Okay, first things- first - no lessons where learned, nobody out of the good of their hearts did anything for anybody. The original plan after world war 2 was to turn Nazi Germany into a agrarian border stripe between the two emerging power blocks.
This plan was put into action, and some starvation resulted from the dismantling and moving of the factories. The reason this changed is because the cold war tensions, made it necessary to bind the former enemy as a useful puppet and ally to each corresponding site.
Thus west and east Germany got away with a blue eye for blundering and murdering east European countries and several minorities.
There is no moral here to be taken home with- maybe some tactical advice- if you want to stab and rob your neighbor - do it in the midst of a gang-shootout and then join in on the side nearby with the stolen goods and weapon.
You say that like every single German personally executed jews and other minorities.
Yes, a lot of Germans did. Yes, more Germans went along and didn't do anything against the Nazis.
But only a minority of Germans knew how bad it was. My grandmother told me that they knew about some labor camps were certain people were put. She said that she didn't know anything about the industrialized murder. If you look on the map, you will see that the extermination camps (the concentration camps constructed to kill people) were located outside of the German Reich so that the German public would not get to know about it. Hitler knew that the extermination camps could weaken his position and enrage the public.
Most Wehrmacht soldiers followed orders and marched against the enemy they were told to shoot at. Yes, this is also bad and "I just followed orders" should not be an excuse. But the recent 72 years showed that most Germans were peaceful and just wanted to live their live. Homecoming soldiers didn't jump on the next minority and beat them up. The overwhelming majority was just happy that everything is over. Hitler was never elected by a majority and he came to his final power through a coup d'état.
There is a program called "Stolpersteine"- they have put little bronze-bricks into the streets before houses where Jews and others who where "Transported" lived. There are little bronze bricks in nearly every street of the town i live nearby. Yet many of the old people there claim to never have known. And many claim they have helped the prisoners in some way.
The Wehrmacht shot and torched whole villages for partisan activity. And soldiers talk- they have convoys through the hinterland- they knew exactly what the SS was doing in the conquered territories.
They guarded millions of war-prisoners while not giving them food and shelter until they succumbed.
Im not singling out germany. Every country, and all people on the planet are capable of this. WorldWar2 or the holocaust where not something particular unique.
They where just humanity's worst behavior combined with organization skill and industrial capacity's.
Stalins Holdomor, the Archipel Gulag or Maos Killing spree are similar in dimension but lacked the cultural scenes echo chamber for sentimental political reasons.
These messy large scale crimes where not ended by education, a protest generation or self civilization of the species, but by the invention of the nuclear bomb, which limited the war like activities of larger, well organized nations.
Among non nuclear deterred groups or within country's, such breaks of civilization can happen anytime even today.
(See Yugoslawia, Iraq/Syria, The Hutu/Tutsi Genocide)
I also assume some dictators started to turn away from ethnic scape-goating, after in several countrys riled up masses turned against them and China showed that even a crony-corrupt-dictatorship can be economically functional.
"The reduction in steel production that resulted from the first and the second level of industry plans meant that a steel production bottleneck ensued which forced other parts of the German industry to fall below their own permitted production levels. The economy of the Bizone finally hit rock bottom early in 1948 as a consequence of this.[21]"
It might have looked like a swift turnaround on the politics, but if you influence economics, the system behaves very physical, meaning, bottlenecks propagate, and effects ripple.
For most Germans i guess, the contrast of the war economy (which always felt good, due to wealth of whole Europe being fed into Germany) - and the aftermath, with refugees and year long food shortages was quite stark.
I guess all other nations have a prolonged history of suffering with the start of WW2 and slow improvement after the end.
Spilled milk under blown up bridges over long dammed rivers.
Whats way more interesting is the question of prevention. I actually propose the idea of Extremism-Vacacination. Controlled Synthetic extremism is introduced, in a controlled environment and the lectures are really learned.
Its quite similar to the approach i always suggest to transmitting live-experience from generation to generation. Usually advice is not really taken or valued, until the same mistake has been repeated.
Take scam-prone investments, for which every generation falls again and again. Now imagine a service a father/mother (or grandmother/father) could hire, that would scam the kid, and retransfer the funds upon lesson learned. Such a lecture, though also painful, would be less prone to do all the damages the real scam would do.
This plan was put into action, and some starvation resulted from the dismantling and moving of the factories. The reason this changed is because the cold war tensions, made it necessary to bind the former enemy as a useful puppet and ally to each corresponding site. Thus west and east Germany got away with a blue eye for blundering and murdering east European countries and several minorities.
There is no moral here to be taken home with- maybe some tactical advice- if you want to stab and rob your neighbor - do it in the midst of a gang-shootout and then join in on the side nearby with the stolen goods and weapon.