The US and the Nazis

ZNet daily commentaries

by Nikos Raptis

www.zmag.org/, February 11, 2006

 

 

... Hitler commited suicide on April 30, 1945. The surrender of the Nazis was signed on May 8, 1945. Eleven days later, on May 19, "a military transport plane with windows blackened to hide its notorious cargo..." brought in Washington, D.C. the first Nazis, Herbert Wagner and his two assistants "and then kept [them] hidden from immigration authorities". ("Secret Agenda", Linda Hunt, St. Martin's Press, 1991, p. 6, 7).

The true number of Nazis planted in the US is impossible to know until the CIA opens its files. There were various programs with assorted code-names ("Overcast", "Paperclip", etc) designed to smuggle Nazi scientists (by the thousands) and (inexplicably) Nazi SS regulars (by the tens of thousands). It seems that the US militaries who were recruiting the Nazis after 1945 considered the SS as somthing similar to the US Marines, so they did their utmost to send them to the US.

Most of the older Nazis (scientists, etc) went straight to the US centers of power. Take the case of General Walter Dornberger. He was one of those responsible for the death of "At least 20,000 prisoners -many of them talented engineers who had been singled out for missile production...- [and who] were killed through starvation, disease, or execution..." Dornberger, after working for the US Air Force, went into the private industry and "eventually rose to be a vice-president in the Bell Aerosystems Division of the Textron Corporation... He died peacefully in June 1980." (Christopher Simpson, "Blowback", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, p. 27, 28).

The younger SS Nazis, who were brought to the US with their families (!), given free passage, board, emergency funds (with taxpayers money), and assisted to find jobs (at a time when American engineers were laid off), dispersed in the lower levels of the American society.

Did these Nazis, planted in the US society, influence it? The US government's "use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has left a mark on the life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as "blowback," meaning unexpected-and negative-effects at home that result from covert operations overseas." (Simpson, p. 5).

Is not 9/11 a typical "blowback"? Is not bin Laden a "result from covert operations" in Afghanistan?

"It had taken the greatest war in history to put a stop to an unspeakable [Nazi] evil. And now the cutting edge of that nightmare was being transplanted to America." Words of Linda Hunt in her book "Secret Agenda" of 1991 (p. 21).

[Note: It would be interesting if some Ph. D candidates, or young journalists research the expansion of the original Nazis and their families in the US society and also assess their political attitudes, etc.]

But, what is Nazism? The most accurate answer to that is found in the four Indictment Counts of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Counts: 1. Conspiracy to commit the crimes enumerated in the other three Counts. 2. Crimes against peace, i.e. the planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression. 3. War crimes, i.e. violations of the laws of war. 4. Crimes against humanity, i.e. exterminations, deportations, and genocide.

Of these counts number 2 is considered the most important. "By 1939, the peoples of the civilized world had come to believe that the launching of aggressive war was a crime not only morally wrong, but one that warranted the most severe punishment. (Bradley F. Smith, "Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg", Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1977, p. 17).

Those were the counts for the Nazis. Now, let us apply them (very brieflly) to the US: Count 2: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan Iraq I, Iraq II (not to add Greece with 160,000 killed through a US proxy army in 1947-9). Count 3: Vietnam "agent orang", Kosovo DU, Iraq I, Fallujah..., torture all over the panet since 1947. Count 4: Genocides in Indonesia and East Timore. Count 1: Conspiracy with the "poodle", i.e. Britain. Ignoring all counts except number 3 (about wars of aggression) we end up with "the most severe punishment" for W. Bush and his underlings.

One has to resist the temptation to delete all the text above the enumeration of the counts and leave only the text presenting the correspondence of the Nuremberg counts to the US acts in order to show that the comparison of the US to the Nazis is not an exaggeration.

Finally, the fitting way to close this Commentary is by quoting the words of two persons that are worthy of great respect:

- "We have to ask ouselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent-or denazification." (Noam Chomsky, "American Power and the New Mandarins", Pantheon Books, 1969, p. 16).

- Irmgard A. Hunt was only 3-and-a-half in October 1937 when Hitler had singled her out to sit on his knee. Her parents were living in Berchtesgaden, Hitler's village, and were "both enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis". Sixty years later, now an American since 1958, Irmgard A. Hunt wrote a book about Berchtesgaden: "On Hitler's Mountain".

In an interview to Michael Little of the "Washington City Paper" (June 24, 2005, p. 25) she says: "Karl Rove has all the skills of Dr. Goebbels and then some. It's just amazing how people have stopped questioning the reasons for the war, how people will believe there were weapons of mass destruction. It's absolutely stunning how you can brain-wash people by fine-tuning the ideology... Hitler said, 'I can't take on this job unless I have complete power...' And it's a bit like the emergency powers after 9/11... The American people had better watch what they're signing onto."


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