I felt this way in an undergrad research class, while studying what happened after Hitler died in Germany to end WW2 (pretty much). My paper was close to 30 pages of writing about the darkness I saw. Everyone knew about the holocaust, which was as evil as it gets. In Salweezal, a Jewish girl overheard some complaining about supposed Jewish holocaust survivors getting the best of everything (chocolates, premium housing) while they got nothing but a barn and straw to sleep on... She spoke up about them screwing German soldiers while her relatives were being gassed and burned in ovens. They killed her and a bespectacled professor that tried to protect her, throwing their bodies with others who had died under the Germans. Americans shot down Nazi guards at Dachau after capture. They probably deserved to die after what the Americans saw in the concentration camp, but even so,.it was a violation of who we were supposed to be as Americans. Displaced persons, by the millions in Germany exacted vengeance on German civilians, so much so that American soldiers forced the DP's into their former concentration camps, now under American guards, to stop the violence. FDR and by extension General Dwight D. Eisenhower told mostly white collar workers to grow their own food after the war, because the Allies would not feed them. They didn't know how to farm, and real farmers were getting strafed by American war planes as they tried to tend the fields. Plus, the British and American zones had most of the populations and the Russians had most of the farm land, which they would not share. In cities like Berlin, the ration levels for civilians was at the level of concentration camps (less than a 900 calories a day). Russians raped German women under their control until 1950...as many as 300,000, maybe more..MULTIPLE times. American GI's used their rations of cigarettes and chocolate to extract "favors" from German women, who were desperate for food. American GI's sent something like 3 times their base salary home, because of the black market, after the war.
I feel too much about the darkness I study. I was depressed for weeks after writing the paper, but I didn't tell my wife. I love what I do, but I am glad that I decided to change from post WW2 studies to late 19th century American transformation to the modern world. I don't know if I could survive the darkness again...
