No peace treaty with Germany exists.
The war never formally ended.
On February 2, 1990, Hans-Dietrich Genscher stood before the cameras with the American Secretary of State beside him and made a promise to the world. You can watch it today. The words are on record. What happened next is the history nobody in the Western mainstream wants to discuss.
The Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen three months earlier. Germany was moving toward reunification and the Soviet Union was negotiating the terms under which it would allow that reunification to happen. The Soviets had one overriding concern, stated clearly and repeatedly: NATO must not expand eastward. The military alliance that had been built to contain them must not advance to their borders.
What they received in response was not a treaty clause. It was a promise. Delivered in words, confirmed in archives, witnessed by the men who were in the room — and then broken so thoroughly that today the standard Western position is not that the promise was kept, but that promises made without signatures don’t count.
What Genscher Said
On January 31, 1990, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave a speech at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing. The relevant passage, documented and confirmed:
“Whatever happens in the Warsaw Pact, there will be no expansion of NATO territory to the East, that is, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union. The West must also take into account that the change in Eastern Europe and the German reunification process must not lead to an impairment of Soviet security interests.”
This was not a private conversation. It was a public speech. It was the stated policy of the West German Foreign Minister, delivered openly, in a form that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were intended to hear.
Three days later, on February 2nd, Genscher repeated it publicly — this time standing next to US Secretary of State James Baker. His words, on camera, available to watch today:
“We were in agreement that there is no intention to extend the NATO defence area to the East. That applies, by the way, not just with regard to the GDR, which we do not want to incorporate, but that applies generally.”
“Ganz generell.” Generally. Not just the former East Germany. Generally.
Baker stood beside him. He did not correct him. He did not qualify the statement. He had already told Gorbachev the same thing in Moscow three days earlier — that NATO’s military jurisdiction would move “not one inch eastward.”
What the Archive Confirms
Frank Elbe was Genscher’s closest associate and headed the minister’s office from 1987 to 1992. He was a member of the German delegation at the Two Plus Four negotiations. In a Der Spiegel interview in February 2022, he confirmed under what he called oath-level certainty what had been promised and to whom:
“That is false. I would state that even under oath. Both Baker and Genscher presented the proposal in the Kremlin at the beginning of February 1990.”
He was referring to the claim that the promise applied only to the former East German territory. Elbe rejected it directly. The promise was general. He was there. He flew to Washington personally carrying Genscher’s formulation. He met with two of Baker’s closest associates. His account of their response: Baker was enthusiastic. He said the non-expansion formula pleased him and he would ensure it was accepted within the alliance.
A German Foreign Ministry internal memorandum recorded Genscher’s words to Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze in the Kremlin: “For us it is clear: NATO will not expand to the East. That applies ‘ganz generell’.” Shevardnadze responded that he believed “every word” Genscher had said.
In 2022, American political scientist Joshua Shifrinson discovered a formerly classified document from a meeting of the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Britain, France and Germany in Bonn on March 6, 1991. Germany’s representative Jürgen Chrobog stated:
“We made clear in the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe. We cannot therefore offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.”
The American representative Raymond Seitz confirmed the same: “We had made clear to the Soviet Union — in the Two Plus Four as well as other talks — that we would not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.”
This was not Russian propaganda. This was the classified record of American, British, French and German officials, in their own words, in their own archive.
What Happened Next
1999: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary join NATO. 2004: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria join NATO. 2009: Albania and Croatia. 2017: Montenegro. 2020: North Macedonia. 2023: Finland. 2024: Sweden.
NATO’s eastern border now runs along Russia’s frontier. The alliance that Genscher promised would not advance one inch eastward now sits on the doorstep of St. Petersburg.
The standard Western response to this sequence is that the promises were verbal and therefore not legally binding. That a political and moral commitment delivered publicly, confirmed in archives by the men who made it, witnessed by foreign ministers and heads of state, means nothing because no one signed a piece of paper.
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Join Now →The American diplomat and historian George Kennan assessed this argument in 1997 — before most of the expansion had even occurred. He called the decision to expand NATO eastward “the most fateful mistake of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” He predicted it would inflame nationalist and anti-Western tendencies in Russia, damage the development of democracy there, restore Cold War tensions, and force Russian foreign policy in directions that the West would deeply regret.
Kennan was 93 years old when the war in Ukraine began. He had been right about everything.
The Minsk Confession
The Genscher promise is the most documented broken commitment of the post-Cold War period. But it was not the last.
In February 2015, Germany and France co-sponsored the Minsk II agreement — a ceasefire framework for the Donbas conflict that included provisions for Ukrainian constitutional reform granting autonomy to the eastern regions. Russia signed. Ukraine signed. Germany and France signed as guarantors.
In December 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit that the Minsk agreement had been designed to give Ukraine time to build up its military strength. It was not, she indicated, intended as a genuine path to settlement. It was a delay mechanism.
Former French President François Hollande confirmed the same assessment in an interview with the same publication the same month.
The guarantors of the agreement publicly stated, after the fact, that they had never intended to implement it.
Russia had signed Minsk II believing it represented a genuine diplomatic resolution. Germany and France had signed it as a stalling tactic. The Kremlin drew its own conclusions.
One Word in the Treaty
Return to the Two Plus Four Treaty itself — the document signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, whose Article 7 declared Germany’s full sovereignty.
Article 2 of that treaty states: “From German soil, only peace shall go forth.”
The protocol note attached to the treaty contained one word whose legal weight was not immediately apparent. The word was “verlegt” — “deployed.” The note stated that all questions regarding the application of the word “deployed” as used in Article 5, paragraph 3, would be decided by the government of united Germany in a “reasonable and responsible manner.”
That single word — who decides what “deployed” means, and how — became, in Putin’s legal reading, the basis for his argument that NATO expansion to the east violated the treaty. NATO troops “deployed” to Poland or the Baltic states were, in Russian interpretation, a violation of the spirit and letter of what had been agreed.
German weapons delivered to Ukraine present a more direct problem. Article 2 is unambiguous. From German soil, only peace. The German government’s position is that weapons deliveries are defensive support, not aggression. The Russian government’s position is that a government which supplies weapons used to strike Russian territory has become a party to the conflict.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock removed all ambiguity on January 26, 2023. Speaking after a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, she stated to the press: “We are fighting a war against Russia.” The German Foreign Ministry immediately clarified that she had not meant to imply German military participation. The Russian government filed the statement exactly where it belonged — in the record.
What Russia Now Holds
On February 21, 2024, Russian parliamentarians formally raised the question of terminating the Two Plus Four Treaty.
The consequences of termination, if pursued, are not abstract. The Two Plus Four Treaty is the legal foundation for German reunification, for the recognition of Germany’s postwar borders, and — in the reading of German constitutional jurisprudence — for the international legal standing of the Federal Republic itself. A terminated treaty does not automatically reverse reunification. But it opens legal questions about borders, about sovereignty, and about the validity of the entire postwar settlement that German diplomats spent forty years carefully avoiding.
The promise that was not written down in 1990 was not written down by design. Written promises are enforceable. Verbal assurances can be denied. The men who made the promise understood this. The men who received it believed they were dealing with partners who shared their understanding of what a commitment meant.
They were not.
The point worth holding clearly is this: if the Two Plus Four Treaty is terminated, the party harmed is not Russia. Russia loses a document it now considers violated anyway. The party harmed is Germany — whose reunification, whose borders, whose international legal standing, and whose claim to full sovereignty all rest on that single treaty. The legal subject the Constitutional Court identifies as the continuous German Reich would be left standing on a foundation whose one formal pillar had just been pulled. A Germany that allowed its own government to supply weapons into a war that the other signatory considers a treaty violation has, in the strictest legal reading, participated in dismantling the document that makes Germany legally whole.
This is not a Russian argument. It is a German one. The architects of the Two Plus Four Treaty understood it. That is why they designed it so carefully — and why the word “verlegt” in a protocol footnote was never an accident.
A promise made without a signature can be broken without a consequence — until the party that was promised decides that the accumulated weight of broken commitments justifies a response. At that point, the absence of the signature becomes everyone’s problem. And in this case, the problem has a specific address: Berlin.
Next in this series: the re-education of a civilization — how a people were taught to distrust their own history, and what fills the space where memory used to be. https://www.maier-files.com/what-fills-the-space-where-memory-used-to-be/
