There’s nothing particularly European about what you describe though. These types of events have occurred pretty much everywhere in the world throughout history. They aren’t European patterns. They are human ones.
Many people around the world had the will, but the Europeans also had the means.
Somehow the fact that the soviets and maoist killed more people each than "europeans" (this is quite the american generalisation) is forgotten, as are japanese atrocities, as are cambodian ones. Also no one seems to talk about the middle east being the centre of the world wide slave trade for a very long time, as opposed to Europeans being at fault for all of it.
I'm sure many people visit e.g. Vietnam because it's a convenient way to see a tropical rainforest, or experience the prototypical white sand beach. You might think less of them because they don't care about the culture -- and I think it's a callous waste of resources -- but it's not poverty tourism.
Furthermore, I'd naturally assume a large fraction of all long distance travellers to be Europeans, regardless of the motivation. Simply because Europeans make up a large fraction of the world population who can actually afford to do it.
But weren't most of the Soviets Europeans?
Until quite recently it was accepted belief in Europe that people from (approximately) east of the Oder and/or south of Constantinople were inferior. "Savages behaving like savages" was generally not paid much attention to (the exceptions being mostly when building a narrative to support conquest and/or religious conversion) by historians and writers because it was written off as them not knowing better. Smart, proper Europeans who should know better killing each other? Well that just can't stand. Even today you still see a lot of this in how events in "less civilized" parts of the world are discussed in the first world.
It'll take a couple of centuries for all the spoken and unspoken prejudices of the people who recorded events and studied history in centuries past to filter out.
And of course about each other. It's plural place after all, one of the many things that appears to be lost amongst anglosaxons.
The Oder wasn't a border until fairly recently. For quite a while, it was just Germany on both sides, without too many distinctions. (Of course, if you go even further back, things get more complicated.)
Do you have any sources for your assertions?