Just to put numbers to this, sickening as that is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_I

Just to put numbers to this, sickening as that is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War estimates between 150k and 1 million dead. That's out of a total population of 32 million or so according to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq>, so somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 30 killed. For comparison, the population of Germany in 1939 was about 70 million according to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statistics_since_1900> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statis.... And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War... there were somewhere between 4.3 to 5.3 million military deaths, somewhere between 500k to 2 million civilian deaths due to some of the Soviet end-war and post-war shenanigans, another 350k to 600k civilian deaths due to Allied bombing. Let's call it 5 million all told on the low end. That's 1 in 14. And due to the fraction of this that were military, the resulting demographic distribution has some interesting features. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_sex_by_age_1950_12_31.png> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_sex_by_age_1950_1.... In particular, note the deep notch in the 30-35 demographic that would have been born during World War 1 and the large differences between numbers of males and females in all the 20-30 age group. So one difference is that a larger fraction of the population was dead, and a significantly larger fraction of the "young male" demographic that tends to do things like fight back against the occupier as opposed to going on with life. People were just _tired_ of fighting, effectively. Another difference was the massive aid/rebuilding program financed via the Marshall Plan. And I suspect a final difference was a much smaller feeling of "us vs them" or "we're fundamentally different", on both sides....