Germany didn’t de-Nazify after they lost the war. German Nazis continued to hold ranking positions in both East and West Germany and in their imperial industrial sectors (CIA and Stasi were both stuffed with former Nazis). One of the kinder things you could say about the Soviets was that they stuck Nazi captives in low-ranking grunt work positions and ran them to death. Similarly, the US turned a lot of ex-Nazis into Expendables style special forces and deep cover insurgent forces in missions that ended disastrously.
But we had Adolf Heusinger running NATO. We had ex-SS officers all over the East German Police. Werner Von Braun was running NASA. Klaus Barbie, Alois Brunner, Josef Mengele all successfully exfilitrated to South America and the Middle East, thanks to Allen Dulles’s ratlines and the fascists in the 1940s Catholic Church. Postwar West Germany, in particular, was littered with mid-level ex-fascists and latter-day turncoats.
Nevermind the foreign sponsors of German Nazis - the Bush Family, the Ford Family, IBM’s Watson Family, the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Duke of fucking Windsor. They all got richer for their trouble, even before guys like Eisenhower and Churchill vacuumed them all up into their orbit.
Nuremberg was show trials for a handful of surviving high profile belligerents. A Limited Hangout, as Nixon would eventually describe it. Fascism never died. It simply got rebranded under the Cold War.
Germany didn’t de-Nazify after they lost the war. German Nazis continued to hold ranking positions in both East and West Germany and in their imperial industrial sectors (CIA and Stasi were both stuffed with former Nazis). One of the kinder things you could say about the Soviets was that they stuck Nazi captives in low-ranking grunt work positions and ran them to death. Similarly, the US turned a lot of ex-Nazis into Expendables style special forces and deep cover insurgent forces in missions that ended disastrously.
But we had Adolf Heusinger running NATO. We had ex-SS officers all over the East German Police. Werner Von Braun was running NASA. Klaus Barbie, Alois Brunner, Josef Mengele all successfully exfilitrated to South America and the Middle East, thanks to Allen Dulles’s ratlines and the fascists in the 1940s Catholic Church. Postwar West Germany, in particular, was littered with mid-level ex-fascists and latter-day turncoats.
Nevermind the foreign sponsors of German Nazis - the Bush Family, the Ford Family, IBM’s Watson Family, the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Duke of fucking Windsor. They all got richer for their trouble, even before guys like Eisenhower and Churchill vacuumed them all up into their orbit.
Nuremberg was show trials for a handful of surviving high profile belligerents. A Limited Hangout, as Nixon would eventually describe it. Fascism never died. It simply got rebranded under the Cold War.