Helmut Kohl negotiated a very good deal. Money was not an issue for Germany but speed and total withdrawl of the Russian troops. Germany would have paid much more. A year later and it might be too late for the reunification (Gorbachev was kicked out of the Kremlin).

I guess they could have gone down in flames if they wanted to choose that instead. The rest of the world owes them a huge thanks for accepting defeat gracefully. And for beating Hitler of course.

> Kohl would shoulder the lion’s share of the costs for extracting 546,000 Red Army troops from Germany—an exodus requiring fifty troop trains a day, fifty-five cars each, for more than three years—and building bases to house them once they were home. The immediate cost of the buyout, or the bribe, was measured in tens of billions, then hundreds, a spectacular use of economic power in political warfare. Its immensity matched the importance of the moment. Over time, *the bill for unification would come to more than two trillion dollars.*

The Washington Post mentions 14 * 10^9 DEM, or ~7.210^9 EUR or ~910^9 USD at the time.