German Parliaments Give Final OK to Terms for Unity : Merger: Legislators act in East and West. The Polish border is recognized as inviolable.

The parliaments of East and West Germany gave final approval Thursday to a blueprint for reunification, fought to the end by leftists fearful of being plundered by the West and die-hard rightists unwilling to forsake German territory.

With the endorsements in Bonn and East Berlin, the two German nations formally agreed to the terms of their Oct. 3 merger and recognized the present border with Poland as inviolable and just.

The East German Volkskammer, forced to meet under provisional shelter after an asbestos scare closed its usual quarters, voted 299 to 80 in favor of the 1,000-page treaty that will join the territory with the West.

West Germany’s Bundestag approved the pact by a vote of 442 to 47, with three abstentions. Members of the radical Greens party protested, along with ardent conservatives, the way the two German states are to be made into one.

The treaty that takes effect Oct. 3 extends the West German Basic Law, or constitution, to both nations and abolishes the Communist constitution that gave statehood to East Germany.

A decision on the capital of united Germany has been postponed until at least next year.

Parliamentary backing had been expected for the treaty, which was signed by German government leaders on Aug. 31, and the vote in both the Volkskammer and the Bundestag easily surpassed the two-thirds majority needed for approval.

However, the sizable “no” vote, after 11 hours of debate among West German deputies and a disruptive demonstration at the East German session, underscored persistent conflicts among Germans over how to mend the social tatters left by 45 years of division.

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave the document its final reading and vowed that united Germany will not seek more power in the world but will strive to set “policy by good example.”

” . . . Unity brings us Germans the historical chance to make our collective contribution toward a peaceful, free and united Europe,” said Genscher, who was born in what is now East Germany. “We also want to help Europe live up to its responsibility in the creation of a new world order.”

Foremost among those new duties, he said, is to support the building of democracy in East Europe and to search for solutions to such global problems as pollution, poverty and hunger.

Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine, who is challenging West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for the leadership in the first all-German elections Dec. 2, used the treaty debate to criticize Kohl’s position that no tax increase will be needed to finance reunification. But Lafontaine joined the majority of his party in approving the unity documents.

The Greens, who hold 42 seats in the Bundestag, voted against reunification, arguing that the conditions amount to a sellout of East German assets. In East Berlin, leftist parties under the umbrella group Alliance 90 opposed the treaty on the same grounds.

Gregor Gysi, head of the renamed Communist Party, denounced the agreement as “an act of subjugation and annexation.”

Among West Germans who voted against the agreement were a handful of archconservative deputies fighting for the rights of Germans expelled at the end of World War II from territories now part of Poland and the Soviet Union.

Herbert Czaja, president of the Assn. of Expellees and a member of Parliament from Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, spearheaded a last-minute legal effort to have the reunification documents declared invalid for tying border recognition to the decision to reunite.

The Constitutional Court threw out the appeal Tuesday, saying it would explain its ruling later.

“We had nothing against the reunification with East Germany and Berlin,” Horst Egon Rehnert, spokesman for the Assn. of Expellees, said. “We were only fighting against a position that prevents any future unity with other Germans. It’s very difficult for us to renounce one-fourth of German territory.”

But with Bundestag approval of the unity terms, Rehnert said, the expellees accept that the eastern border is fixed forever.

The reunification documents recognize the Oder and Neisse rivers as the permanent border between Germany and Poland, giving up all claims to the former German territories of East Prussia and Silesia.

More than 12 million Germans were driven from the regions deeded to Poland and the Soviet Union after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Czaja’s association estimates that another million or so Germans still live in western Poland and might some day have chosen to join the German fatherland under the same provision used by East Germany.

Among the constitutional changes mandated by the unity documents is repeal of Article 23, the clause allowing annexation of German territories.

Government leaders from Bonn and East Berlin have described the loss of East Prussia and Silesia as painful but justified punishment for Nazi Germany’s having started World War II.