#way (for both the characters' and audience's edification) is something i think about constantly

[sea-changed]

Four quotes from The Bitter Road to Freedom that I though all belonged together in the same post:

"In the eyes of the GI, the Germans fared well when compared to the French: said one trooper, 'these people are cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs. They're our kind of people.'" (196)

"But everywhere the Military Government turned to look for capable administrators, they found people who had worked in some way for the Nazi regime. General George Patton, now commander of the Third Army Military Government in Bavaria, spoke for many of his subordinate officers when he said it was 'silly' to get rid of 'the most intelligent people' in Germany." (203)

"It is remarkable how, in the first accounts of the camps by Western journalists, names of individual prisoners, their countries of origin, and their personal experiences are totally absent. Rather, reporters and soldiers described an undifferentiated mass of human refuse. [...] Even the living were reduced to inanimate, nonhuman objects of pity and almost contempt." (299)

"Upon first encountering the smouldering corpses at the small labor camp at Ohrdruf, General Eisenhower declared 'we are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.' Ike was right: for the soldiers, the liberation of the camps lent a moral clarity to the war. In dozens of war memoirs by U.S. soldiers, the discovery of the camps is said to have answered the question of what the war was all about. But for the surviving Jews, liberation brought not answers but questions." (308)