Hi Jochen Jansen; Re: "I guess more Germans were killed by Russians than by Americans yet Russians were not loved that much, to put it mildly."
(1) There was zero love for the US in Germany at the end of WW2. If you have doubts about this fact, ask someone with relatives in Dresden.
(2) The German people were well beaten, and did not resist their occupiers. While this applies to the US, it equally applies to the Russians. It is in the nature of beaten people to surrender, they will surrender to whoever is there with the gun, good or bad. That is my theory, and it explains nicely why the East Germans did not revolt against the Russians in the immediate years after WW2. (They did more or less rise up in 1953, but that was 8 years after the war and rather half hearted.) By that time the US had used Magnanimity and Good Will to avoid a similar event in West Germany.
When Churchill said "In Defeat: Defiance", he lied, though it is a beautiful, if commonplace, lie. England was never defeated. They had some military reversals, but they, as a nation, were not defeated. So there was never any need for defiance. The universal human response to defeat is submission. Nazi Germany was spouting similar nonsense about resisting forever, but when the end came they submitted. This is normal human response to these sorts of events.
-- Carl |
