Xabba,
I can't tell you why it is like I described, but it was very obvious, an observation shared by my colleagues of that time as well. That does not mean that all British and American tourists were like that, hell, no. With most there was no problem. but compared to other tourists groups, the share of people being upset for the reasons mentioned, was bigger. Like for example american tourists being easier upset about the shop personnel not speaking English. On many working days I was the only one on my floor being fluent in English, and sometimes I got called by colleagues in despair (and stress!) when they had to deal with an American tourist who was angry that he was not understood. It seems they take it as granted to come along with their mother tongue everywhere , but many older generations of germans have not had english at school or were no longer competent at it. With younger generations of Germans it is no longer a problem. when I think of it, it seems to me that it were younger tourists sometimes being angry, and older American tourists always being extremely polite indeed. In my last year, there was a traveling girls group of maybe 20, 25 girls from a religious community, they came from Maryland and all wore light-grey, oldfashioned (but somehow attractive!) dresses. I forgot what community it was. They swarmed over the whole floor immediately and in absolute record time, they literally took EVERYTHING in their hands and lifted it and examined it and chatted and chirped and laughed as if there was no tomorrow. I felt like in a bird cage at spring time!
Strange what kind of observations you make about people when business was running low and you had too much time!
Funny it often was with Dutch, becasue the languages are very close, it seems, but most germans find it more difficult to speak dutch than Dutch find it to speak German. Often it was doing communication with both hand and feet - resulting in much smiles and laughter. Somehow they seem to be immune to speaking English at these occasions.
But I cannot remember to have ever seen a Brit being upset if one of my colleagues did not speak English.
I especially liked the Danish, Spanish, Dutch and British soldiers that sometimes came in. Very relaxed, and often soime jokes exchanged. We have several British families living up our road here, belonging to the British garrison here, and over the years I used to form some very lose contacts with some of the men, having a short talk when meeting on th street, exchnagign some not seriously meant "strikes" when football national teams played - things like that.