I almost didn't include that sentence, in fear of the "you're justifying mass rape" retort -- morale was too vague of a word to use in that context, and gives a

I almost didn't include that sentence, in fear of the "you're justifying mass rape" retort -- morale was too vague of a word to use in that context, and gives an unintentional connotation. However, I hope that you see I am explicitly not "justifying mass rapes". If contextualizing and understanding are the same thing as justifying, then historians are surely the most depraved people on the planet. As for your closing comment, I would also caution you that the Nazis were far more disciplined, and they committed war crimes on a much larger scale. I'm not saying that to be cheeky, but, again, to emphasize that actions such as these cannot be reduced to variables as simple as "insufficient discipline/education", "degradation of civil society", or even "racial hatred". These kinds of reductions hide almost always more than they tell, especially when it comes to something as sociologically complex as international war. In all, the point of my comment was not to cast black into white, to exchange one form of binary bigotry for another, but to remind us that our popular history of that time has, in fact, been dyed in politically-opportunistic ways many times over. Whether we choose to accept those dyeings or not is up to us, but it's important to know that we have a choice to hate or not to hate. And that we should default towards skeptical when we have been instructed to treat people as "The Other". When education and discipline are corrupted by this introduction and emphasis of "otherness", hate crimes and war crimes follow.