The highway was planned between September 1933 and December 1934 by the construction departments of the company Reichsautobahn in Düsseldorf, Hanover and Magdeburg.

The southern variant, which was finally built, led through the most densely populated area and opened the possibility of an extension to Wroclaw or Frankfurt (Oder) and Warsaw.

On 10 January 1937 the Berlin Ring was connected to Hannover with the release of the 55-kilometre-long (34 mi) section between Burg / Schermen and Helmstedt.

The also scheduled for this day traffic transfer of the section between Gütersloh and Bielefeld could not be performed due to a landslide in the Teutoburg Forest.

It played an important role as a transit corridor to West Berlin, with allied checkpoints at Helmstedt and Dreilinden-Drewitz (on the A 10) respectively.

In the beginning of the 1970s prepared numbering scheme of the federal highways carried the current A 2 in the former West Germany largely their current number, but ran west of the cross Oberhausen on the way of today's A 3 on to the motorway junction Heumar, the Berliner Ring coming Kilometrierung was even continued in a westerly direction to Aachen.

From the introduction of today's numbering system in 1975, the A 2 already began at the Dutch border Straelen / Venlo and led from the intersection Kaiserberg together as A 2 and A 3 to the cross Oberhausen, where the A 3 in the direction of Arnhem again separated from the route.

The landfill is easily recognizable by the Lanstroper Ei, an old water tower standing on a hill approximately 400 metres (0.25 mi) away from the autobahn.

Christian Dzida, keyboardist for the Austrian band Schürzenjäger from 1995 to 1999, was killed in a road accident on Bundesautobahn 2 in November 2009.

At the end of October 2013, after 18 months of construction, the tank and service facility "Lipperland Nord" north of the junction Ostwestfalen / Lippe opened.

Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia want to expand the busy A 2 from Bielefeld to the border to Saxony-Anhalt eight lanes.

In order to meet the expected increase in traffic, especially of trucks on the important east–west connection, both countries had notified the expansion for the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan 2030.

However, the final version of the corresponding demand plan, which came into force at the end of 2016 with the amendment of the Highway Act, now only includes the extension of the motorway triangle Bottrop and Hannover-West, the motorway junction Hannover-Buchholz and the eight-lane extension from Herrenhausen to AD Hannover-West as urgent needs with bottleneck elimination.