After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies (obviously Germans acted similarly with Allied PoWs during the war). Germans were expelled by the millions from culturally German areas. Not every Axis power received the same degree of treatment, which I assume is due to the higher level of vilification of Germans caused by wartime and continuing post wartime propaganda (obviously the Nazis created quite a bit of ammunition for this).
I bring this up because we can observe this type of vilification in real-time by western media against Russians as well as the same propaganda against Ukrainians by Russian media. I'm hoping that once the conflict is over that Europe's experience makes this type of post-war pillaging distasteful.
> After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies
Really? I never heard of this except USSR.
I know that in the early months after the war the general populace was forced not just to tour death camps but sometimes bury bodies, and that during the war, western countries like Canada had enlisted men do some farming, but as far as I know the western allies tried to disgorge their PoWs as quickly as possible because they were a cost.
Can you point me to references otherwise?
Certainly USA, UK, and USSR “recruited” German scientists and spies post war, and how much free will they felt or did have in the matter can be questioned. But I don’t think any of them were slaves.
After the war, German soldiers were passed around to be used as slave labor by the Allies (obviously Germans acted similarly with Allied PoWs during the war). Germans were expelled by the millions from culturally German areas. Not every Axis power received the same degree of treatment, which I assume is due to the higher level of vilification of Germans caused by wartime and continuing post wartime propaganda (obviously the Nazis created quite a bit of ammunition for this).
I bring this up because we can observe this type of vilification in real-time by western media against Russians as well as the same propaganda against Ukrainians by Russian media. I'm hoping that once the conflict is over that Europe's experience makes this type of post-war pillaging distasteful.