In the initial days after WWII were surrendered German soldiers ever murdered in cold blood? If so were the US, British, French or Russian the worst?

One of my favourite academic subjects regarding WWII is the way the "good guys" and "bad guys" trope so often seen in the history books just didn't exist during the war. We very little see the crimes committed against the Germans during the war because they were chalked up as the "bad guys" and the Allies could do no wrong. One of the most debated cases of this is the allied fire bombing of Hamburg and other German cities in which hundreds of civilians died.

Regarding the last few months of the war and after Germany surrendered, many German civilians and soldiers were indeed killed in retribution or revenge killings as well as looting, rapes and pillaging.

Regarding the Red Army, it's important to remember that even prior to World War Two, Stalin's control over Eastern Europe was heavy handed. The various policies, namely collectivization (communal farming), meant to bring Russia into the industrial age essentially killed millions of people in the Ukraine and Poland through starvation. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Act which divided Poland into USSR and German territory and brought a very temporary "peace" between the two countries also aided in the further destruction of the Polish communities on both sides of the line. The point of this is that the Red Army and Stalin's regimes were not exactly known for kind policies in either peace or war. When the Germans invaded USSR territory, many communities hailed them as saviors from Stalin and would have continued to do so if not for even more cruelties from the German Wehrmacht.

Most notably as the Soviet's Red Army advanced through Eastern Europe, there are many stories of the massacres they committed on ethnically German civilians who had moved into the areas as part of Hitler's Lebensraum policies. Königsberg was one such German town in Prussia which was seiged by the Red Army and destroyed after the German defences fell. Though many were killed, thousands more women were raped during the advance of the Red Army. This was not limited to the Soviets, and there are records of the French Army's occupation of Stuttgart resulted in the rape of over 1000 German civilians.

The Germany soldiers suffered under Allied occupation as well. Most notably were the Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine Meadow Camps), a set of 19 POW camps which held over one million German soldiers near the end of WWII. Most importantly, the Germans who were held here were declassified as Prisoners of War which revoked any rights granted to them by the Geneva convention. They were held here without shelter or food and many died from exposure and starvation. While they weren't necessarily murdered in cold blood, they were certainly left for dead.

A more famous case of retribution killings were the Dachau Liberation Reprisals carried out by American soldiers when the Dachau concentration camp was liberated and the horrors of the Holocaust more or less revealed. This was an emotionally charged instance of revenge after approximately thirty nine box cars full of corpses were found prior to taking the facility and the refusal of the Germans to surrender. There are several different accounts of the killings, but most claim that 12 to 16 Germans were attempting to escape and were gunned down. There was a brief investigation but the charges were very quickly dismissed. Several other German soldiers were killed by the prisoners during the liberation.

I'm not going to quantify which one was the "worst", as each Allied power has their problems with taking retribution after the War had ended. I think the most important lesson to take away from this is that the traditional methodology of looking at the war through Good and Evil is outdated and harmful to the actual history of the event. Both sides committed atrocities and one does not negate the other.