I have a copy of the death certificate of a cousin who was shot down over Germany in 1944 while flying with the RAF. I’m puzzled by the heading on this certificate:
I trust you notice something at once. WW2 ended in 1945 - at least I thought it did. But I don’t believe an official document would make such an error. Presumably, then, the war did not formally end for another three years. What happened on 30th June 1948? I have looked up the date on Wikipedia - nothing there. Anybody have any ideas?
Probably irrelevant, but the last British soldiers pulled out of Palestine on 30th June 1948. British campaign medals for Palestine are given for service “between 27th September, 1945 and 30th June, 1948”.
For the US military at least, wars do not end until at a minimum six months after they end. 1946 is still considered within WW2 for award, promotion, benefit purposes. As for the RAF, I’m afraid I can’t comment too much --1948 doesn’t seem to correspond to any significant dates such as end of occupation, merger of American & British Zones, or anything of that sort other than the Berlin Air Lift started roughly around that time. When was the certificate issued? If issued around the time of death it’s possible the clerk was just taking a stab at some date in the future the war should be over by.
If you want a very technical answer, one could say WW2 “officially” ended March 15, 1991; on this date, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (also referred to as the “2 plus 4” treaty: The two Germanies plus the four Allied Powers signed it) entered into force. Neither in 1945 nor at any point of time afterwards, an official treaty of peace was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers. The 1991 agreement, settling the issues brought up by German reunification, was the closest we ever got to a peace treaty ending WW2; it approved the reunification, the membership of reunited Germany in NATO, and transferred full sovereignty onto Germany by renouncing all reserved rights the Allied had held since the end of the war.
I understand that this is not the answer you were looking for. In Europe, Germany surrendered twice, once in Reims (France) on May 7, 1945 to the Western powers and once in Karlshorst (close to Berlin) to the Soviet Union on May 8. Both surrenders were to become effective on May 8, 1945, at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time. This, and the time lag explains why the end of the war is variably given as May 7, 8, or 9.
The Asian war ended on August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered. Official treaties of peace with various Asian nations were not concluded until the early 1950s.
It was issued under the terms of the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Special Provisions) Act 1957. This Act is cited on the certificate. It must therefore have been issued in 1957 or after. I suppose there may have been an original certificate issued at the time, but by the time *this *certificate was issued WW2 was long since over.
I didn’t find it in the English version of Wikipedia, but according to German Wikipedia, on July 1, 1948, the three Western powers framed the conditions for the establishment of a democratic German state comprising their occupation zones. Since this, eventually, led to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany as the successor of the defeated German Reich, your WW2 document might pin down the eve of that date as the last day of the war.
Of course, it might be totally irrelevant, but I just wanted to mention it.
In a legal sense, the war has not officially ended. Due to the unresolved issue of ownership of the Kurile Islands, Russia and Japan have never signed a treaty formally ending the conflict between them. Ironically, the actual war between these two powers only lasted fourteen days.
If you’re going to be super-technical, you have to keep in mind that the OP is asking about Britain. Both Britain and Japan were parties to the San Francisco treaty of 1951, ending the war between these two nations. The fact that the Soviet Union and Japan never formally concluded a peace treaty does not mean that there is no state of peace between Britain and Japan.
I think this is the most plausible reason posted so far.
I have also posted this question on a genealogy forum, as the minutiae of death certificates is very much in their line. Hopefully someone here or there will come up with the definitive answer.
I was just reading about this this weekend, in an overview history of the war in Europe, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, by Norman Davies. Both the legal aspects of the German surrender, as well as the real-world implementation of the universal ceasefire, were marked by a degree of ambiguity. Here’s a distilled timeline of the surrender, paraphrased from his prose:
April 30, 1945: Shortly prior to his suicide, Hitler appoints Admiral Donitz his successor.
May 4: In Luneberg Heath, Montgomery receives an official delegation, resulting in all German forces in northern Germany laying down their arms.*
May 5: In Rheims, Eisenhower receives a delegation of emissaries from Donitz, who wished to surrender to the U.S. forces. Eisenhower rebuffed them, reminding them our goals were for a general unconditional surrender. The emissaries refused to sign to those terms at that time.
May 7, 0241 hours: The German delegation** signed the prepared document, meeting the Allies’ terms, requiring all German forces*** to cease fighting by 2300 hours on May 8. Churchill and Truman announce V-E Day to be celebrated on May 8.
Here’s what Davies writes of the second official surrender:
“Stalin, however, was having none of it. He judged the Rheims document to be invalid or ‘preliminary’. He wanted the act of unconditional surrender to be made to his own representatives. So another German delegation was obliged to repeat the performance at Karlhorst in Berlin at 2330 hours on the 8th. Due to the difference in time zones, Moscow had already entered the 9th. And Victory Day is celebrated in Russia on 9 May.”
Finally, it’s one thing to have a legal document but another to have a universal ceasefire in actuality:
“Even then the war was not completely over. There had been three surrenders, but no formal armistice and no legal peace. The ceasefire did not hold in all places. Germans and Soviets carried on fighting in Prague. And in all Soviet-occupied countries the NKVD was hunting down a variety of political opponents and freedom fighters. Admiral Donitz, who was technically a POW at large, continued to rule the non-existent Reich until he was arrested in Flensburg on 22 May. In these circumstances, it is difficult to say exactly where and when the Second World War in Europe ended.”
Presumably this delegation agreed to the terms sought by the Allies: unconditional general surrender.
** Apparently the same one from Donitz rebuffed two days earlier. Strangely, despite his emissaries’ signing this document in his absence, the admiral himself was still leading the Reich and was now considered a POW-at-large, as Davies goes on to note.
***This wording specifying “German forces” is somewhat problematic because of the existence of non-German Axis forces allied with the Germans and of non-German nationals wearing German uniforms (as in the French and Dutch SS volunteer units), although there couldn’t have been many left with fighting capability in the European theater by the time the Germans surrendered. I don’t know if the leader of a military alliance can, in international law, surrender by proxy for all their allied forces, regardless of uniform, whether their allies consent to such a surrender or not. I’m sure this was largely a moot point, though; by the time of Germany’s defeat, the Allied advance had done a pretty thorough job of pacifying all of Europe, despite the odd outbreak of hostilities.