Both Germany and the US do not like to think about US soldiers committing war crimes or even behaving badly in WWII.
The US thinks so, because its war was all about moral high ground, ignoring its very own blatant racism at home.
Germany likes to think so, because the liberation by the US actually ended in being liberated. Millions of civilians had to flee and/or were being raped by the Red army. Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for decades, while the GDR was constructed at home.
I think with time passing it becomes easier to paint a more complex and realistic picture acknowledging the situation these (often young) people were in, without justifying their actions. I would like to see glorification shifting more and more to memorization of a time and of circumstances that brought out the worst in people and must never happen again anywhere in the world.
To be fair, it wasn't just the German POWs who ended up imprisoned for decades; Russian POWs who managed to survive the German camps were shipped off to labor camps in the USSR.
The US thinks so, because its war was all about moral high ground, ignoring its very own blatant racism at home.
Germany likes to think so, because the liberation by the US actually ended in being liberated. Millions of civilians had to flee and/or were being raped by the Red army. Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for decades, while the GDR was constructed at home.
I think with time passing it becomes easier to paint a more complex and realistic picture acknowledging the situation these (often young) people were in, without justifying their actions. I would like to see glorification shifting more and more to memorization of a time and of circumstances that brought out the worst in people and must never happen again anywhere in the world.
Edit: indeed, decades