[Laurent Rizzotti]

While your question is interesting, I would like to point that Uffz Gehrke was probably in a military German hospital when war ended in Europe and probably remained in the same structure the next month. In a similar case, I remember that all German personnel remained in place.

Then the award of the medal itself was probably less interesting to him that the money that was due with it, or the pension. German administration certainly continue to pay pensions for invalid soldiers after the war, and in immediate post-WWII Germany, they were important. Again I remember reading about it but for a latter period (1946 or later).

So I found logical that while a part of the German military administration will have stopped working (like the victory confirmation board), the services dealing with casualties were still working (and probably even harder than before, to compensate the confusion of the end of the war).