After blogging about how Americans summarily executed Germans found with arms after WWII in the pacification program, I ran across this recollection of a German soldier in Kim du Toit's blog explaining why Germans are now pacifists:

Longtime German Reader Heike D. took some exception to the allusion, and, using English which is exponentially better than my German, offered this rebuttal:

No excuse but there are reasons.

I was a boy when my father told me of the time when WW2 came to an end and American troops occupied the region around Detmold, my home. As war was still going on, fighter planes shot people working in the fields. Grounded airmen were killed when people got them. Many of those people later were executed for murder. War was over, American troops all around, clearing the region of arms, checked homes for weapons. A boy in my street had kept his air rifle—and was shot on the spot.