Good on you for being open minded enough to realize that behind any historical event there is usually an admixture of different motivations. Unfortunately Hollywood which sadly seems to be the basis for the majority of peoples education about the war beyond the very stayed and safe opinions.
That's somewhat misleading. The depiction of wartime Germany and Germans in mainstream American cinema has not been a uniformic and unvaried continuum from the 1940s to the present. Even during the height of the war itself, when the enemy were not simply faceless extras opposing our heroes from across a hedgerow, there was usually some effort taken to distinguish between "Nazis" and ordinary German soldiers (in contrast with the Japanese, who were generally subject to a much more visceral hatred).
That said history is written by the victor and as such tends to reflect more positively upon events during the period.
It would be more accurate to say that history is written by
historians, and as such, there's always going to be an incentive for scholars to upset the historical apple cart, so to speak. To earn their own place in history radically changing the popular perception of noteworthy events, and by all indications, the WWII Nazi death-camp narrative would appear to be a particularly inviting topic to challenge the accepted accounts, but extensive legal minefields around the topic ensure that all but the most courageous or reckless of scholars will steer clear of the topic, and those who press on regardless will have their professional and personal reputations systematically destroyed, at the very least.
With that said the Nuremberg trials were sensationalized to the extent that the Allied forces had already started laying the ground work for de-nazification and with the majority of the upper echelons of the party dead, wanted to put on what essentially were show trials for the sake of both their own media consumers at home and the Russians as well who would have resorted to their own systems of prosecution that had been carried out in the East with captured Germans and German allies, essentially a kangaroo court without the fan fair.
Which goes back to the essentially two-faced and hypocritical nature of the tribunal itself. While the surviving members of the German government were being fast-tracked to the hangman's noose for "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" among other things, the victorious Allied forces were forcibly removing approximately 14 million ethnic Germans from their homes in Central Europe and shipping them in cattle cars to Germany (a process that would kill an estimated 500,000 of them), inspiring outrage and disgust from observers such as George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, with the latter cuttingly demanding to know if "mass deportations [are] crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?"
No administration was blind to the dangers of the Soviet Union and in some cases the expansion of the Soviet Union was directly a result of the American and British funding that had gone into it, to prop it up during the German invasions.
If the Roosevelt administration was not blind to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, then it must have been complicit in the latter's aims and ambitions, considering the extent to which the upper echelons of the U.S. federal government were found to be stocked with Communists and Communist sympathizers after the war.
The Germans tend to get the worst of the press from the period, because they were the first totalitarian power to break the international peace.
Perhaps more accurately, they were seemingly the fulfillment of the centuries-old English paranoia about another European power rising to the status of continental hegemon and thus being able to challenge the British Empire's (then already-declining) global supremacy. English anti-German propaganda inspired by fears of so being eclipsed goes back into the 19th century, though to the extent that Great Britain was successful in attempting to keep Germany down, it was a Pyrrhic victory, as the English ended up sacrificing their empire and effectively crippling themselves to ultimately merely delay Germany's rise to the status of Europe's dominant (economic if not military) force.
Churchill had wanted war with the Soviet Union over the invasion of Finland and was called off it because the renewed and more aggressive territorial ideals of the Nazi party were considered equal to if not more dangerous to European and world safety.
Considered more dangerous by whom, exactly? The Soviet Union's ideology was explicitly premised upon the idea of world-wide Marxist revolution, and there had been numerous such uprisings attempted throughout Europe in the inter-war period, including one in Germany itself which was only put down at the last moment by German WWI veterans grouping up with their old wartime squadmates in
ad-hoc "Freikorps" militias to reinstate order.
That said Hitler cast the die when he ordered the go ahead for Operation Barbarossa, because it instantly put the Soviets at odds with Germany. The western leadership in Britain and America were under no illusions that the war single handed against Germany would have to be fought by relinquishing control over German outposts in the colonial world and then an invasion of Europe. By having the seemingly limitless manpower of the Soviets if not on side at least headed in the right direction, it made the job of opening up a western front of attack much easier. The intention was likely to not rely on the Soviets to be able to mount the same level of restructuring and mass production/military victories that it did, merely to tie up the better parts of the German army in fighting in the east. By the time that the dust settled in WW2 the Soviets had became a much more capable enemy, than they had been before the war.
Again, why ally with the Commies? They had demonstrated no less belligerence and territorial ambition than the Nazis, and there was ample evidence that they had been carrying out mass killings for decades at this point, whereas the German concentration camp system was in its infancy and most of the then-inmates were ethnic Poles. Furthermore, German territorial ambitions were directed eastwards,
away from France, Britain and so forth, whereas Soviet expansionism was a very westward-oriented affair.
As to the fact that their is this strange fetishism on Nazism alone when the crimes of communism far out weigh it. I can only hazard the guess that since most of the institutions in the west were under infiltration from left leaning professors to outright ardent communist, and these are the same people who took over large swathes of media production including Hollywoods Jews, it's not really a wonder that there has always been this soft treatment of international communism in many circles, that shouldn't be there considering how deadly and destructive it was.
There's something rather darkly comedic about the fact that the "Aryan" aesthetics promoted by Hitler's followers arouse such hysteria in Jews to this very day (to the point where making both romantic leads in a movie fair-haired and blue-eyed is seemingly evidence of "anudder shoah" waiting to happen), yet Russian Communism was no less artistically enamored of square-jawed-and-straw-headed sons of the soil, their icy blue eyes gazing sternly from amid sheaves of harvested wheat or atop tank turrets. Alexander Deinek's "Defense of Sevastopol" illustrates the point rather nicely, as the two most prominent figures in the foreground, the grenade-throwing Russian sailor and the (dead or dying) German soldier, could pass as twins caught on either side of some terrible, fratricidal family feud:
They even have the same haircut.
As for the holocaust, it is over prescribed in terms of our modern society and the way it's slanted for the public. We do no see subjects like the Killing Fields or the Holodomor get covered extensively in the same way, but again I think that's an issue with media studios and what they are willing to produce.
There's a certain amount of black humor to be had in comparing and contrasting the nearly-ironclad estimates of Jewish deaths in the concentration camps with the number of "kulak" deaths resulting from Stalin's forced collectivization policies, and observing how some scholars try to nickel-and-dime the latter down, splitting hairs over exact cause of death and so forth, in an apparent attempt to ensure that the number does not equal or exceed the sacred Six Million.
Another point about the seeming obsession with the Reich over the Soviets is this, The Germans were defeated and brought to bare by crushing military might. This is why they are still popular subjects of historical analysis. The Soviets, decayed and withered over time becoming a shadow of it's former power to essentially fall to a near bloodless coup and enforced reformation.
I seem to recall that the sudden fall of the Soviet Union came as a surprise to almost everyone in the west, to the point of former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner complaining, in retrospect, that he had "never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem," and decrying "the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis." It seems as though throughout the Soviet period, the USSR was portrayed by both sympathizers and opposition in the west as strong, stable and pretty much
inevitable, as far as the question of whether or not it would still exist at the end of the 20th century or thereabouts. Despite this shred of common ground, negative portrayals of the Soviets in western media tended to be derided as right-wing fantasies (
Red Dawn was particularly hated in this regard) with the exception of the "Red Scare" era of 1947-1957, which just so happened to chronologically coincide with the low-key but widespread purge of Jews from positions of authority in the Soviet Union.
Anyways that's just my rumination on the subject.
Thanks for your time.
