The Soviet experience of the war had been far worse than that of the Western powers. Soviet troops “had seen their own land devastated,” Frederick Taylor writes. “They were living witnesses of the fact that at least twenty-five million of their compatriots of all ages and both sexes had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation—all in an aggressive German war of choice executed by Hitler’s forces with scant regard for even the most basic, minimally humanizing rules of conflict.”84 Not surprisingly, Soviet troops entering German territory were often driven by a spirit
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