While I don’t buy the ultimate conclusion that ALL Germans were “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” this supports Donald Goldhagen’s book that says that the camp guards and even ordinary German soldiers went out of their way to kill Jews, even to the point of herding them westward to avoid the Russians so that the Russians wouldn’t free them.
That’s some slick communist propaganda - implying that they were being “herded away from” those who would “free them”. Whichever allied army reached a camp would liberate the camp - all the death camps were liberated.
Russian death camps are just as infamous and NAZI camps, having killed tens of millions of Russians, and, similarly, were populated with an array what the Soviet government considered to be of enemies of the state, criminals, undesirables, etc.
Anti-semitism on both an institutional and personal level in Russia, in fact, all over the world, has a long yet conveniently forgotten history.
In the closing days of the war, a number of German units ignored fantasy orders coming from Hitler and moved west so they could surrender to the Americans. One can only surmise that if prisoners were being herded westward this was not done to be mean to them, but, like most everyone seemed to know at the time, because surrender to the Americans presented a fate infinitely preferable to surrender to the Russians.
After WWII, everyone trapped in the Soviet bloc was stuck in a Godless, communist, politburo-run, militaristic, corrupt, command economy in which the domestic political and commerce scene can only be described as savage.
This guy has written some interesting books about Russia during the cold war; this article on his life is well worth a read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn