As portrayed in the movie *Fury*, were Allied soldiers sympathetic towards regular German soldiers but ruthless when dealing with the SS?

Not an expert on this matter, just someone that enjoys learning about WW2.

In my experience, the US soldiers were more sympathetic than the British and the Soviets were quite ruthless towards all Germans. And for good reasons. US soldiers hadn't been attacked on their own land, while the British were bombed and a lot of Soviets were, well, kinda annihilated early on in the war. And since the Americans didn't really join the war in Europe directly until the Axis powers were already declining (they sent loads of equipment to both the Soviets and the British and basically everyone in Europe that was against the Axis before they sent soldiers to help) and a majority of the veterans were dead, wounded or POWs. So they didn't meet that much of the gruesome, well oiled war machine that it had been in the Soviet countries. Instead they met an army that was a lot like the US armies, except most of the people in the German military were being forced into it. Meanwhile, the US had volunteers mostly. The Germans were also forced to defend themselves increasingly when the war was coming to an end, unlike the US, who could properly train their soldiers and get young men, instead of older people and teenagers. But since the SS hadn't really been in the frontlines nearly as much as the Wehrmacht, they had more of the hardcore Nazis left. And they were just incredibly brutal most of the time. Which is one of the reasons why so many teenagers and older people were forced into the military. They were basically just civilians that were given guns and told to defend their country against the invading savages. But in reality, the SS and the Nazi regime was just trying to survive at this point and throwing civilians onto the fire. And many people in the Allied forces kinda realized it. But that does not mean that the propaganda was immense on both sides, which meant that a normal country boy from America would be scared of a normal country boy from Germany because he was told that he was a savage murder machine without emotions. And the German would be told the same about the American. that he would rape his sisters and mother. In short, it was really shitty and people just tried to reach out in this mayhem and carnage, since the real insanity was not in the majority of the armies, but rather in the higher ups that were far away from the front lines. But the US was kinda in the best shape of the 5 major powers, because it hadn't been ruined by the war.

So Britain was pissed about the bombings there, the Soviet were seeking revenge and both Germany and Japan were trying to viciously defend themselves, even though it was mostly at the cost of the civilians in Japan and Germany, like it had been in the beginning of the war in almost all other places.

So yes and no to your question. Soviets were brutal in most cases, hell, they even raped Berlin and were taking revenge for what the Germans did in the USSR, but the Americans were the softest, although in many cases they were kinda brutal. And fighting against kids will soften you up if you aren't used to it, even if they are devoted to killing you out of fear of what you might do to them, even though it is mostly propaganda.

But everyone hated the SS with a burning passion by the end, cause of the destruction and misery they caused and a lot of it was just to prolong the war.

/r/AskHistorians Thread