good luck citing any major war where the defending nation never executed enemy prisoners.

the intent was to get revenge for genocide. again, genocide. let that word sink in for a second to imagine how the soldiers felt when they were getting back at germans in Berlin. germans slaughtered defenseless villagers because they had brown hair. anyone who simply complies with something like that is below human in my book.

and it wasn't even "eye for an eye" thing. the Soviets started cleaning the street and distributing food to general population before the rest of Berlin was even captured. russians never did to germans what germans did to them. they never devoted themselves to wipe out all german nation because they found them not nordic enough. most POWs who died did so in labor camps, not in gas chambers, and there's a difference between genocide and a response to genocide.

edit: embracing the downvotes. you know, in western Belarus 600 villages have been burned to ashes when nazis exterminated the untermensch. these people died because somebody thought they were not worthy of being kept as slaves, and the soviet soldiers had to push back and avenge them, walking through miles and miles of dead land, all so that some US folks, living in a country that barely ever fought a war on its own territory, but instead keeps milking one terrorist act for 10 years straight, are ready to make nazis look better just so that the russians who lost 20 million people in the war would be the bad guys. why don't you find a WWII veteran who lost all his family to nazi genocide, and explain to them how they should have behaved in Berlin. fucking armchair philosophers.