The even wilder thing is that the CIA actively hired former Nazis (and relocated them and their families) in Operation Paperclip after the war to aid in Cold War operations...
That's not exactly a wild thing; it was no secret at all that Werner von Braun was at the heart of the Apollo program while it was happening.
The Soviets and British did the same thing, IIRC.
The lesson is simple: if you're going to lose a war, lose a war as a guy who is good at something, because the new management will be a lot less likely to hold crimes against humanity against you.
Even mentioned in a darkly humorous tone in the 1968 movie "Ice Station Zebra" (cold war thriller). The character played by Patrick McGoohan has a line: " The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists."
Or just do those crimes and never loose a war. The moral is you can get away with all the murder if you are not an upstart and can write it out of your history. Can even be a hero of history prosecuting people for the crimes you commit.
It does display the lyrics w/ one click, also the sheet music, has multiple recordings, and is actually Lehrer's site. It's true that there's no video.
It's not really all that wild when you consider that they were hired for their impressive achievements in various fields and not their loyalty to the nazi party.
"Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.
One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews."
If you take the Kolmogorov Option you’d better be Kolmogorov. Besides the creature being ended was Nazism, not its components. Some of its component individuals had to be ended (and if necessary, humiliated) to end it but that was the means.
Yes, they were hired _despite_ their loyalty (and sometimes despite their war crimes).
But not just because of their 'impressive achievements' during their time as Nazi scientists, part of why they were hired was because the US was afraid to lose them to the Soviet Union based purely on _potential achievements_. Some scientists even played this as a card to get hired by the US.
In such a state, it's hard to be "respected in your field" unless you publicly pledge loyalty to the ruling party. This does not mean that all such people were all apolitical, just that their motives and outlook will vary. And that for people who were prominent when the Nazis came to power, there likely wasn't much middle ground between "leave the country, go far away" and "join the party".
This also applies to the US to a lesser extent. If you want to work in academia, there's a very strict subset of ideas you're allowed to even consider.
"Denial" crimes. There's at least 3 of them involving race, gender, and religion. Good luck getting funding or even keeping your shitty job if you commit any of these cardinal sins.
But it wasn't simply for their achievements that so many of these guys (many of whose achievements weren't all that impressive, actually) were hired. Rather, it was because they were perceived (by virtue of their Nazi credentials) as being solidly anti-communist, and hence, "reliable". That's where post-WW2 history starts to get wild again.
I don't think he's asserting they brought in Nazis for the fun of having them around. But it's surprising that while heightened ties to the Nazis would disqualify you from immigration eligibility, the most secretive circles of the state (and ones highly acquainted with Nazi brutality) were actively recruiting these people. Shows how deep the anti-Soviet derangement ran.
Derangement? Stalin was extremely suspicious of the west and even went so far as to accuse of us collaborating with Hitler himself. Not only that, the Soviet regime was excessively brutal. One of the worst in history despite not being mentioned much in modern history books. The treatment of captives during wartime, the Eastern Bloc in total, etc. While not a primary source "Soviet War Crimes" has a massive Wikipedia entry detailing just how bad the soviets were. At least related to WW2 alone we can look to how their treatment of the Polish was after pushing Germany out. They murdered Finnish civilians en masse during raids. Further, their deportation campaigns were enough to make most period despots blush.
To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.
I think what people find "wild" is likely the blatant contradictions in rhetoric between valuing humans and valuing "impressive achievements". The US and the NAZIs are merely the best examples of valuing the latter over the former. At least, for now.
Notably, nobody in this entire comment section has been able to articulate how the space race has improved humanity more than equivalent efforts that focus on human quality of life, like implementing a public healthcare system. Whitey On The Moon rings just as true now as it did 60 years ago. Political posturing that happened to spawn technological development is a poor excuse for lack of coherent values. The fact that we achieved something that is truly admirable does not excuse for the general lack of giving-a-shit-about-humans that surrounds national politics. You know what else would be admirable? Taking care of our neighbors even if they don't contribute to the GDP.
It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war. This isn't passing judgment on Soviet policies, only a recognition that conflict might not have been so heated if we'd learned our lesson from how the disintegration of US-Japanese relations had drawn us into the previous war.
Essentially, the US seems to have a habit of being "forced" to ally with undesirable elements after some lapse in geopolitical awareness or effort leads to hostilities (sound familiar?).
>It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
Only if you ignore communist antagonism in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Up to and including their own allies when they gave their citizens a little too much freedom. I have several books in Czech on my shelf with a copyright date of 1968, a year in which far more books were published than years prior, I wonder why they share that year?
Are you implying that all communist antagonism was in response to American policy? I believe there was plenty of aggression by all parties in the Cold War, but there are several instances where the communists were very clearly the aggressors. Just a couple of highlights:
1) The Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The Soviets did this in response to the horrifically aggressive acts of the US, Britain, and France to... manage their occupation zones in Germany differently than the Soviets wanted them to, and economic and currency reform in West Germany.
2) The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As far as I can tell, western involvement in Dubcek's reforms and the Prague Spring were about as non-existent as possible. This didn't stop the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations invading their own ally, and in explicit violation of the Warsaw Pact itself.
3) The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The west's bizarre support of the Khmer Rouge after the successful Vietnamese invasion notwithstanding (for complex geopolitical reasons), prior to the invasion it treated both Cambodia and Vietnam as enemies and the war between the two nations was do to their own politics, not any US influence.
And there are plenty more. And I'm sure there are instances you can bring up where the combloc countries were reacting to clear aggression by the west, but here's the thing: I'm not claiming that such aggression never happened. Meanwhile you seem to be arguing that the combloc countries would have been perfectly peaceful if they didn't need to react to aggressions by those damn western capitalists.
Would you care to explain to us how (just picking one of the events listed at random) literally blockading an entire city -- cutting off all access to food and humanitarian supplies -- can in any way be a logical, "non-antagonistic" response to a paper declaration such as the Truman Doctrine?
Or even to the Soviets' stated rationale for taking action -- the introduction of the Deutsche Mark in West Berlin?
I'd really like to see your careful, considered response to this question.
Well, it's not non-antagonistic, of course. It was an antagonistic response to previous antagonism, both in word (the aforementioned doctrine) and deed (unnecessarily obliterating an entire city with a single bomb, in part as an intimidation strategy). It's simply not irrational to perceive some given action as a way to f*ck with you (even if we give America et al. the benefit of the doubt it assuming that it was ultimately meant benignly) if the people carrying out the action had previously declared, "We are going to f*ck with you," and it does, in fact, end up f*cking with you.
>But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
>Which was?
>No need for fancy optic effects here - just say what you mean.
I see that you're angry that I did not take the bait of trying to contradict your premise. Sorry; much as you may hate it, we agree that the siege was antagonistic. My straight answer, I'll repeat: antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable. In this case, "Who started it?" is significant.
I'm trying to falsify my own stance by finding an instance where the USSR did something aggressive and uncalled for that wasn't a response to Western rhetoric or behavior. One might say the various invasions in the run-up to WWII, but those come after Truman's famous, "Let 'em kill each other," line; Western enmity was preexisting, at that point. And I reject the notion that it comes down to their human rights record, considering our own (even at that time). It seems to come down to a bitterness over the West's inability to turn its totalitarian machine towards at least the facade of our desires and ends (a la China for much of the 90s and 2000s). It's just one of many examples where the West has interpreted a failure to kowtow to our ambitions as an existential threat. This is the dumbshit recklessness that I'm referring to when I say that we started the Cold War.
Also, this is the last time I'm assuming good faith on your part. I would say, "Don't fuck it up," but part of me thinks that you'll take that as a challenge.
No one is angry about anything. It's a meeting of minds here, now.
Antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable.
Next question then: was the response ... proportionate? You know, blockading a a whole city, so that nothing can get in, not even diapers or baby food? That's like, an act of war, right? In response to -- currency reform?
More specifically: would you say the Soviet response to that situation was -- "understandable"? Would you now?
Because that's an incredibly euphemistic read of what it stood for, akin to taking a police department press release at face value. Soviets reading between the lines - as American warhawks certainly intended it to be read - would have recognized it as a declaration of America's intent to isolate the USSR, cutting it off from potential global allies (i.e., threats to Western capitalist hegemony, e.g., any country that threatened to nationalize its resources in opposition to Western corporate interests). It turned what could have been a negotiation for power-sharing (through which soft power and widespread welfare might influence more robust observation of human rights) into a (second) confirmation that the two superpowers were entering a period of conflict (the nature of which actually encouraged means-to-an-end thinking that caused suffering in both the 1st and 2nd worlds).
Later developments would also prove the doctrine's stated intentions to be a farce, as much of its execution involved toppling democracies in favor of US-backed autocrats.
So the Soviets took a public statement to mean something not explicitly stated, and that made it justified to and not an act of aggression to (checks notes) cut off all food and humanitarian aid to a city? Your view of things here is seriously twisted man. I don't think the west were perfect little angels during the cold war period, why is it so hard for you to not consider the same for the combloc countries? Especially when the Soviets already had a history of unjustified aggression and expansionism in Poland, Finland, the Baltics, and Romania in the lead up to/during WW2?
>So the Soviets took a public statement to mean something not explicitly stated
Yes.
>and that made it justified
I didn't say that. Their reaction may not have been justified, but it, or some like reaction, was understandable, even predictable - and, most importantly, a reaction. Speaking from the perspective of the West, who could not control the USSR's behavior, but who could measure its own actions against what would provoke or placate them: did we do everything we could to avoid the Cold War? Did we AVOID doing anything that might have pushed both states towards it? Clearly not.
So, circling back: when we talk about the US spiriting Nazis away to America, setting them up with a happy American life, justified by the necessity of staying ahead of the Soviets in a military and technological arms race... Where does that necessity come from? Something unavoidable, or not? That's my only point here. It's wild that America created conditions where we felt the need to harbor mass murderers and/or their enablers, when we needn't have had to. I don't know why that idea makes you so angry.
No, because that's a straw man. The idea is that the Soviets were not looking to be in a half-century-long dick-measuring contest with the US, with the fate of the biosphere in the balance, and that the impetus for much of their expansionism and antagonism was the selfsame posturing that we claimed was our response to their antagonism. This is tantamount to the stance that Henry A. Wallace - the man who would have been president after FDR's death if not for the DNC pulling a Kamala at the 1944 convention - took (even if he walked that back amidst McCarthyism).
I'm not saying that the US and Soviets ever would have been strict allies like we became with Japan, but a calmer entry to the post-war period might have cooled nerves and prevented the worst excesses of the Cold War. Do they seek the bomb? Do they ruin Afghanistan? Do we have flashpoints in Korea, Vietnam, South America? Are we still dealing with the negative ramifications of these events, decades on? And, in this hypothetical alternate history, did we have to employ and grant amnesty to literal Nazis to counter Soviets threatened by the Truman Doctrine? We can't know, but surely it's believable. Unless you think that mid-century communists were evil and irrational (and I suppose that you could (not me)).
It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
This is an extremely myopic point of view, and ignores a whole host of major events in Europe and Asia in the key years 1946-1950. I don't have time to lay them out for you, but if the topic is of interest to you, then you're welcome to do your own research.
That sounds like you don't really have an argument. Per previous replies, you're implicitly displaying your own myopia, considering that major events in 1945 and before were what set up major power behavior post-war.
But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
The Soviets did the same. Wernher Von Braun was famously recruited despite his past. Top National Socialists were not only recruited for their skills, but also to deny their expertise from the opposing sphere. Many of the common soldiers and officers who were not in the same demand joined the Foreign Legion. Some of those continued on in Africa to become mercenaries.
Otto Skorzeny allegedly worked for the Mossad after working with Nasser.
And perhaps on larger scale in terms of raw headcount. But significantly, there were apparently no "rock stars" like Gehlen, von Braun, Skorzeny or Barbie in their pack. Nor did any of these characters end up (like the first two) leading mission-critical organizations/programs up until the 1960s.
I think it's a decent book. If you end up reading / liking this book, I'd also recommend her book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182733784-nuclear-war. Both are well researched, the second one (Nuclear War) was a more entertaining read, in a morbid kind of way.
It's only wild if you're incredibly naive and divide the world into "good" and "bad" guys.
Before someone thinks I'm a nazi apologist, I want to clarify this is about making a point of the world being extremely grey, even in areas where you perceive the good guys to operate.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to execute people with knowledge that would otherwise be useful to the enemy. If we didn't, the soviets would. There was a lot to learn from them that didn't have to do with their prior allegiances that proved valuable for weapons development, spycraft, and space exploration.
Even in post-war West Germany, "denazification", e.g. excluding ex-nazis from roles in the new German society, was a failed policy that got discontinued after a few years.
Well, if you look into the whole ordeal regarding the planned ban of the NPD a few years ago, the whole NSU ordeal and the things regarding the AfD i would guess not much has changed...
Huh? I mean, even major news outlets in germany (even government owned) reported about the... ehm... "interesting" relationship of the various intelligence agencies and the far right...
Just to be curious, what did you write about Israel and Germany?
For all it's flaws, it was far more successful than reconstruction.
Germany as a whole hates Nazis, both because they were absolute monsters in human skin, and because they brought unprecedented and absolute ruin and devastation to the country.
Any right-thinking southerner should feel the same way about the Confederacy. And yet, a good chunk of them actively think that those animals were some kind of national heroes, unafraid of proudly broadcasting their affiliation with them.
For all the apologists white-washing history, you don't see a lot of elementary schools named after Heinrich Himmler in Berlin.
The world might not have a lot of heroes, but it has no shortage of utterly irredeemable villains.
I wonder from time-to-time how many Richmonders realize that the Union didn't burn down the town; the Confederacy did to deprive the Union of the munitions stores. Richmonders were trying to put the fire out because, well, it was destroying their homes.
Portions of the city that were razed weren't rebuilt until into the Nineties (the 1990s).
But somehow, a mythology clings on that the Union were the problem, not the people carrying the torches.
It got sabotaged by the ex-Nazi West Germans, who realized they could use West German re-armament and NATO membership (which was needed against the Soviets) as leverage to pressure the Allies to drop denazification and look the other way at them pushing the "Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht."
Makes more sense when you realize the purpose of Nazi hunting wasn't really to catch enough of them to establish some level of justice. It was to keep them closeted so they would not attempt a comeback. Before getting kidnapped to Israel, Eichmann was more than ready to be the spearhead of a resurgent Nazi movement.
The most exemplary story was the killing of Herbert Kukurs. West Germany was about to apply a statute of limitations to war crimes, which would have emboldened Nazis to come out of the woodwork. To the Mossad found a Nazi and beat him to death.
> Green Cross was founded in 1950 as Japan's first commercial blood bank and became a diversified international pharmaceutical company producing ethical drugs for delivery or administration by doctors and healthcare workers. Its founders included war criminals such as Masaji Kitano who performed torture and experiments on humans in the Japanese military's notorious Unit 731 during World War II. Also serving as a consultant for the company was Murray Sanders, the American officer and physician who had petitioned for Kitano's acquittal after the war.
> In the late 1980s, Green Cross and Takeshi Abe were at the center of a scandal in which up to 3,000 Japanese people contracted HIV through the distribution and use of blood products which were known to be unsafe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip