It's hard to imagine that anyone with observers in, or news from, the European theater could imagine that surrendering to Stalin was a better idea than surrendering to the US.

Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]

Tip to HN users: "This is indisputably true but I don't like it" isn't a good reason to downvote people.

1: https://socratic.org/questions/why-did-germans-forces-surren...

>Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]

That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there.

The Japanese, at that point, not so much.

So, angry retribution against Wehrmacht soldier scum was to be expected...

It's a lot more than just that. Beyond their justified mad-on for German soldiers, the Russian military was (and continued to be, and essentially still is) monstrously brutal to pretty much everyone who crossed their path. Russian POWs liberated by the Western Allies begged not to be sent back to their own country. The ones that were sent back anyway were mostly murdered for the crime of being captured.

>That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there. The Japanese, at that point, not so much.

This didn't really matter for the Soviets. Though the Manchurian invasion was too rapid and short-lived to really escalate to European-level Soviet brutality, the Red Army engaged in plenty of the same random massacres, mass rapes, brutalities and mass deportations after they entered and occupied Manchuria.

Many of these soldiers had already long since been brutalized by their campaigns in eastern and central Europe (from which they had been shipped in massive trainloads shortly after VE Day) and the basic nature of the Soviet leadership hardly fostered a spirit of good military conduct to civilians at any time.

Some deeper reading about the Soviet Manchurian campaign reveals quite a few of the uglier details.

Also, none of this in the least bit excuses the grotesque behavior of the Japanese Army in the same region during its long occupation. Regardless of how the Japanese are perceived today, their army's habits during the 2nd World War were completely beyond justification in their genocidal viciousness.