impact: the talks should have been called “One-plus-Four.” A key moment came during a visit by Kohl to Gorbachev’s home turf in the Caucasus Mountains in July. Moscow was insisting that Bonn pay for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany and Berlin and their relocation in the Soviet Union. The Germans had offered DM 8 billion, but Gorbachev wanted more, and threatened to sabotage German reunification if Moscow was rebuffed. In their Caucasus meeting the two men agreed on a figure of DM 12 million, combined with a credit of DM 3 billion. The Soviets would have four years in which to withdraw their troops, during which time no NATO troops could be stationed on former East German territory. The Western powers could keep their troops in West Berlin until the Soviets had fully withdrawn. Germany’s own army, the Bundeswehr, would be reduced from about 400,000 men to 370,000. Kohl was understandably jubilant over this outcome: German unity was a done deal, and the price had not been exorbitant.
Oskar Lafontaine, Willy Brandt, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, and Richard von Weizsäcker attending the German reunification ceremony at the Reichstag, October 3, 1990
The final agreement on German unification was signed by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers at a ceremony in Moscow on September 12, 1990. With this gesture, the World War II victors gave up the rights over Germany that they had assumed in the Berlin Declaration of June 5, 1945, and the Potsdam Agreement of August 2, 1945. At long last, World War II was officially over. Agreement on Germany also signaled an unofficial end to the Cold War. At the signing ceremony, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze declared that there were no winners or losers in this settlement, but in truth this was a clear victory for the West and for a Western-oriented Germany. Another winner was Berlin, which of course had always been one of the main victims of the German division.