[elcid1970]

Most Nazi suicides after V-E Day were among the well to do & influential. They were fully aware of what their Third Reich had done to the Jews & other “subhumans” & they expected the Allies to reply in kind, outside of the rule of law, as was already happening where the Red Army had conquered.

Germans living near death camps claimed they had no idea what was going on despite the unmistakable stench of the crematoria. The nearest thing to Allied poetic justice was forcing Germans to handle & bury the thousands of murdered corpses. Some were driven to suicide after that experience as well.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

They were fully aware of what their Third Reich had done to the Jews & other “subhumans” & they expected the Allies to reply in kind, outside of the rule of law, as was already happening where the Red Army had conquered.

I love that scene in Band of Brothers where the formerly well-to-do people of the local town were made to sort the bodies and dig graves. Sweet Schadenfreude.

[T-Bone Texan]

"...they expected the Allies to reply in kind, outside of the rule of law, as was already happening where the Red Army had conquered...."

There are many, many examples of our people also acting outside the rule of law and harming noncombatant german civilians after hostilities ended.

The one that springs to mind is the Morganthau-driven policy that German civilians were to be kicked out of their homes, in winter, so that jews could live in them.

Also, the story of Eli Weisel comes to mind wherein he and friends, postwar, would roam the countryside at night looking for German females to rape. The Allies knew all about that kind of activity and allowed it to continue in order to cow the citizenry into submission.

I do not affix a moral value to those events, I am just throwing them out there.

[morphing libertarian]

IKE had the locals walk through the camps so they could no longer deny what was going on there.