They were not as afraid of Germans as they were of Soviets. Soviets were animals raping, stealing and beating everything they encountered.
Yet for the generation that lived through WW2, you can talk to anyone who was on the wrong side of the iron curtain and they will tell you what it was like.
The BBC documentary World At War (1973) covers this in episode 21. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3oeao1
This is also covered on Wikipedia now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
"Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000.[2][17] Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[18]"
In Hungary: "According to Skrabski, it’s possible that as many as 800,000 Hungarian women were raped, and the violence included gang rape and sexual torture. Pregnancy resulting from rape was so widespread that the government suspended its ban on abortions for several months during 1945, offering abortion and STD treatment services free of charge." https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/...
There are many well documented stories of these atrocities in all the areas occupied by the Red Army, most too gruesome to include here. Anyone can do their own research, the information is out there, even if many don't want to hear it. When you want to understand why Eastern Europe is falling over itself (foolishly, IMO) to join NATO and integrate into the West, these types of things need to be understood as being in the background.
And yes, I'm telling you that my grandmother herself has better memories of Germans than Red Army soldiers. She was a nice blond girl who knew a bit of German and that was according to her helping her a lot with Germans. But she had to hide from front line Red Army soldiers because everyone knew that they were mass raping women.
The worst direct story about about Germans in my family is that one of my great grandfathers was forced as a recruit into Wehrmacht. Germans threatened to kill the whole family if we would not agree. He probably died somewhere on front lines, but nobody knows what exactly happened to him.
The Russians killed in order to terrorize the domestic populations. They terrorized everyone.
When you see public displays like the husband of a farm impaled on his front porch and all the women raped and murdered inside, that is a very public act of terrorism meant to frighten the general population and let them know that their lives had zero value to the new occupying forces. When you see that happen in every single village, in every neighborhood, it spreads terror across the entire nation. It was not violence focused at undesirable groups, it was violence focused at anyone, arbitrarily, and very publicly. E.g. 20% of Hungary's female population was raped, and many were murdered afterwards. That touches basically everyone in society, to let them know that no one is safe, and that anyone can be gotten at any time and for arbitrary reasons, and if you had 5 women in your extended family, odds are the Russians raped one of them. That is something that terrorizes the entire nation. Things like the repeated public gangrape of nuns in Poland, a very catholic country, that terrorizes a large proportion of the population, as does the execution of random ordinary villagers in gruesome spectacles.
Is it so surprising that a policy of terrorism succeeds in terrorizing the population? Do you really think it's just about numbers?