On this day in 1951, more than six years after the end of World War II in Europe, President Harry S. Truman signed a proclamation officially ending U.S. hostilities with Germany.
The official end to the war came nine years, 10 months and 13 days after Congress had declared war on Nazi Germany. The lawmakers had responded to a declaration of war issued by the Third Reich in the aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other U.S. bases in the Pacific.
The president explained why he had waited so long after the fighting had ended to act: It had always been America’s hope, Truman wrote, to create a treaty of peace with the government of a united and free Germany, but the postwar policies pursued by the Soviet Union “made it impossible.”
After the war, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union divided Germany into four zones of occupation. Berlin, while located wholly within the Soviet zone, was jointly occupied by the wartime allies and also subdivided into four sectors because of its symbolic importance as the nation’s historic capital and seat of the former Nazi government.
The three western zones were merged to form the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, and the Soviets followed suit in October 1949 with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic.
The East German regime began to falter in May 1989, when the removal of Hungary’s border fences punched a hole in the Iron Curtain, allowing tens of thousands of East Germans to flee to the West. Despite the grants of general sovereignty to both German states in 1955, neither of the two German governments held unrestricted sovereignty under international law until after they were reunified in October 1990.