With all the commemorations and celebrations surrounding the 80^th anniversary of the formal Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri [September 2, 1945], thus officially ending WWII – it’s important to remember that before the atomic bombs were even dropped on Japan in August 1945 the United States was busy recruiting as many German engineers and scientists as they could find.

Rather than prosecute these ardent Nazis as war criminals – as they should have done – elite US Foreign Policy movers and shakers like Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, along with other Nazi sympathizers like John McCloy, Walter Bedell Smith and Bill Donovan – were finding ways to incorporate these ardent Nazis into some of the most sensitive positions in the US Military-Industrial Complex (MIC).

The new enemy was the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. At virtually any cost.

Nazi scientists Walter Dornberger, Kurt Debus, Hubertus Strughold and Arthur Rudolph were appointed to high positions in the aerospace industry. Strughold became known as the ‘Father of space medicine’ at NASA.

Werner von Braun – the former SS Nazi rocket scientist who participated in the persecution of forced laborers, including inmates from the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp – became director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and was the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.

Only in America could a Nazi war criminal become exalted as a national hero…

Many of these former Nazis ended up eventually being stripped of their US citizenship and deported back to Germany when their services were no longer needed. Von Braun and others remained immune, however. The British, who suffered the brunt of the V1 and V2 terror campaign wrought by von Braun and his team, wanted him prosecuted.

Several years ago, under a successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the CIA was forced to open up its Cold War files on former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and his postwar activities with the CIA. The congressionally-mandated Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act exposed the close relationship between the Gehlen Organization and their post-war involvement with the OSS and later, CIA.

Using his clout, Gehlen forged a deal with the Americans whereby he would turn over his Russian intelligence files in exchange for his freedom and that of a number of his top aides – then languishing in POW camps scattered throughout Germany. Gehlen offered to reestablish his intelligence network for the United States. This offer was accepted by Dulles and his cronies on behalf of the US government, and Gehlen was set free to turn his considerable resources against our former ally, the Soviet Union.

The ‘Gehlen Org’ as it came to be known, recruited thousands of the former Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS officers into its ranks. Among those now under American jurisdiction were Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s most trusted aid; SS Major Emil Augsburg, who oversaw the murder of hundreds of Russians; and of course, Klaus Barbie: the infamous “Butcher of Lyon.”

Gehlen went on to head West German intelligence for many years. In 1956, The Gehlen Org became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service) – the West German Secret police.

Under top-secret US OPERATION PAPERCLIP, thousands of German “scientists” (along with their families) were brought to the USA and put to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War. The program was managed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), whose goal was to appropriate German intellectual property in order to develop America’s arsenal of rockets and biological and chemical weapons, and to ensure such coveted information did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.

Although President Truman officially sanctioned the operation, he expressly forbade the recruitment of any ardent Nazi party members or supporters.

Nevertheless, high ranking officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner to the CIA) – such as McCloy, John McCone, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan and the Dulles brothers – bypassed Truman’s directive by whitewashing incriminating evidence from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

Thus, treason became embedded in America’s intelligence apparatus.

OPERATION PAPERCLIP had several spin-off projects. Expanding on PAPERCLIP, the ‘National Interest’ program was connected to the new CIA, and provided a means of bypassing scrutiny by anti-Nazi elements within US military intelligence.

Nazis were prime movers in the CIA’s MKULTRA program and its many offshoots involving mind-control and psychoactive drugs like LSD and DMT.

No longer were Nazi scientists the sole objective of PAPERCLIP, however. Recruitment of Nazis eventually included Eastern European fascists and neo-Nazis in the fight against the communists; including convicted war criminals. Anyone, regardless of their past, was eligible, as long as someone within the US government deemed their presence to be in the “national interest.”

Later, when the hideous crimes of some of these men were eventually exposed in the press, the CIA helped some of them escape justice by secreting thousands of Nazis to friendly nations in South America.

America has a long and sordid history of collaborating with Nazis at the very highest levels of government and finance. In the ensuing years, Nazi ideology became deeply embedded in the upper echelons of US foreign policy and domestic policy. It continues to this day.

The USA is the Fourth Reich. Heil Trump!

[Edited repost from 2019]