>Americans on the other hand, don’t seem to want to take credit for anything. Even though by and large, the collective memory of Europeans who survived the war view our contributions favorably and NOT the USSR. (Many Europeans and to deal with the occupations and conquests of BOTH Soviet and Nazi troops.)
I doubt you’ve ever read the real story of the Allied occupation of Germany. There was a very real attempt by Truman’s government to starve the German population to death. He outlawed farming, used German POWs and Civilians as slave labor without giving them enough food, and didn’t provide food supplies for civilians. The man who came up with the occupation plan, Henry Morgenthau hated Germans and wanted to see them all dead. 2 Million Germans died after the war ended from hungery and privation.
Wikipedia gets a lot of the details wrong, but it’s a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
The primary reason the Morgenthau plan failed was German women trading sex for food on a mass scale with allied troops to keep their families fed.
http://www.ihr.org/other/july09weber.html
>Accordingly, British and American authorities denied access by International Red Cross representatives to camps holding German prisoners of war. Moreover, any attempt by German civilians to feed the prisoners was punishable by death. / 11 Many thousands of German PoWs died in American custody, most infamously in the so-called “Rhine meadow camps,” where prisoners were held under appalling conditions, with no shelter and very little food. / 12
By and large, the US army hated what their political masters in DC wanted to do to Germany, General Patton chief among the detractors. Before he was possibly assassinated he’d planned to write a book about the occupation.
Many thousands of German PoWs died
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More than thousands. German troops captured at the end of the war were starved like cattle. Not on the scale of the German treatment of Russian POW’s during the first year of Barbarossa though. The allies had millions of civilians to feed so obviously it was difficult to feed millions of German POW’s.