History is written by the victors, but I wonder if in the losing nations from WWII, have facts that may be difficult to hear been softened or changed over time to lessen the humiliation or damage to national pride?
Yes, especially in the case of Japan. This is an ongoing issue and one that clearly violates the 20 year rule to talk about as applies to today's Japan so I won't touch on recent developments, but the Japanese right wing, especially the now-former governor of Tokyo prefecture Shintaro Ishihara, has been associated with a long-standing campaign to wipe out references to the Rape of Nanking (claiming it was no better or worse than the sacking of any major city in the period) and to Korean "comfort women" taken as sex slaves in the war (claiming they were compensated prostitutes). This dispute, again, continues to this day, but was very much alive 20 years ago...Ishihara has been a deeply controversial and incendiary figure going back to the 1980s.
Japan Unbound by John Nathan is a good book on post-World War II Japan and features discussions of Ishihara, including his friendship at the time with Yukio Mishima, the Japanese ultranationalist poet who in 1970 launched a bizarre and doomed coup attempt to restore the Emperor to power and to condemn postwar Japanese society as pathetic capitalist consumer worker drones who had forgotten their proud warrior heritage. The book mentions, among other things, Shintaro Ishihara's efforts to get Yukio Mishima's poetry and writings widely circulated and popularized in the aftermath of the incident.
You may be interested in a past post on this topic:
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