Let's not get carried away. True, standards in US POW camps dropped after Germany had lost the war, for reasons of convenience (no US POW counterparts whose living conditions would reciprocally decrease) and the (rightful) fury of the Allies about horrors of the concentration camps. True that US POWs were, by and large, treated best (along with English POWs) in German camps. True that immediately after the war, the US Army wasn't logistically great in taking care of the millions of German POWs it all of the sudden had. It took the easy way out and let them go after six months or earlier (unless they were shipped to France or England which were in need of labor force). True that after the war German POWs in French camps (especially former SS men) were incentivized to either join the French Foreign Legion or ruin their health in French lead and coal mines. True that my grandfather had very little to eat in the Russian POW camp in Siberia where he stayed until 1949, but "neither had my captors" and he was always quick to add that "I was never hit by a Russian in all those years and the Russian women would slip us warm potatoes when we were cutting wood in the forest".
But no one and certainly no German in his right mind will say that US treatment of German prisoners of war or the population was wilfully mean on any meaningful scale and for any longer duration, much less genocidal and even in its excesses ever approaching Nazi crimes. The worst thing one can say about US occupation is that it initially fumbled at what to do (as Churchill once put it so well: "Trust the US to always do the right thing in the end - after having exhausted all other available options of course!"). But after the harsh hunger winter of 1946/47, the US saw to it, and not just with C.A.R.E., that the German population in its occupation zone was properly fed. Ask any older German about his memories from that time, US soup kitchens have not been forgotten. My mom's first confrontation with US candy (and a black person) was when a black tank commander chucked sweets at her from a Sherman turret. Of course she refused to take them (having been fed with all the propaganda how it might be poisoned) leading the offended tank commander to curse her as some "goddamn Nazi"! She forever regretted not taking it (and her two sisters admonished her severely for her stupidity when she came home to tell the tale).
Let's face it: Germany's war and genocidal crimes were such that, in 1945, shooting close to half the German population would have maybe not been just, but understandable as an act of blind revenge/rage. That did not happen. Neither did the Morgenthau plan of deindustrializing Germany and turning it into an agricultural country happen. The Ruhrgebiet (coal and iron!) and the Saarland (ditto!) did not go to France. Of all the occupation zones, the US one hat the least dismantling of industrial plants and was the first one offering economic freedom. To this day, the wealthiest German
Bundesländer are Bavaria (Munich), Hesse (Frankfurt) and Baden-Würtemberg (Stuttgart), all three of them were US occupation zone (and had by no means been wealthy regions before the war). They had a headstart that hasn't been caught up with 66 years after the end of WW II. To this day they transfer parts of their surplus to other German
Länder under the
Länderfinanzausgleich.
Not even the mass rapes in Eastern Germany (US soldiers had no need to rape, they had clean-shaven, well-fed good looks, nylons, coffee and chocolate!) compare with anything that happened in the East under German control. Rape is horrible, yes, but it's not gassing families after freight training them through Europe without food and water. It's a miracle that the Russian and Poles ever spoke to us again after what we had done to their people and countries. I'm always good for some non-PC WW II cracks here, but how lucky Germany actually was after the war (and how West- and East-European nations reached out a hand to us again after all the Nazi horrors) is always in the back of my mind.
