E. Germany Bids Warsaw Pact Farewell : Eastern Europe: The agreement comes just nine days before reunification. In Bonn, the unity treaty is signed.

East Germany, discarding two of the Communists’ most cherished symbols just nine days before reunification, left the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact on Monday and bade farewell to foreign ambassadors.

Disarmament and Defense Minister Rainer Eppelmann, a pacifist pastor, signed the historic agreement to quit the pact with the alliance’s supreme commander, Soviet Gen. Pyotr Lushev.

“I wish you all the best for the future,” a grim-faced Lushev told Eppelmann at the ceremony, which in five minutes ended 35 years of active military cooperation.

The East German news agency ADN said the signing ceremony’s “mood was like that at a funeral” and described the atmosphere as “realistic and chilly.”

Acting head of state Sabine Bergmann-Pohl officially said farewell to all ambassadors accredited to East Germany at a separate reception at her headquarters on Marx-Engels Square.

In Bonn, meanwhile, with the stroke of a pen Monday, the unification process became official.

In a private ceremony witnessed only by press photographers, West German President Richard von Weizsaecker signed the 1,000-page unity treaty that details the legal and social unification of the two Germanys that will take effect Oct. 3.

On leaving the Warsaw Pact, East Germany will hand over sensitive equipment, withdraw from the command structure and stop paying funds to the alliance.

It became the first country to pull out of the seven-nation pact since the peaceful revolutions that swept Eastern Europe last year.

Formed in May, 1955, the Warsaw Pact squared off against NATO forces in the West during the tense years of the Cold War.

East Germany’s National People’s Army was regarded as the most efficient fighting force in the pact, but next week its 50,000 troops will be absorbed into a unified German army.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s 380,000 troops stationed in East Germany will be sent home only gradually in a phased operation ending in 1994.

This means Warsaw Pact forces will remain in part of Germany, even though the country as a whole will belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

At the reception for more than 100 ambassadors and charges d’affaires accredited to East Berlin, Bergmann-Pohl thanked them for their understanding of the dramatic events that put them out of jobs.

The ambassadors will leave by Oct. 2, the day before the two Germanys formally unite, and their missions will become consulates or branches of their countries’ Bonn embassies.