A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program. Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you. If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win. https:/…
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could... Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Sov…
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.