I met a Jewish man who had survived the holocaust,(he spent about a year in Auschwitz before being liberated) and then decided to go back to Soviet controlled Hungry, where he was born. He explained to me that he believed living under Soviet rule was worse then living under Nazi rule.

I'm pretty confident (no sources sorry, but thats not the point) that the vast majority of people would disagree with him, but it goes to show you that one side wasn't necessarily better than the other.

Of course I'm sure American control wan't nearly as bad - but that could just be my American bias talking.

Japan and Germany's economic success was to the benefit of the Allies in the long run anyway.

That's what usually happens when you go a little out of your way to be nicer than you could have been: it turns out that, just by coincidence, some of those times come back to help you later. :)

Also, todays Japan and Germany are a far cry from 1930s Japan and Germany because the loss of the war changed both substantially.

I can't speak for Japan, a total lack of experience in that department, but Germany is still licking some of its wounds 55 years later.

Don't forget that East and West Germany got reunited in fairly recent times and the shockwaves of the reunion have not yet subsided.

Actions have consequences. Could Germany be even more prosperous if it hadn’t started a war? Possible. But if that’s what they wanted then they shouldn’t have started a war with the explicit goal of, well, world domination.

Germans today are just as rich as the French or Britains, much richer than Poles or Russians. Germany has the fourth largest economy in the world (behind China, Japan and the US). The world owes us nothing, we owe the world.

Quite true.

>>losing to the Allies was almost certainly very different than losing to the Axis would have been.

Well... there is e.g. Ukraine and the holocaust. Then there are the Japanese camps, etc.

But was it really worse in e.g. France or Norway compared to Soviet rule? Consider the low survivability of the national elites sent to Siberia. Check e.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Estoni...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers

Estonia was certainly unusual in that the occupying Soviets even managed to kill almost as many Jews as the occupying Germans. The reprehensible behaviour of Soviet armies in their sphere of influence nevertheless isn't enough to make me disappointed the Axis didn't win...