The problem was that Germany fell so completely under Nazi control. Not everyone was an enthusiastic Nazi, but relatively few felt they couldn't accommodate themselves to the Reich somehow or other. And most of those who were deeply opposed, out of conviction or necessity (because they were targeted as scapegoats by race or prior political affiliation) were trapped and eventually killed, unless they could escape.
Compare the die-hard resistance of the Reich to the capitulation and anti-Fascist uprisings of Italy, and one can see why it was that Soviet leaders who had experienced the Great Patriotic War years at any age above infancy (and this describes nearly every one of them in any position of real power, right up to the OTL end in 1991) greatly mistrusted and frankly feared any revival of Germany. In the Cold War context Stalin and his successors was capable of seeing to it that East German industry was rebuilt, but only in the context of overwhelming Soviet control. Late in the Warsaw Pact period, East Germany (and the satellite republics in general, but especially the DDR) did indeed enjoy a higher per capita standard of living than the average citizen of the USSR, and this despite some very obvious plundering still going on to supplement the massive plundering on top of the devastation of being conquered in the immediate post-war years.
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So, for there to be a more sympathetic relationship, in some combination either the Soviet Union would have to be other than it was, or the Third Reich other than it was. How was it that despite decades longer to rule, sufficient dissidence existed in Mussolini's Italy that the country he had ruled so long suddenly turned against him, but despite the fact that the writing of total defeat was on every wall, and that Hitler had led once decently civilized people to commit atrocities such as the Shoah, his subjects for the most parts fought on to the bitter end, with resistance taking the ineffective forms of tiny, quixotic rings of mostly symbolic (and yet necessarily secretive) acts, abortive plots invariably discovered and annihilated by the secret police, and piecemeal surrenders to overwhelming force on the front lines (which nevertheless never cascaded into mass collapse of any fronts)?
Part of it may be precisely that the Nazis were so boldly extreme; making fewer compromises with prior notions of decency, they themselves and then the mass of German people who mainly just wanted to get along were quickly complicit in crimes so monstrous, only the triumph of Hitler's new order that justified them by sheer glorification of violence itself could redeem them from crushing guilt.
Had the Nazis been otherwise in an effective way, they probably wouldn't have come to power at all, or held it more than a half year or so. They might possibly have been even crazier and more vicious, but that would have scared off crucial allies in their rise to power. If they had been kinder, gentler, saner--would they be Nazis at all then, would Hitler even be recognizably the Hitler of OTL?
If the Second World War had been a matter of Germans mainly motivated by simple nationalist pride, but with scruples that would have held them back from the unforgivable acts of terror that probably, if we are realistic about it, were the very mortar holding their otherwise ramshackle conquests together, perhaps the Western Allies would have had more lenient intentions upon attaining victory. (OTL, any intent to follow through on the sweeping punitive intents entertained before occupation was an actual accomplishment were postponed, then shelved, in the face of the competition with the Soviet-dominated eastern bloc and the need to recruit West Germans to the common cause of Western defense).
But if Stalin and his regime were as they were OTL, I'm afraid he would not have been any gentler with the Germans just because they had been less offensive. And indeed the only thing that brought the Red Army into the war was Hitler's invasion of the USSR after posing behind a mask of friendship; such a betrayal alone would surely bring with it a vigorous reaction and a deep mistrust. That Hitler struck with massive force fully intended to break the vast power of the Red Army, which necessarily did much harm to the Russians, and that this force succeeded in sweeping the Soviets very nearly completely out of the European heartland of all the Russias, only worsened things when the Red Army proved able to belatedly push them back.
So even a very scrupulous and visionary German attack capable of such an effect would still earn tremendous hatred from a Red Army capable of pushing them out of Soviet territory again. In fact OTL the same ruthlessness Hitler showed in his six years of "peaceful" rule and expansion of the Reich was unleashed on his conquests too, so the legacy of destruction and resentment among the survivors of Nazi rule was a very real and large log to add to the flames of Soviet resentment and suspicion. Had the Germans been otherwise in occupation--had they shown lenience and forbearance, and cultivated every possible resentment against Stalin's rule, perhaps the Red Army would have been much weaker, and the combined resistance of Reich and locals to the return of Soviet power in the west much stronger, and there would be no question of Russians setting policy in a Germany they could not conquer at all.
But could such an idealistic, visionary scheme of occupation be compatible with unprovoked acts of naked conquest in the first place?
In any event, that combination did not occur and the Russians were not the only victims of Nazi conquest who showed a heartfelt and desperate will to throw them out again. And if at all possible, see the heartland of German power reduced to rubble and forever removed from the lists of nations that could contemplate such acts of conquest.
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So, aside from ATLs where for whatever reason, the Germans never venture to challenge the Bear in the first place, how could the mood of Soviet occupiers be otherwise?
About the only effective mitigation I can think of, aside possibly from an Italy-like uprising of suppressed but smoldering anti-Nazi resentment (which might fail completely to impress invading Red Army forces, no matter how sincerely the Germans who overthrew the Nazis turned to the Ivans as liberators) would be if the German Left had died a lot harder than OTL when Hindenburg signed the Republic's fate over to the little Nazi. If the Communists and Social Democrats had at that point refused to go quietly into the night, but risen up to try and seize last-minute control, and then only amid much bloodshed and decimation of people who OTL did submit (not Communists, obviously, who either died one way or another, or fled, but alongside them legions of SDs who were grudgingly permitted to live in more or less peace as long as they kept quiet) had either died on the barricades, or fled en masse presumably to the USSR, the only nation that would take them, then I suppose, if the sheer numbers of leftist Germans in exile added up to a substantial fraction of the populace, then with the eventual turning of the tide and invasion by Red Army forces, with legions of the exiled Germans returning under arms and being more or less entrusted to restore order, perhaps then the DDR would have a plausibly, authentically German face, and perhaps the restored socialists, after a dozen years of exile, would not be so bitter as to outdo the Russians in vindicativeness, but judiciously focus punishment on those most deserving while rehabilitating the rest of their surviving countrymen. And just possibly, the Russians would let them, trusting these Internationalist comrades enough to deliver an order that would duly thank the Soviets for giving them refuge and backing, and a fair compensation along with rebuilding efforts for Soviet pains.
Well, maybe! Does any of the Russian lenience shown above sound anything like how Stalin ran things? OTL, a fair number of German Communists did flee the Reich, and quite a few of them were allowed to settle in the Soviet Union. (Others were kept busy attempting to undermine the Reich, some from within, and these were ruthlessly swept up and eliminated by the Gestapo, eventually, unless they fled again). Then, when Stalin and Hitler came to their understanding of 1939, Stalin cooperated with the German police machinery. When the Gestapo came to Moscow with a list of former German citizens whom the Reich deemed traitors, Stalin ordered the Soviet police to apprehend them and deliver them to Gestapo "justice"!

This was in conjunction with a general crackdown on Soviet citizens of German extraction, many of whose ancestors had been invited into Russia by Peter the Great.
Also, to raise the numbers of German leftists who fight the Nazis and then break off and survive to return to restore Germany later, it would be necessary for the street fighters, at least in the final battle before the Nazis win, to be an alliance of hard-core Third Internationalist Communists, and the larger numbers of Second International Social Democrats. The latter would provide the numbers that could persuade the leftists that they might win if they fight, and later, though decimated, sufficient numbers and sufficiently moderated political views that an occupation government based on returning exiled Germans could be large enough and have traction enough to be something other than merely a thin glove over Soviet iron-handed whim.
But ideologically, the SDs and Communists hated each other; this was one reason the Nazis ever had a shot at national level power in the first place. Each saw the other as traitorous, one to German nationalism, the other to the proletarian cause, and Moscow's line had long denounced the SDs as "social fascists," at least as bad as any frankly capitalist-friendly party.
From a knock-down fight in 1933 that the leftists ultimately lose, German Communists might reasonably have hoped for refuge on Soviet soil. German SDs would be mad to expect any welcome or safety there. They might not be unwelcome in Britain or the Netherlands perhaps (but each refuge would worry about what taking them in would do to relations with Berlin, and possibly even that it might make at least the Netherlands a target for German revenge).
I suspect, since changing the character of the Nazi regime merely makes the Second World War, or anyway the invasion of Russia, more unlikely in the first place (and that I don't see any real likelihood the German far right would actually be less manic than the Nazis were anyhow) that one needs to focus instead on the USSR being quite other than it was. In particular, its leadership would need an infusion of scruple and conscience, that would first of all hold out some forgiveness and forebearance for German leftists who did not toe the Comintern line but were at best "fellow travelers."
Perhaps we could have a scenario where the Soviet regime is considerably softer than OTL in the 1930s. Such an outcome would either require Stalin being removed from the picture completely, or the positive rise of figures quite unlike OTL who can enforce a general suite of tolerant, positively progressive programs and manage to keep Stalin's dictatorial impulses in check, despite the vast ammunition a conciliatory, go-slow policy would give him against them. By maintaining high levels of good will, low levels of terror, and perhaps through superior morale and permission of serious internal criticism, perhaps such a goody-goody regime could accomplish the same actual growth rates of Soviet industrial, hence military, power as Stalin was able to with high levels of stress.
If such a regime refused to make any deals with Hitler, and later found itself under attack, it might have the moral standing to introduce occupation governments of local citizens not only in Germany but in all the eastern European nations, perhaps even Poland.
Now, I would say that if the USSR reaches the year 1945 on such a relatively Utopian basis, with its citizens less terrorized and much freer to communicate dissent, with large numbers of positive allies in the eastern European nations it would wish as a buffer zone and possibly zone of mutual development, then its moral standing in the postwar world would be far higher. American and British leftists and moderates who favored good relations and aid, and hoped for a post-war world of peace with the USSR among the peace-loving greatest powers, would be well justified. There would be no Berlin crises, no credible talk of "Iron Curtains," no broad consensus for containment. On the Soviet side, if the Western powers are as keen to demobilize as they were OTL, the Soviet regime too could probably afford to demobilize their forces to a much greater extent also, being able to rely on good will in their neighbors to keep the peace and maintain productive mutual relations.
Under these conditions, it depends on one's deep ideological beliefs what could happen next (or how the Russians could have got there in the first place). If one believes that a Marxist-Leninist mandated command economy must inevitably lead to inefficiency, corruption, and ultimate failure up against a "free" capitalist set of competitors, then this whole scenario is insanely Utopian unless one supposes the Soviets have spent the 1930s backing away from planning and into a de facto market system, albeit perhaps with labels declaring the companies involved "the Peoples' this" and "The Peasants'" that and "the Magnitogorsk Workers'" the other.
I stubbornly go on thinking that capitalism has its inherent drawbacks from the point of view of the general public, and that a bunch of Bolsheviks would sooner die that allow the USSR to slip into a de facto capitalist situation, so if anything less grim than OTL is going to be possible, it would be on the basis of a genuinely socialist, public-owned, alternative, in which some sort of more or less openly political and conscious planning mechanism takes the place of market forces to guide investment and management. In the spirit of Marxism, the common workers should be involved, given real responsibility and should respond to their new, revolutionary situation by making responsible decisions balancing their particular interests with the collective good.
If the Soviet system is running on such a basis in 1945 I'd expect at least some of the liberated nations in the eastern bloc to adopt a form of it themselves, with more or less concession to private interests in the transition period. And among these I'd expect Germany, those parts of it under Soviet occupation (let's assume the same boundaries as OTL) to be among the most Communist of them all.
In this case, grounds for conflict with the West would still exist, but it would be much harder for Western anti-Communists to paint it as a simple, stark black and white conflict of good versus evil. Ad hoc I suppose the Western nations would fall in line to resist, with domestic programs of cracking down on a stronger internal leftist movement in all countries. The Eastern bloc would be cut off from positive aid by the richer western nations, but revolutionary movements in both the colonial and quasi-colonial spheres, and for that matter within the opposing Western nations, would favor the Soviets.
If Soviet planned, socialist/communist economic approaches can in fact work better than OTL, then even if a hard Cold War comparable to OTL does emerge, with the threat of massive nuclear destruction hanging over both sides, I see no reason at all to expect it to collapse on "schedule" in 1991, or at any time. If Soviet power in the eastern bloc is projected largely through soft power of leadership, partnership, and having liberated these nations from the Nazis but devolved power right down to a respectable local group, there is no reason to expect it to ever collapse en masse. If some countries might be very suspectable to shifting rightward and seeking the alliance of Western powers against the Bear, other western nations might veer left due to domestic politics and seek "in" to the Soviet planned economy bloc, and perhaps even choose Soviet patronage over American militarily. The world might be more unstable and therefore dangerous than OTL, precisely because pro-Soviet alignment might involve more positive benefits and less risk of coercion.
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Even in an ATL where the Soviets could earn themselves such a positive reputation and braces of voluntary friendly powers, it is not clear how plausible the desired scenario of a soft occupation of the former Reich heartland could be. Returning exiled German leftists, even if many or most of them were once moderate Social Democrats, might be even more bitter and vindictive than the OTL Russians were. They might still fail to connect with the typical Germans left alive after both Nazis and Communists, along with the general decimation of war time, have thinned their numbers. Their Russian backers, despite a dozen years of cordial relations with the refugee German comrades and fellow-travelers, still might not trust even "their" Germans to lead other Germans.
It's a long shot and a big ask. Much better to butterfly away WWII completely I think.