How did post-war Germany, Japan, Italy, and France view/treat its returning soldiers?

[Thistletooth]

This is a topic I have heard exactly nothing about over the years. I hear plenty about American, British, or Soviet soldiers being lauded after the war, given massive parades, given new homes by the government (in the case of the US), and being treated as both conquering soldiers and liberators of the world. Perfect example of the greatness of the nation, "Greatest Generation", whatever.

But what was the common view of surviving soldiers in the defeated countries, or in countries like France that, while victorious, suffered through a catastrophic defeat and needed to be rescued by others? Did these countries retain a positive view of their soldiers and what they fought for? Were they lauded as national heroes, or urged to play down their past role? I don't want to draw too sharp a distinction with the claim of American soldiers in Vietnam getting spit on stateside (whether that's true or not, it isn't relevant), but were any of the countries' soldiers compelled to deny their involvement, or to feel ashamed of themselves?

Basically, what did late 1940s-1950s Germany, France, Italy, and Japan (or other countries that either lost or didn't entirely "win") do with their veterans, and what was the popular consensus on how the soldiers were supposed to think of themselves? How are they viewed nowadays?

[Aetius]

Many of the Soviet soldiers ended up in the gulags after the victory. They were contaminated by seeing living conditions outside the Soviet Union.

The dead Italians and French soldiers are commemorated with monuments in the center of nearly every village I have been in. The monuments basically state that they sacrificed themselves for their country.

In Italy basically you have two phases, the war against the allies and the war against the Germans and the Fascist Salo Republic. The victory in phase two is National Liberation Day.

In Japan they also see it as personal sacrifice , but there are no monuments in towns and villages like in Europe. They have the Yasukuni Shrine instead, this has been complicated by the addition of the ashes of war criminals in the 1970s. The Japanese view is also coloured by the power of the alumni of the army/navy, their connections to right-wing groups, connections to organized crime and the LDP's relation to all three of these groups.

[Lord Finnish]

German soldiers were treated normally.
Except SS soldiers, which were in great danger, but some Germans helped them to escape i.e. to South America.

And, in Japan the returning soldiers were taken in many ways. Some took them as great heroes, but while others (mainly those who had lost relatives in the war) took them as traitors, as they didn't die for the fatherland. In the Japanese tradition, which was cleaned by the USA, soldier returning home from a lost war is a sort of traitor. That's my image.

[L.J. Hiertha]

Japan:
Considerable amounts of troops taken prisoners by the Soviets in mainland China were sent off to prison camps. The survivors returned in the 1950's, but tended to keep their fate secret out of shame. It's one of these things that Japanese society put a lid on and didn't talk about for a long time.

The French were really happy, since the war's end meant the remaining 1 million French troops made prisoners of war in 1940 got to return home. The Vichy tried to negotiate their release by playing nice with the Germans, but only managed to effectuate the release of something like 200-300K prisoners.

[ComradeOm]

Originally Posted by Aetius

Many of the Soviet soldiers ended up in the gulags after the victory. They were contaminated by seeing living conditions outside the Soviet Union.

Only true of those taken prisoner by the Germans. The Soviets authorities had little time for those who had allowed themselves be taken prisoner. The vast majority of returning soldiers, ie those that had avoided capture, were, and still are, treated like heroes.

Edit:

The dead Italians and French soldiers are commemorated with monuments in the center of nearly every village I have been in. The monuments basically state that they sacrificed themselves for their country.

Depends where you are. I've been to a few villages/towns in what would have been Vichy territory and, while there's usually plenty of reminders of the Gestapo etc, the war memorials are often conspicuously dedicated solely to WWI. In my experience anyway.

[ComradeOm]

Originally Posted by Vincent Julien

Wasn't Stalin's line that anyone who was taken prisoner had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner? I.E, you were supposed to die rather than allow yourself to be captured?

Pretty much. Those who had fought bravely but futilely during the first chaotic months of the German advance got a pretty poor deal.

[Pero Coveilha]

Originally Posted by L.J. Hiertha

The French were really happy, since the war's end meant the remaining 1 million French troops made prisoners of war in 1940 got to return home.

of course, the families were happy to get them back, but they weren't praised as soldiers, more as fathers, husbands...

Originally Posted by Aetius

The dead (...) French soldiers are commemorated with monuments in the center of nearly every village I have been in. The monuments basically state that they sacrificed themselves for their country.

yeah but actually, on every May 8th commemoration, the veterans who participate aren't soldiers from 1939-40, but former Free French or Resistants

[Stahltrommel]

Originally Posted by Lord Finnish

German soldiers were treated normally.
Except SS soldiers, which were in great danger, but some Germans helped them to escape i.e. to South America.

I don't believe the former SS-memebers were in any real danger from their own countrymen, execept perhaps in the DDR.
Very few (of the total) ordinary SS-soldiers emigrated/escaped abroad.
There were, I believe, some sort of sanction against former SS-members, like the loss of pension gods for their war service. Not entirely fair if this is true IMO.

[mlipo]

Originally Posted by ComradeOm

Pretty much. Those who had fought bravely but futilely during the first chaotic months of the German advance got a pretty poor deal.

I wonder how many who were captured in summer of 41 actually made it to the end of the war?

Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale discusses what Soviets came home to.

[ComradeOm]

Originally Posted by mlipo

I wonder how many who were captured in summer of 41 actually made it to the end of the war?

Very few I'd imagine. AFAIK up to 3 million Soviet PoWs (largely from those first months) died in German camps.

[Leviathan07]

Originally Posted by Stahltrommel

I don't believe the former SS-memebers were in any real danger from their own countrymen, execept perhaps in the DDR.
Very few (of the total) ordinary SS-soldiers emigrated/escaped abroad.
There were, I believe, some sort of sanction against former SS-members, like the loss of pension gods for their war service. Not entirely fair if this is true IMO.

No, there were no official sanctions against the SS as a whole. Of course a lot of the former SS members were persecuted during the war crimes trials, but the ordinary Waffen-SS member faced no such persecution. There were Waffen-SS reunions all the way into the 1980s AFAIK.


As for the treatment of returning German soldiers in general - what you have to consider is, that the *entire* Wehrmacht walked into captivity in 1945. When the war ended, virtually every family was missing at least one, of not more, members in POW camps. If you talk to the old people today, ask them how the months after the war went, something that you almost always hear is how relieved the people were when their fathers and brothers and sons finally arrived home from the POW camps. You hear them talk about how the men would one day return to their home towns, and they would spend one or more day just trying to find their families!! Its not as if one day they walked off the bus, duffel bag over their shoulder, and said "Hi Mom, I'm back".

In many cases, the houses where their families had been living were destroyed, the family had fled, or was dead. Returning prisoners -who often had no idea what awaited them at home- would have to find the neighbours first, and then ask their way around to find out where the family had moved. Sometimes there would be no one left in the town who knew where they had gone, and the poor guy would have to spend weeks trying to find his family. Sometimes they would return to the burnt-out wreckage that once was their home, and the new address of the family would be written on the walls in white chalk.

Some returning prisoners never found their families again. The Red Cross maintained a search service where you could try to find family members that had been lost in the war, and this service was busy all the way into the 1950s. There were some cases where lost children were reunited with their parents and siblings as late as the 1980s.

So, when soldiers returned home, people didn't regard them as anything other than long lost family members. There was nothing like "you lost the war"... everyone had lost the war.

Life in Germany in 1945/46 was a nightmare. The country was destroyed beyond anything imaginable, the families were torn apart and dispersed like leaves before the wind, many people starved. Life only returned to something like normal in the years afterwards...

All in all, there was no special attitude towards the men who had fought in the war. Almost every men of age had been drafted, so almost everyone was a former soldier. You can imagine that this made a serious discussion of stuff like war crimes, Nazi involvement of the Wehrmacht and so on impossible for a long time. It took until the late 1960s that the people were ready to actually talk about the war.

[Jove]

Originally Posted by Leviathan07

No, there were no official sanctions against the SS as a whole. Of course a lot of the former SS members were persecuted during the war crimes trials, but the ordinary Waffen-SS member faced no such persecution. There were Waffen-SS reunions all the way into the 1980s AFAIK.

I thought former members were not given the pensions and health care of former members of the national armed forces as the government didn't consider them part of the army etc.

My understanding was that these members created an organization under Sepp Detriche (or was it Paul Husser) to care for former Waffen - SS who needed health care, jobs, etc. (like a fraternity).

[Leviathan07]

Hmm, I'm not sure about the pensions and health care things. None of my family were in the SS, so I wouldn't know... and I guess I never asked.

But I think there were laws (later on, in the 50's/60s) that approved of some kind of pension for former SS members.

[knott]

Originally Posted by ComradeOm

Very few I'd imagine. AFAIK up to 3 million Soviet PoWs (largely from those first months) died in German camps.

Well the USSR sent millions of russian POWs captured by the Germans directly to the Gulags..

[ComradeOm]

Originally Posted by knott

Well the USSR sent millions of russian POWs captured by the Germans directly to the Gulags..

Does that in any way excuse the massacre of Soviet soldiers in Nazi deathcamps? Indeed, is your statement in any way relevant to that fact? I have already noted above that the Soviets were harsh towards their own PoWs and no one is pretending that they were any fairer on German prisoners.

[Abdul Goatherd]

Originally Posted by Stahltrommel

Not millions. Quite a lot, but certainly not millions.

Oh, they sent them all (c.2.5 million). But most came right out after vetting. But enough didn't.

As for attitudes, Red Army soldiers were certainly lauded to Achilles. Even at the height of Soviet repression, proof of veteranship offered a layer of protection and deference. If you were going to nail one regardless, you'd still take the precaution of changing the record of his service.

As for ex-POWs, at least those vetted out of the gulag, AFAIK, they weren't particularly denigrated, they just weren't much lauded (not for "allowing themselves" to be taken prisoner per se, but rather for "not having contributed" to the victory). Needless to say, ex-POWs with collaborationist records, if released, were shunned beneath contempt.

Mikhail Solokhov's "Fate of Man", a Soviet novel and popular film of the 1950s, puts the Soviet POWs in a rather heroic light. Yes, it is post-Stalin and may have itself contributed to a softer attitude, but it doesn't seem particularly defensive and probably reflects what was already the general attitude.

P.S. - Please, please don't bring up comparisons with Soviet POWs in German hands. That was a genocide machine that ran at a pace higher than the Jewish Holocaust at its height, until Hitler changed his mind in 1942.

[knott]

Originally Posted by ComradeOm

Does that in any way excuse the massacre of Soviet soldiers in Nazi deathcamps? Indeed, is your statement in any way relevant to that fact? I have already noted above that the Soviets were harsh towards their own PoWs and no one is pretending that they were any fairer on German prisoners.

Well it is not exactly good manors to send millions of your own soldiers that finally are released from inhuman POW camps directly to the Gulags. I’m not trying to excuse German or Russian handling of POW, I’m turning against your attempt to ignore the less flattering parts of USSRs history.

[ComradeOm]

Originally Posted by knott

Well it is not exactly good manors to send millions of your own soldiers that finally are released from inhuman POW camps directly to the Gulags. I’m not trying to excuse German or Russian handling of POW, I’m turning against your attempt to ignore the less flattering parts of USSRs history.

My mistake. I read your post as "German POWs".

Although if you'd read my above posts you'd see that I am highly critical of the process that you describe.

[Tamerlan]

Originally Posted by Thistletooth

But what was the common view of surviving soldiers in the defeated countries, or in countries like France that, while victorious, suffered through a catastrophic defeat and needed to be rescued by others?

As for France, the large number of Resistants/Free French fighters is somehow comparable to the number of prisonners in Germany. 5 years later, when the prisonners returned, may 1940 was very far, the French army fielded one million soldiers in Germany and most French military casualties actually happened after 1940.

As for the prisonners, they weren't perceived as cowards or heroes. May-June 1940 had been disastrous with a ratio of KIA exceeding anything experienced in WWI. They certainly weren't perceived as heroes, but by 1945 [and even earlier 1943], people had come to realise that the problems really lied with the military elite of the time [Petain and the likes who had completely discredited themselves through more than friendly collaboration with the Nazis].

On top of that, common folks weren't particularly interested in looking back on a painful event. De Gaulle did not want either to look back on this or on the collaborators [some high ranking vichyst public civil servants like Maurice Papon managed to keep their jobs in the new administration], since this would have benefited to the communists, by romanticizing them a little too much their own action in the resistance.

Ultimately there was ofc a huge relief to have fathers, brothers and sons back at home.

[White Daimon]

Alll this talk of executing sovjet troops returning makes me think of the last days of the regime of the Red Khemers. They were really nervous about Vietnam, thinking a war might be imminent. And then they learned that the vietnamese might have infiltrated the border guards. Or maybe not... Anyway, they wanted to make sure there was no spies.

So they collected all the border guards and soldiers assigned to border duty, interrogated them ( as in torture ) and executed them when they confessed. Like they all did. In total 100.000 soldiers died. off course, that didnt excatly help defend the nation when the vietnamese invaded shortly after.

Anyway, what did the french think of those who served Vichy or even the Wehrmacht? Were they looked upon just like the free french, or what?