Big difference between soldiers dying....they weren't innocent.
Sure they were.
Some at the very least. Many were conscripts, they had precious little choice but to serve. Pope Benedict was drafted as a flak gunner and also served in the infantry (his 14 year old cousin who had down syndrome was murdered in a euthanasia program) like all German teenage boys the Hitler Youth was compulsory.
Some of the men who were left to die agonizing deaths in the open air camps by the French and the Americans had fought heroically against the Red Army. The Iron curtain would have been a lot closer to the Atlantic Ocean were it not for their sacrifice. President Ronald Reagen was roundly censured for acknowledging this uncomfortable fact.
Anthony Beevor is an author and historian who accessed the Soviet archives and found some very horrific information therein. His book "The fall of Berlin" details the depredations of the rapacious Red Army and what they did to civilians, and even "liberated" female concentration camp inmates, is truly sickening.
Lev Kopalev was a Jewish Captain in the Red Army who sharply denounced atrocities which were being perpetrated upon German civilians by Soviet soldiers, and the Reds threw this man into the gulag (where he met Alexander Solzhenitsyn) for 10 years as punishment for displaying his humanity.
The Germans had no monopoly on cruelty, or evil.
Children, babies, being gassed while their mothers held them in their arms.
Years back, I stood in attendance at a function where two Canadian RCAF veterans were being lauded for their service.
These men had participated in the February 1945 raid on Dresden, a city of no real strategic or military value, which was full of refugees, women, children, and seniors fleeing the Red Army.
The city, full of non combatant civilians, was immolated with incendiary bombs.
The dagger is from the Sturmabteilung, it predates the war.
Many of the SA men signed up to fight back against the very real threat of Communism seizing power.
History is not as black and white as hindsight may make it seem.