While the battle for Aachen was still raging in mid-October 1944, a US Army psychological warfare unit filed one of the first reports from German territory. It found ‘a latent and possibly deep-seated sense of guilt, owing to the brutalities committed by the German armies in Europe, particularly in the east and against the Jews’, adding that: ‘Germans have resigned themselves to the idea of retribution and only hope that the Americans would moderate the rage of those who will punish them. But the idea of punishment they do accept.’4
Fascinating.
