Thank you for visiting the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad! But you are rather an exception to the rule, most of the guests from Germany, upon arrival in St. Petersburg, mostly go to the nearest bar to get drunk on beer. (I worked at the hotel reception). "Hate is a bad friend" - There is a good phrase - Hate It has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet. (Maya Angelou)
I'm saddened to see you've basically come to this place to see your prejudices confirmed. This is what tourists do, you know, visiting other cities: They try having a good time. That's a pretty normal behaviour regardless of nationality.
Please watch the YouTube channel "German History Archive", look at the smiling, happy faces of the German soldier.
Based on what you've told us about yourself, I can be sympathetic for your feeling irked by such a sight, but you're being willfully selective in your bid to find your views confirmed.
So there's a Youtube channel. What of it? How many views does it even have, how many subscribers? How many of them are German? What is its significance in the public eye?
I quoted these select examples from your comments only to make a point. I understand where your antipathy is coming from, but you should be able to understand its futility. It is not a state of mind that can be sustained.
I know for a fact that Swedish troops massacred my entire home town during the Thirty Year's war, a conflict which had proportionally killed even more people than the Second World War did.
I do not take a dislike to Swedes, I do not resent the fact even modern-day Swedes revere Gustavus Adolphus – who orchestrated a campaign that saw Germany lose a fifth of her population – as a national hero.
Speaking from a humanist perspective, it's at least a good sign that modern-day Germans don't revere Nazi criminals – much unlike e.g. the Japanese, who still revere their war criminals.
Anyways, this branch of the discussion is moot. I would like to try and answer your question, regardless.
"France and Germany have shown how international reconciliation works. Both nations are close friends today." - with all due respect, this is not a very correct comparison. France quickly lost, surrendered, in fact did not take part in the Second World War. The destruction and damage caused by Germany to the USSR is not comparable to what France lost. It is easy to forgive and forget when you first lost, secondly you didn’t put up resistance, thirdly your cities weren’t destroyed, your people weren’t killed.
You're quite mistaken, it is a very apt comparison.
France and Germany had been at each others' throats for centuries, so much so that both nations considered the other a "hereditary enemy". Depending on what to count as all-out war, they were at war no less than 17 times in the two centuries leading up to 1945, often one war leading directly to the next as a means of reprisal.
That both countries are on friendly terms now – and not just their governments but their peoples as well if polls are to be believed – is a miracle. We'll have to come back to this, as it directly ties in to your question.
You've wondered why a distinction is made in the German concscious mind between the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, such as the widespread devastation caused in what was then the USSR.
You've suggested a variety of rather unworthy motives for this, to which German members responded by asking whether or not the war crimes of the Red Army were being remembered in Russia.
Personally, I found that response uncalled-for; violence begets violence, as you correctly insisted.
(Even though your comments lean hard towards exonerating the individual from whatever crimes they committed. Violence begets violence, but violence doesn't justify violence.)
I would argue there are three reasons for the distinction mentioned above:
1. Exposition. The Holocaust happened right here; events like the siege of Leningrad did not. The Holocaust, being rightfully seen as a unique event by scholars globally, is widely discussed and such discussions tend to spawn new discussions. Psychologically speaking, this is inevitable.
2. The Holocaust is a unique event; the devastations Hitler's armies inflicted upon the Soviet Union are not. In the early 20th century anti-Semitism was to be found anywhere in Europe, but only in Germany (and Austria) did the spark of anti-Semitism find enough fuel to explode into an industrialized machinery of murder.
Though many genocides happened before and, sadly, have happened since, the only ones even remotely comparable to the Holocaust in terms of degree of heinous purposefulness were those in Cambodia and Rwanda. In comparison, the others were rather spontaneous outbursts of violence.
However, the inhumane methods of warfare and deprivations visited upon Russia were not entirely unique. The history books are filled to the brim with invasors waging what modern scholars would consider a total war, a war of annihilation on a foreign territory.
3. But most important of all reasons was the Cold War. The reason that e.g. France and Germany were able to reconciliate after the war; the reason that German school children went to tend to the graves at Oradour sur Glane after the war and not to those at Leningrad; was the Cold War.
In your contributions to this forum, you've often cited psychology to explain human behaviour (e.g. the war crimes committed by the Red Army) yet still you seem strangely unwilling to take psychology into account elsewhere. But man cannot escape the way the human mind works.
I only have to look out of my window to see the adjacent road still dotted with so-called prechamber shafts, holes in the blacktop meant to receive obstacles designed to slow down the tanks of the Soviet Union in an attack which Western Europe feared was coming for more than fourty years.
Seeing you've stated your dislike for the Soviet system, I'm sure you'll agree Soviet leaders did everything in their power to make the West believe such an attack was surely coming. An attack which, according to military historians, would've rendered Germany permanently uninhabitable and killed tens of millions.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to you then that West Germans, except maybe those of a pro-Communist persuasion, rather didn't think of Russia at all for a long time. It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that the public focus shifted to aspects of the Nazis' crimes other than the Holocaust only in recent years.