Treaty on Relations Between the USSR and the GDR (1955)
On September 20, 1955, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic signed the Treaty on Relations Between the USSR and the GDR in Moscow, formally ending the Soviet military occupation regime in East Germany. Yet the agreement simultaneously created the legal foundation for Soviet forces to remain on East German soil for decades to come. The treaty stood as a defining document of the Cold War's division of Germany, balancing symbolic sovereignty against continued military and political dependence.
The Road to Moscow
By the mid-1950s, the division of Germany had hardened into a permanent feature of the Cold War landscape. The Federal Republic of Germany had regained substantial sovereignty through the Bonn-Paris Conventions and, in May 1955, formally joined NATO, a move Moscow viewed as a direct threat to Soviet security interests in Central Europe. Just weeks later, on May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union responded by founding the Warsaw Pact, with the German Democratic Republic as a charter member alongside Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Against this backdrop, Soviet leaders recognized that continuing to govern East Germany as an occupied territory undermined their broader argument that West German rearmament, not Soviet policy, was the true obstacle to German unity. Granting the GDR a veneer of statehood also strengthened East German leader Walter Ulbricht's Socialist Unity Party at home, bolstering its claim to legitimate governance. Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin led the Moscow talks, while Otto Grotewohl represented the East German government. The resulting treaty was framed as an act between two sovereign states, even though Soviet military and political leverage over East Germany remained largely unchanged in practice.
Did You Know?
Despite the 1955 treaty proclaiming East Germany a fully sovereign state, Soviet troops remained stationed there for nearly 40 more years, only completing their withdrawal in 1994, four years after German reunification had already taken place.
Terms of the Agreement
The treaty declared that relations between the USSR and the GDR would henceforth be conducted on the basis of full equality, mutual respect for sovereignty, and non-interference in internal affairs, language mirroring the rhetoric the Soviets used to criticize Western policy toward Bonn. In practical terms, however, the agreement preserved the presence of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany under the newly designated Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, successor to the wartime Soviet occupation administration. This force, which had numbered in the hundreds of thousands since 1945, was permitted to remain under the treaty's provisions, ostensibly to guarantee security amid ongoing four-power responsibilities over Germany as a whole and unresolved questions about Berlin's status. The Soviet Union also retained certain rights connected to the Potsdam Agreement framework, since final German reunification and a peace treaty with a unified Germany had never been concluded. East Germany, for its part, gained formal control over its own domestic administration, foreign relations with other states, and internal security apparatus, distinctions that allowed East Berlin to present itself internationally as a genuine sovereign actor rather than a Soviet satellite administration.
Legacy and Long-Term Impact
The 1955 treaty became the enduring legal basis for Soviet, and later Russian, military presence in East Germany for nearly four decades. The Group of Soviet Forces in Germany was renamed the Western Group of Forces in 1989 as Cold War tensions eased, but the troop presence itself continued until Germany's reunification process concluded in the early 1990s. Under the terms negotiated during reunification, Russian forces did not fully withdraw from German territory until 1994, nearly four years after East and West Germany merged into a single state in October 1990. The treaty's underlying tension, proclaiming sovereignty while sustaining foreign military occupation, exemplified the broader contradictions of Soviet bloc politics during the Cold War, where satellite states exercised limited autonomy shaped heavily by Moscow's strategic priorities. Historians frequently cite the September 1955 treaty alongside the Bonn-Paris Conventions as twin pillars establishing the competing legal frameworks that defined divided Germany until reunification. It remains a key reference point for understanding how Cold War superpowers balanced ideological claims of self-determination against the military realities of occupation and alliance structures in postwar Europe.