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Both Germany and the US do not like to think about US soldiers committing war crimes or even behaving badly in WWII. The US thinks so, because its war was all

Both Germany and the US do not like to think about US soldiers committing war crimes or even behaving badly in WWII. The US thinks so, because its war was all about moral high ground, ignoring its very own blatant racism at home. Germany likes to think so, because the liberation by the US actually ended in being liberated. Millions of civilians had to flee and/or were being raped by the Red army. Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for decades, while the GDR was constructed at home. I think with time passing it becomes easier to paint a more complex and realistic picture acknowledging the situation these (often young) people were in, without justifying their actions. I would like to see glorification shifting more and more to memorization of a time and of circumstances that brought out the worst in people and must never happen again anywhere in the world. Edit: indeed, decades

jedrek 11y ago
> Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for centuries, while the GDR was constructed at home. I think you mean decades?
- M8 11y ago
  No, and there were literally billions of them. And also soviet leaders were eating babies. Alive.
  - allendoerfer 11y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatvertriebene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatvertriebene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_... And also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin Spoiler: He was not nice to his own people, nor to others.
  - cafard 11y ago
    To be fair, it wasn't just the German POWs who ended up imprisoned for decades; Russian POWs who managed to survive the German camps were shipped off to labor camps in the USSR.
fredsters_s 11y ago
Yup. Agreed. This was war. Putting young humans whose brains and morality are still in flux into such insane situations = a loss of humanity. It's more surprising to me the naiveté (which is hard to see as anything other than a put-on in this article) with which we view these events. Humans do horrible things to other humans in war.

jedrek 11y ago

> Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for centuries, while the GDR was constructed at home. I think you mean decades?

M8 11y ago
No, and there were literally billions of them. And also soviet leaders were eating babies. Alive.
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatvertriebene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatvertriebene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_... And also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin Spoiler: He was not nice to his own people, nor to others.
- cafard 11y ago
  To be fair, it wasn't just the German POWs who ended up imprisoned for decades; Russian POWs who managed to survive the German camps were shipped off to labor camps in the USSR.

fredsters_s 11y ago

Yup. Agreed. This was war. Putting young humans whose brains and morality are still in flux into such insane situations = a loss of humanity. It's more surprising to me the naiveté (which is hard to see as anything other than a put-on in this article) with which we view these events. Humans do horrible things to other humans in war.