Wow, what a great collection… a interesting mix of propaganda photos and authentic “candids”. It's great to be able to see some of these after conducting so much research on the war in the East.
The sixth picture are American B-17's, you can even see the American roundel on the wings. Interestingly, in 2009 I got a guided tour of the Reichstag building by the Bundeswehr military attached to the Bundestag which took us to places normally off limits to the public. When the Germans renovated the building they left most of the WWII graffiti in place, the vast majority is Russian but I also saw some in English and one that stuck with me was a drawing of Killroy in one corner of the building.Pretty good picture set but there are several pictures of Americans or Germans and one that I would swear is from Pearl Harbor. Captions would have been nice.
I am surprised they would leave such graffiti intact. I thought they wanted to erase most all remnants from their memories. Perhaps if it is just American/Soviet graffiti it was left because it was “acceptable” to their memories.
The way it was explained is that the graffiti was part of history and therefor should not be destroyed. There is also the fact that modern Germans love to wallow in the sins of their forebears. Get the average German talking and they will go on for hours about how evil the Nazis were and why the German people as a whole should be made to atone for the sins of seventy years ago. If Americans were as bad as them about self-recrimination we would give every person in America with a drop of black blood enough money to live like a king for the rest of their lives and think that it was still not enough to make amends for slavery. Don't forget that Demjanjuk was prosecuted in Germany last year on the basis of very flimsy evidence.