76 years after the end of WWII there is still no peace treaty with Germany. Will there ever be one? Let’s wait and see.
“Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers….
The Soviets unilaterally severed the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and placed these under the direct administrative authority of the Soviet Union and Poland, with the larger share going to the Poles as compensation for territory they lost to the Soviet Union. The former provinces of East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and Silesia were thus stripped from Germany. Since virtually the entire German population of some 9.5 million in these and adjacent regions was expelled westward, this amounted to a de facto annexation of one-fourth of Germany’s territory as of 1937, the year before the beginning of German expansion under Hitler. The Western Allies acquiesced in these actions by the Soviets, taking consolation in the expectation that these annexations were merely temporary expedients that the final peace terms would soon supersede.
As a result of irreconcilable differences among the Allied powers, however, no peace conference was ever held.” More at https://www.britannica.com/place/Germany/The-era-of-partition
Is that really true? Well, consider this opinion:
« *The case for “no real constitution”*
These arguments are historically grown. When West-Germany was founded, it did not have sovereignty and no “real” constitution. Both points resulting from allied control over the German lands and emerging states. The West-German state held the view that it was the only legitimate German state and successor to the German Reich, giving itself a preliminary constitution, called Grundgesetz (Basic Law), until all German lands are again unified, including the GDR and crucially, all other territories in the East, now in Poland and Russia, that were internationally accepted parts of the Reich before 1937. »
More at https://tinyurl.com/8tfy63zy
After the end of the second world war Germany became occupied by the military forces of not just four but five different countries. Canadian troops, too, occupied Germany, but Canada did not sign the 1990 2+4 treaty that was signed by the two Germanies, four of the five official occupational forces, and then again by the newly unified, abridged Germany, the treaty that – so some say – now serves in place of an official, legal peace treaty with Germany.
« In World War II the chief Allied powers were Great Britain, France (except during the German occupation, 1940–44), the Soviet Union (after its entry in June 1941), the United States (after its entry on December 8, 1941), and China. More generally, the Allies included all the wartime members of the United Nations, the signatories to the Declaration of the United Nations. The original signers of January 1, 1942, were Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia. Subsequent wartime signers were (in chronological order) Mexico, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Iraq, Brazil, Bolivia, Iran, Colombia, Liberia, France, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. »
More on that at https://www.britannica.com/topic/Allied-Powers-international-alliance#ref754272
It seems that there is a sufficiently large number of loose ends to permit even a junior lawyer to drive a wagon through, without getting tangled on any of, the arguments that an international peace treaty with Germany exists. At any rate, the signatures of vastly most of the Allied nations are missing from the 1990 2+4 treaty.
