Introduction

At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Belgium, Holland and France fled Europe and escaped prosecution for crimes against humanity, including genocide. Many high-ranking Nazi leaders such as Adolf Eichmann, Vice-Chancellor of Germany Martin Bormann, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, Heinrich ‘Gestapo’ Muller, and the “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie (to name just a few) escaped justice following Germany’s defeat in May, 1945. Recent documentation has come to light suggesting that even The Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler himself, might have escaped Berlin in the final days of the war and lived out his life as a recluse in Argentina.

Some of these claims have been met with skepticism by historians. Attempts to determine fact from fiction is difficult if not impossible at this stage, however. Tens of thousands of classified documents related to World War II still remain locked away in secret U.S. intelligence archives. Unless further documentation is made available to researchers, we will probably never have all the answers.

Whether or not the truth eventually comes out, though, the fact remains that many dangerous war criminals eluded the authorities with the aid of powerful supporters from the International Committee of the Red Cross, The Vatican, Interpol, a mysterious organization called ODESSA, and crucially, the United States’ Office of Strategic Services (OSS – precursor to the CIA). In this post, I will demonstrate that the Nuremberg trials were essentially a western version of a show trial; a judicial sham concocted to placate the global community while behind the scenes unrepentant war criminals were being fully integrated into the US Military-Industrial complex with very few restrictions. The historical implications are staggering.

Historical Background

The military tribunals for war crimes set up in the aftermath of the atrocities committed during the Second World War are commonly referred to as The Nuremberg Trials. Several Nazi high officials, bankers and industrialists were tried for war crimes and other atrocities which violated the accepted rules of war. The charges brought against the defendants accused them of “originating, plotting and waging aggressive war, using slave labor, looting occupied countries, and abusing, torturing, and murdering civilians, prisoners of war, and so-called undesirables.”

Yet, only 177 Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. In the first and most famous trial, 24 Nazis were brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. 11 received the death penalty. The majority were acquitted or served token prison sentences. Former Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering committed suicide in his prison cell before his sentence could be carried out. Somehow he had managed to hold onto one last cyanide tablet throughout his incarceration…hidden in his body fat!

The Accused

By October of 1943, the Allies had already decided to try major Nazi officials for war crimes at the conclusion of the war. Planning for the trials began soon after V-J Day – September 2, 1945 – and the first Tribunal opened in Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945. Judges representing each of the Allied countries chaired the proceedings.

Two of the highest ranking Nazi officers, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, committed suicide at the end of the war. Goebbels and his wife, Magda, had poisoned all 6 of their children – including Magda’s alleged love-child by Hitler – along with their German Shepard dogs, before taking their own lives. Himmler’s body was found clutching his stomach, still in uniform.

At the time, it was widely accepted that Adolf Hitler was also dead, although some weren’t so sure – including Soviet leader Josef Stalin. In the years immediately following the war, the Russians maintained Hitler was still alive, and that he had fled Germany for Argentina while being shielded by former western allies. The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, reportedly said: “No one can say he (Hitler) is dead.” When President Truman asked Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August of 1945 whether he thought Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, “No”. The standard mythology follows that The Fuhrer committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin along with his new wife Eva Braun in the last days of the war.

Documentation has recently come to light which proves that western intelligence agencies were still actively pursuing leads on Hitler’s whereabouts into the mid-fifties. Certainly, there was enough reasonable doubt about Hitler’s fate at the time (at least at the highest levels) to try him in absentia, like Bormann. Why this was not done only adds to the intrigue.

The first group of Nazis and industrialists to be charged at Nuremberg were Hermann Goering, Joachim Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Julius Streicher, Hjalmar Schacht, Karl Doenitz, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Gustav Krupp, Hans Fritzsche, Walther Funk, Rudolf Hess, Erich Raeder, Robert Ley, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann (in absentia). Three other defendants, Konstantin von Neurath, Franz von Papen, and Baldur von Schirach were tried individually for other, more specific crimes. Of the 24 Nazi defendants, twenty-one were convicted; nine of these were sentenced to prison terms. Most were freed within seven years. The remaining eleven were sentenced to death by hanging.

Thirteen separate war crimes trials were held from 1945 to 1947. The trials were all presided over by judges from the four major victorious allied powers: America, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. A total of 177 Germans and Austrians were indicted at Nuremberg. All but 35 were found guilty. 25 were executed, 20 were sentenced to life in prison, and 97 were sentenced to shorter prison terms.

Goering and Bormann both escaped the gallows: Goering by suicide and Bormann by remaining at large – eventually escaping to South America with the help of the Vatican – disguised as a Priest. Robert Ley hanged himself in his cell, and Gustav Krupp was deemed too ill to stand trial, conveniently leaving the enormous Krupp arms empire intact. Three defendants were acquitted: banker Hjalmar Schacht, Hans Fritzsche – filling in for his boss, Goebbels – and Franz von Papen (aka the “Silver Fox”).

Hjalmar Horace Greely Schacht had intimate connections to American banking interests. His father had lived in the United States and named his son after the radical American journalist Horace Greeley, a prominent anti-slavery campaigner. Schacht played a major role in the creation of the Bank for International Settlements, which was responsible for the servicing of loans made under the Dawes and Young Plans to re-finance Germany. When Hitler asked him to become head of the Reichsbank and later, Economics Minister, Schacht quickly agreed.

At first Schacht denied the Nazi’s violent policies. ”What atrocities? All lies,” he once snapped at a reporter’s queries about Hitler’s increasingly violent tactics toward Jews and other “enemies of the state.” Schacht’s behavior was wildly inconsistent, however. Throughout much of the 1930s, he worked hard to stabilize Germany’s finances in the face of hemorrhaging inflation. But he also intervened on behalf of Jewish friends, according to some of his associates.

By 1938, Schacht was publicly calling the Nazis ”criminals” and attacking the persecution of Jews in his annual Christmas speech to employees of the Reichsbank. Hitler apparently tolerated Schacht’s open defiance because of his importance to the German economy.

The remaining defendants at Nuremberg were hanged on October 16, 1946. Later, a slew of lower level officials were tried, including officers and prison guards from the concentration camps, along with civilians who had murdered American aviators: during the war, angry mobs had killed several pilots who had been shot down and forced to parachute over German territory.

The Tokyo Tribunals (1946-1948) yielded even fewer convictions. Only sixteen former Japanese leaders were imprisoned for war crimes, and seven were eventually hanged. Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, however, the man who committed some of the most horrendous war crimes imaginable against captured allied forces as head of the infamous biological warfare Unit 731, was not charged with any crimes and instead was quietly drafted into the post-war American biological warfare program.

Arrested by the US occupation forces at the end of the hostilities, Lt. Gen. Ishii and other Unit 731 officers managed to negotiate and receive immunity from war-crimes prosecution before the Tokyo tribunal, in exchange for full disclosure of their biological warfare data – most of which was based on the unit’s repulsive (and highly illegal) human experimentation.

The Soviet authorities wanted to prosecute them as war criminals, but the US objected after leading US microbiologists – including Dr. Edwin Hill, head of America’s biological warfare labs in Fort Detrick, MD – reported that Unit 731’s information was “absolutely invaluable”, raving that it could never have been obtained in the USA “because of scruples attached to experiments on humans”. They also noted that “the information was obtained fairly cheaply.” Human life is pretty cheap, after all.

The Victims of the Injustice

It is generally accepted that the Holocaust took the lives of at least six million Jews during World War II. In addition to Jews, targeted groups included 2.5 million Poles and other Slavic peoples; approximately 10 million Russians (many of them civilians and prisoners of war); gypsies, immigrants and others who did not belong to the ‘Aryan’ race; the mentally ill, the physically disabled and mentally retarded; homosexuals and transsexuals; political opponents such as social democrats and communists, and religious dissidents like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Taking into account all of the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll is probably close to 20 million. The total number of those killed in the Second World War is estimated to be anywhere from 150 to 350 million.

The Perpetrators

Hitler, Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Goebbels, Goering, Bormann, Walter Rauff: these names are well-known to most students of the Holocaust. But many of the perpetrators who committed the most terrible atrocities during the war were not charged with any crimes, and were in fact allowed to escape – if not assisted – by the allies. In many cases they were given cushy jobs working for the US military establishment, like Walter Dornberger at Bell Labs. A few, like Werner von Braun, went on to lead high-profile lives bordering on celebrity. Others, like Dr. Ing. (engineer) Hans Kammler, disappeared down a historical black hole.

Hans Kammler was a high-ranking SS General (Obergruppenführer). He was regarded by many in the Nazi hierarchy as the most powerful man in Germany besides Hitler. Kammler was in charge of the Third Reich’s most secret projects, specifically those involving the world’s first jet engines, rockets, and even more esoteric and experimental propulsion systems. Kammler helped design and develop facilities for the extermination camps, including gas chambers and crematoria, and was in charge of constructing facilities for various secret weapons projects. He eventually helped administer and streamline the entire concentration camp system.

Kammler is also the man who is ultimately responsible for overseeing the demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto after the failed uprising in 1943; one of the most horrendous series of war crimes ever committed.

Following the Allied bombing raids on Peenemunde – the top secret research facility on the Baltic coast – on August 17, 1943, Kammler was responsible for moving Germany’s most vital production facilities underground. This resulted in the Mittelwerk facility and its attendant concentration camp complex, Mittelbau-Dora -, also known as Nordhausen – which supplied slave-labor for constructing the factory and working on the production lines. Kammler was also assigned to the construction of secret facilities at Jonastal and Riesengebirge for nuclear weapons research.

He had thousands of slave-laborers working for him, mostly building and working in underground factories; but many historians have never even heard of Dr. Hans Kammler. Eisenhower admits in his book, Crusade in Europe, that the Nazis were within six months of developing advanced weapons that could have changed the outcome of the war. Kammler would have been an extremely valuable asset to the allies, despite his inglorious past. Several different, conflicting versions of his death have been issued, but unlike other, better known Nazis, he appears to have simply dropped off the face of the earth after the war.

My suspicion, based on historical precedent, is that he cut an airtight deal with US intelligence agents in exchange for advanced technology and access to top-secret research far beyond even what von Braun and his team had to offer. It is easy to imagine Kammler spending the rest of his life working in highly-secure US facilities, becoming the archetype for many a “Dr. Strangelove” character. Perhaps a death-bed confession will someday shed more light on his ultimate fate. Hans Kammler’s name was not spoken but once during the Nuremberg trials.

The pretext of fighting Communism was used to justify the wholesale importation of many ardent Nazis, including the incorporation of Hitler’s top spymaster, General Reinhard Gehlen, the Chief of German Intelligence for the Eastern Front, along with his entire organization, the Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East). This collaboration basically established the modern day CIA – and created the dangerous conditions for what became known as the ‘Cold War’. Based near Munich, Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and Waffen SS veterans.

PROJECT PAPERCLIP

Because President Truman passed a law forbidding the hiring of former Nazis by the US government, all of the men recruited under Project Paperclip needed to have their past histories eradicated of any Nazi party affiliation before they could legally immigrate to the United States. Other prominent Nazi refugees include Werner von Braun, first Director of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) and Hubertus Strughold, the ‘father of Space Medicine’ – who was later extradited to Germany to stand trial for war crimes.

Arthur Rudolph was another prominent Nazi scientist who helped run the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise. All of these men worked onsite at Nordhausen, and all were fully aware of the inhumane conditions under which the prisoners were working. In spite of these facts, they were welcomed with open arms by the US military establishment for the technology they possessed. In October 1945, the Secretary of War approved a plan to bring the top German scientists into the United States to aid military research and development.

Convinced that the scientists could help America’s postwar efforts, President Harry Truman agreed in September 1946 to authorize “Project Paperclip,” a top-secret program to bring selected German scientists and technicians to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War. By the end of the year more than a hundred Germans arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas. Their assignment was to immediately begin work at nearby White Sands, New Mexico on the captured V-2 rockets which had already arrived from Germany.

The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) conducted background investigations on the scientists. In February 1947, the JIOA submitted the first set of scientists’ dossiers to the State and Justice Departments for review. They were damning. The State Department’s representative on the board, Samuel Klaus, claimed that all the scientists in the first batch were “ardent Nazis.” Their visa requests were flatly denied.

The JOIA was furious. Director Bosquet Wev, a rabid anti-communist, wrote a memo warning that “the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in ‘beating a dead Nazi horse.’” He argued that returning these scientists to Germany would be a, “far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have.”

Military Intelligence then went back and simply “cleansed” the files of any Nazi references.

By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and some were given prominent positions in the American military-scientific community. Many of these men had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on prisoners at concentration camps, and had used slave labor – among other war crimes.