When the Red Army finally reached central Europe, its exhausted soldiers encountered another world. The contrast between Russia and the West was always great--Czar Alexander I had long ago regretted allowing Russians to see how Westerners lived--and it had grown even sharper during the war. While German soldiers wreaked devastation and mass murder in the East, Germany itself remained prosperous--so much so that its civilian population had very little sense of the material cost of war until quite late in the conflict. Wartime Germany was a world of towns, of electricity, of food and clothing and shops and consumer goods, of reasonably well-fed women and children. The contrast with his own devastated homeland must have seemed unfathomable to the common Soviet soldier.