Why were the Germans so bad?
The Germans were the way they were because of the aftermath of WWI. Ex-soldiers like Hitler were convinced that they had been stabbed in the back by the politicians. So they became politicians themselves - and really stabbed the country in the back. At the end of WWI, US General Pershing warned against accepting the armistice "offered" by the reeling Germans. He warned that the Germans didn't know yet that they had been defeated, and urged that another month or so of fighting would make the Germans realize it - and so the subsequent peace would last.To understand the situation you really should read the classic book,The Road to SerfdomBasically, there were distinctions but not real differences between Nationalist (German and Italian) Socialism and Internationalist (actually Russian) Socialism. Road to Serfdom was written by an Austrian who had emigrated from Europe to Britain (having picked up English while visiting America as a teenager for a year). It was written during WWII, before the liberation of the death camps. His economic/social insight into socialism (he dedicated his book "to the socialists of all parties") led him to predict that since we knew of the horrible work camps in Soviet Siberia before the war, we had to expect that equally horrible things (which he did not assay to predict in detail) would be found to have been perpetrated by the equally ruthless socialists of Germany.
(Link to the Readers' Digest Condensed Version in PDF!)
Another part of the problem was the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. FDR's announcement of a demand for unconditional surrender was popular in America, because the public realized that the armistice of WWI hadn't produced peace. The downside of that was the fanaticism which that proclamation roused in the breast of the German soldier. The policy may have been exactly right, but the announcement of that policy was probably premature.
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming