Read "A Woman in Berlin" by a well-educated German woman who worked in publishing before 1945 and avoided multiple rapes by attaching herself to one Soviet officer. The movie trailer link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEZxcSf9HwM.

The book, but not the movie, gives a good, if unintentional, picture of how immersed in Nazi racial ideology German women, even elite intellectuals, were. It's clear that ideological complicity with Nazism ran very deep and those who resisted it were exceptional. With 20-27m dead at home behind them, the Soviet soldiers, could hardly have been expected to exercise restraint. The logic of the Soviets' application of collective guilt stemmed from this. Was it a war crime? Certainly. Did it, like the bombing of Dresden and the Soviet occupation of East Germany, convince the Germans to abjure war forever more? Also certainly.

Had the Americans applied more of General Sherman's treatment to more of the Confederacy, we might have avoided post-1877 Jim Crow, 4m members of the Klan in the 1920s, the Klan's 1960s terror against civil rights activists and the January 6 neo-confederate insurrection. The lesson: removing the boot too early from the neck of a people who back a criminal, expansionist enemy regime animated by racial darwinism does them no favor.