Ratlines, NATO, and the Fourth Reich

How (some) Nazis won World War II

    On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending the self-appellated “Third Reich” as well as World War II in Europe. By the end of the year, most of the public faces of Nazi leadership were either dead or captured - Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels had committed suicide on May 1, Heinrich Himmler followed in suit on May 23, and Hermann Göring would commit suicide the next year on October 18, 1946 after being sentenced to death for his crimes. In occupied Germany, the denazification process officially began, with decidedly different approaches from the West and the Soviet Union. The Soviet administered East pursued denazification zealously, with members of the Nazi Party being arrested and interned in prison camps. In the West however, the administration of punishment was more, shall we say “selective,” as large numbers of Nazi party members not only avoided any punishment for the crimes that they were complicit in, but received protections and employment from the occupying Americans. Among these party members were many high ranking officials who were given positions of influence in the West German government and American intelligence services. The protections afforded to these avowed Nazis would allow for the emergence of a sort of “Fourth Reich” formed from an anti-communist reactionary alliance between Cold Warrior American intelligence services and the fascist secret armies and private military companies that operated throughout Europe and beyond. For the purposes of this detailing this network in this essay, I have drawn heavily on Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout, Martin A. Lee’s The Beast Reawakens, Paul L. Williams’s Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance, and Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies, and included links to sources for a couple of the claims which readers might find particularly unbelievable.

Now then, the most well-known instance of American recruitment of Nazis at the end of World War II was Operation Paperclip. The United States Counterintelligence Corps brought over a thousand German scientists, many of them Nazi party members and a number of them party leaders, to the United States. The best known of these Nazi scientists was Wernher von Braun, who had developed the V-2 rocket weaponry for Germany during World War 2 and would go on to play a prominent role in America’s ballistic missile and space rocketry programs, serving as one of NASA’s most vital assets. It is often overlooked that von Braun was not just a rocket engineer though, but a high ranking officer in the SS. During his time overseeing the construction of the V-2 rockets, von Braun used slave labor from the Dora concentration camp, working over twenty thousand prisoners to death. The construction of the V-2 rockets actually killed more people than they killed in their deployment as weapons. Paperclip also brought over other similarly monstrous scientists, including Hubertus Strughold, who had murdered human test subjects taken from concentration camps through exposure to extreme cold, intensive air preasure, and surgery without anesthetic, and Kurt Blome, the head of Nazi bioweapon research who deliberately infected concentration camp inmates with numerous different diseases, many of them deadly. For the United States, Strughold’s work would prove invaluable in making manned spaceflight even remotely possible, while Blome’s research would shape the development of American chemical weapon and nerve gas programs before he was sent to West Germany to work on still undisclosed secret projects for the military. Of note, Blome had also been a collaborator with the infamous Japanese “Unit 731,” which killed hundreds of thousands of prisoners in inhumane experiments. Similar to the fate of von Braun and the other Paperclip scientists, most of the scientists in Unit 731 were also granted immunity for their numerous war crimes, with the United States using their research in combination with Blome’s to develop bioweapons of their own, later deployed in the Korean War.

    Scientists weren’t the only recruits from the Nazi regime protected by the United States. At the end of World War II, countless Axis war criminals fled to countries such as Spain and Argentina through “ratlines,” orchestrated by the fascist Croatian Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović in cooperation with the United States Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). During World War II, Draganović had overseen the deportation of countless Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi concentration camps, and after the war organized the ratlines to provide escape routes to members of the Ustaśe, the Croatian fascist movement to which Draganović belonged which had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Draganović soon expanded the ratlines operation to provide escape routes to various prominent Nazis and other fascists. Among the escapees who used these ratlines were Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Croatian Dictator Ante Pavelić, and Léon Degrelle, who would go on to establish the neo-Nazi organization CEDADE. The CIC was aware that these ratlines were operating, and at times even helped facilitate them when it wanted to recruit certain Nazis who would otherwise have received death sentences for their crimes. One of the most prominent Nazis brought out of Europe on this US-Ustaśe ratline system to work for American intelligence services was Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.” During World War II, Barbie was a member of the Gestapo who personally tortured and killed numerous prisoners in the Netherlands and France, including children, and would ultimately be responsible for the deaths of well over ten thousand people in this capacity.

In 1947, Barbie would be recruited by the CIC as a part of American anti-communist efforts before making his way to Bolivia in 1951 in an escape facilitated by the United States government. Barbie would live in South America for decades until his capture, trial, and execution by the French government in 1983. In the decades between his arrival and capture however, he would make himself exceptionally useful to the United States and play a major part in several “regime changes” in the country. Barbie cozied up with the Bolivian government initially, becoming an advisor on internal security while at the same time serving as the main liaison for the Central Intelligence Agency in the country. When in the early 1960’s, that same government did not break off friendly relations with Cuba and acted with leniency towards organizing tin miners, Barbie was in communications with the CIA-backed René Barrientos who would lead a coup against the elected government and install a military dictatorship that would conform to American interests. Similarly, Barbie had been the main point of contact for the CIA in the country when agents assisted the dictatorship in assassinating the revolutionary guerilla Che Guevara. When the usual tumult of mid-20th century Latin American politics led to another coup, this time by a general less inclined to play by the rules set down by the US, Barbie helped organize another coup, this time to install his friend General Hugo Banzer Suárez in 1970. Under Suarez’s rule, thousands of leftists and trade unionists were “disappeared,” prison camps were established and Barbie’s torture methods were adopted, serving as a prelude to the methods of the Pinochet dictatorship and similar CIA backed right-wing regimes.

Under Banzer, Barbie would become heavily involved in facilitating the production and trafficking of cocaine, an unsurprising choice considering his patrons. The Bolivian cocaine operation would be the main supplier for the Medellín Cartel lead by infamous cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar, and in turn would fund the creation of Barbie’s narco-terrorist mercenary group, Los Novios de La Muerte. When widespread protest forced Banzer to resign and bring back free elections after the extent to which his family profited from cocaine trafficking organizations came to light, Barbie was instrumental in the 1980 “Cocaine Coup.” Barbie provided the mercenaries that would violently install General Luis García Meza, who during his brief reign would commit to a “crackdown” on the drug trade in Bolivia that was ultimately a smokescreen for consolidating the cocaine monopoly Barbie had helped establish. When Barbie was finally captured in 1983, despite receiving a tip off from the CIA about his impending arrest, he had caused untold irreversible suffering throughout Bolivia and served as a major architect for one of the largest cocaine trafficking networks, which would be of particular utility to Barbie’s handlers in the CIA. Here Barbie serves as the most egregious example of Nazi war criminals receiving protection from American intelligence, being smuggled out of the country on the ratlines, and then used abroad as an instrument of imperial domination.

This isn’t to say that every prominent Nazi or fascist the Americans recruited was brought to the United States or sent down to South America: many were made some of the most important figures in the West German government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Some of the former members of the Nazi government could exercise a small degree of plausible deniability with regards to their devotion to the ideology. Hans Speidel was a German general who was one of the participants in the July 20 Plot against Hitler in 1944, a conspiracy which was motivated more by Hitler’s poor handling of military affairs than any distaste the right-wing generals had for the government’s explicitly racist policies, considering they were able to tolerate a decade of the latter. Speidel’s involvement in the plot to make a separate peace with the west while continuing the war against the Soviets made him a palatable enough to serve as one of the founders of West Germany’s Bundeswehr, the successor to the disgraced Wehrmacht. Speidel served as the first of its highest ranking generals and a key figure in facilitating the country’s integration into NATO, going on to serve as the Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces of Central Europe from 1957 to 1963. Another high ranking Nazi military officer who would become of one West Germany’s highest ranking generals was Adolf Heusinger, a member of Nazi High Command. By his own admission, Heusinger had no involvement in the July 20 Plot and actually told the government everything he knew about the conspirators. None of this prevented Heusinger from serving as chairman of the NATO Military Committee in the early 1960s of course. Interestingly, both Speidel and Heusinger were involved in the Schnez Truppe, an illegal “secret army” set up in 1949 and composed of thousands of Wehrmacht and SS veteran officers. The Schnez Truppe compiled lists of socialists and left-wing sympathizers to round up in case of Soviet invasion, with the United States being aware of the entire arrangement. Other examples of Nazis throughout NATO's highest echelons of its military structure are almost innumerable. Johann von Kielmansegg, Ernst Ferber, Franz Joseph Schulze, Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, and Karl Schnell were all Nazi military officers who would also hold the title of Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces of Central Europe, while Johannes Steinhoff was a Nazi lieutenant and fighter pilot who served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee in the early 1970s. Steinhoff’s moment of most widespread attention was probably in 1985 when he took then President Ronald Reagan to pay respects at a German military cemetery that interred a number of SS members. Throughout the Cold War, fascist military officers who had served under Hitler continued to direct military operations in West Germany and Central Europe.

The military was not the exclusive domain of high ranking Nazis in West Germany. In 1957, over three-fourths of the senior officials in the West German Justice Department were former self-identified Nazis, a higher percentage than at any point under actual Nazi Germany. Many of these Nazi lawyers and jurists had been the same who created the legal framework for the Holocaust, and this does not even take into account the officials who, while not members of the Nazi party, were directly involved in Nazi policymaking. One of the highest ranking holdovers from Hitler’s government was Hans Globke, the Chief of Staff for the German Chancellery from 1953 to 1963. Back in Hitler’s Germany, Globke had never officially been a member of the Nazi Party, but he had formulated the 1933 Enabling Act which brought Adolf Hitler to power, drafted numerous anti-semitic laws, and served as the chief legal advisor to the Office of Jewish Affairs which was responsible for administering the Holocaust. When the Allies eventually took Germany, the British and Americans concluded that Globke was too valuable as a statesman to face punishment for his involvement in genocide, laying the path for him to become the most important advisor for West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. A decade after World War II, one of the architects of the Holocaust was one of the most powerful men in Western Germany. In his capacity as Chief of Staff, Globke was instrumental in strengthening ties with the United States, NATO, and the CIA, and establishing the country’s intelligence services, which just so happened to fall under the administration of his good friend Reinhard Gehlen.

Reinhard Gehlen was likely the most important Nazi recruited by the Americans at the end of World War II. A lieutenant general and spymaster in Nazi Germany put in charge of military intelligence on the Eastern front, Gehlen was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets during his time there. Gehlen was too talented for his own good it seems, as his intelligence reports correctly described the successful advance of the Soviet military, which Hitler saw as an act of “defeatism,” and prompted him to dismiss Gehlen from his post in April 1945. Fortunately, Gehlen would not have to wait long between employers as only about a month later, with Hitler dead and Nazi Germany defeated, he surrended to the US Counterintelligence Corps who in turn introduced him to his new boss: Allen Dulles, then the Swiss branch director of the CIA precursor Office of Strategic Services. A few months earlier, before the war had even ended, Dulles was engaging in secret negotiations with SS General Karl Wolff. Wolff was in charge of occupied northern Italy at the time and responsible for the deaths of three hundred thousand Jews, and Dulles wanted to secure an early peace in the region to keep the predominantly communist Italian resistance from overthrowing the fascists and coming into power. These clandestine negotiations, which granted clemency to a vast number of SS officers in what was known as Operation Sunrise. When Stalin learned about these negotiations, he was furious, assuming that the US was attempting to secure a separate peace contrary to the agreement established between the Soviets and the rest of the allies. Stalin had reason to assume the worst, since part of the negotiations with Wolff entailed an attempt to recruit him and his men for Operation Unthinkable, the possible invasion of the Soviet Union after the defeat of Nazi Germany. While Dulles was unable to secure his “separate peace” before Germany’s surrender, Wolff was protected from the Nuremburg trials for his cooperation and allowed to live out the rest of his life a free man. 

When Dulles met with Gehlen, the inevitability of conflict with the Soviet Union was the main matter on their minds. To this end, Gehlen informed Dulles of the incomplete plans for Werwolf, a plan formulated by Heinrich Himmler when the prospect of defeat was beginning to loom over Nazi Germany. The plan called for a secret army organized behind enemy lines in Soviet territory that would engage in clandestine paramilitary operations with plans to draw on hidden caches of supplies and weaponry set up by the Reich. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Americans would put a similar plan into effect in the form of Operation Gladio, the “stay-behind” network of covert fascist paramilitaries deployed across Europe under the oversight of NATO and the CIA. In 1947, Gehlen was sent back to Germany to work under the CIA as the head of a new intelligence agency that would become known simply as the Gehlen Organization. Staffed by numerous former SS officers, the Org attempted to implement these secret armies in the Baltic and Ukrainian SSRs in cooperation with MI6, working to smuggle anti-communist exiles behind enemy lines under the leadership of men like Estonian SS officer and war criminal Alfons Rebane. Despite some early successes, Soviet counterintelligence managed to successfully thwart most of these efforts. Around the same time, in collaboration with the CIA, the Gehlen Organization also set up the neo-fascist organization Bund Deutscher Jugend and its paramilitary branch, the Technischer Dienst, to serve as West Germany’s own “stay-behind” secret army, once again composed of Wehrmacht and SS veterans. It’s probably not surprising to learn that one of the trainers for the BDJ-TD just so happened to be US Counterintelligence Corps recruit Klaus Barbie. The discovery of the BDJ, its weapon caches, its American funding, and its kill list of West German socialists all became a point of controversy in 1952, leading the Counterintelligence Corps to intervene to prevent local West German authorities becoming privy to sensitive information. After about a decade of these kinds of operations, in 1956 the Gehlen Organization was dissolved into the newly formed Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence agency which still exists to this day, with many of the SS officers in the original organization being brought over into the new national intelligence agency. For his part, Gehlen would serve as the first president of the BND from 1956 to 1968.

    A final illuminating example of this supranational “Fourth Reich” is found in the post-World War II activities of one of the most important recruits of the Gehlen Organization, Otto Skorzeny. The exploits of this scarred SS officer and intelligence operative are almost too numerous to comprehensively list, but a brief overview of his activities should serve to demonstrate how US-backed Nazi activities in Europe, Latin America, and beyond all tied back together into a global network. During World War II, Skorzeny had established himself as one of Nazi Germany’s most vital special forces operators, such as in Operation Oak in 1943 when he rescued Benito Mussolini from certain doom. Towards the end of the war, with a growing understanding of the Reich’s coming defeat, Skorzeny’s reputation lead to his recruitment by a number of wealthy German industrialists who had backed and profited from Hitler’s regime for the purpose of smuggling their wealth out of the country. At this time, Skorzeny was also working alongside Reinhard Gehlen as one of the coordinators of the proposed Operation Werwolf. When the war came to an end, Skorzeny purposefully presented himself as a prisoner of war to American forces, correctly predicting that his skillset would make him a valuable asset to the United States in their oncoming pivot to a focus on anti-communist efforts. While interned as a prisoner by the Americans, Skorzeny had left behind a network of his own ratlines to allow SS members to escape Allied territory for safe havens such as Spain, Portugal, and Argentina in what was variously known as the Organization of SS Veterans (ODESSA) or Die Spinne (The Spider), organized by the Werwolf agents Skorzeny had trained. Like the ratlines operated by Krunoslav Draganović, these ratlines were tacitly approved and at times even facilitated by the US Counterintelligence Corps. Skorzeny would eventually “escape” from American custody in 1948, but according to his own testimony, the Americans actually helped facilitate this escape. After a brief period lying low, Skorzeny would return to activity as a member of the Gehlen Organization - with American and British internal documentation indicating the Org was a cutout for covert American sponsorship of Skorzeny.

    Skorzeny set himself up in Madrid in 1950, living comfortably under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, where he quickly found that his services on behalf of German industrialists had paid off. In 1951 Alfried Krupp, the SS-associated weapons manufacturing heir who had used slave labor and operated private concentration camps during World War II, received a pardon from the American occupation for his war crimes and returned to operating his business with all of his capital restored. An incredibly wealthy man once more, Krupp served as another of Skorzeny’s patrons by recruiting him to serve as his company’s representative in Argentina. Through this Argentina connection, Skorzeny became involved in frequent dealings with President Juan Perón, who transformed his country into a haven for Nazi war criminals and their ill-gotten loot. Beyond Argentina, Skorzeny engaged in globe-trotting work on behalf of the Gehlen Organization and by extension the CIA, participating in the 1952 Egyptian coup, bringing on board German technicians, and helping to reorganize the Egyptian service on the basis that the new nationalist leadership would provide the United States with a valuable anti-communist ally, even if this meant undermining the British by installing militant anti-colonialists in one of their most important former colonies. However, when the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser refused to allow the Americans to establish a military base in his country and continued to maintain relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China, the United States reversed its stance and Skorzeny would convince many of the German technicians in the country to depart - ironically, on the basis of orders relayed to him by the Israeli Mossad.

    Outside of his intelligence work directly on behalf of the CIA, Skorzeny operated as the focal point for a loose “Fascist International.” Skorzeny was a mentor to Jean-Fraçois Thiriart, the “Nazi Maoist” with strong ties to the Belgian branch of Operation Gladio, joined the Belgian fascist Leon Degrelle in founding the Spanish Neo-Nazi group CEDADE, maintained communications with Klaus Barbie during his activities in Bolivia, and associated with the covert Portuguese mercenary group Aginter Press which carried out anti-communist counter-insurgencies and was connected to the “strategy of tension” carried out by Gladio operatives in Italy. In cooperation with one of the founders of Aginter Press and Propaganda Due lodge member, Italian neofascist Delle Chiaie, Skorzeny formed his own mercenary organization, the Paladin Group, which would train paramilitary death squads. During the last decade of Skorzeny’s life from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Paladin Group would provide its services to Francoist Spain, Apartheid South Africa, the military junta in Greece (ran by Operation Gladio assets), and Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed dictatorship in Chile. After Skorzeny’s death in 1975, Chiaie continued his mercenary and neo-fascist activities, including assisting Klaus Barbie and the CIA in the Bolivian “Cocaine Coup.”

Let us take all of this together: the United States facilitated the escape of numerous SS officers and Nazi war criminals from any consequences or punishment, integrating them into government scientific agencies, installing them in positions of leadership in West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and using them as intelligence assets. These CIA-backed Nazis would both help establish the secret armies of Operation Gladio, serving as middlemen for their American sponsors, and facilitate coups in countries to bring them more in line with American interests. Based on these facts, I propose a radical revision of history, and one that I will admit is not entirely original. Given the extent of American cooperation with and support for former Nazi leadership, as well as other fascist organizations through Operation Gladio, we should consider that Stalin was not only correct in believing the Americans had attempted to secure a separate peace with parts of the Nazi government, but that they had actually done so. In this light, the Cold War was a continuation of World War II, with the United States allying with the remnants of the Third Reich who they reconstituted into a new, supranational form. The American military intelligence apparatus dismissed the doomed approach of Operation Unthinkable in favor of a long term Werwolf style war waged through clandestine means such as Operation Gladio and Operation Condor. The ideological fervor of Hitlerism might have died in 1945, but the pragmatic new Nazism lived on through the efforts of men like Dulles and Gehlen and finally triumphed over its eternal enemy in 1991. Today we live in the world created by that lingering Nazi victory: an Invisible Americanized Reich.