Ukraine neo-Nazis, latest allies Washington has used against Russia
FROM pogrom-mongers to Hitlerites to radical Islamists, the US has collaborated with repugnant partners for more than a century.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was furious when he found out in March 1945 that his supposed World War II ally, Washington, was negotiating with the German Nazis behind his back.
In fact, by the accounts of some historians, American spy and future CIA director Allen Dulles essentially kicked off the Cold War when he held secret talks with Waffen SS General Karl Wolff as Hitler’s regime was nearing its collapse.
Stalin, US President Franklin Roosevelt, and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill had agreed that they would accept only unconditional surrender from the Nazis because of the Hitler regime’s monstrous crimes.
When the Dulles-Wolff talks came to light, FDR repeatedly and falsely told Stalin that no one was negotiating with the Germans.
The Georgian generalissimo was unconvinced and suspected that his Western allies were manoeuvring to contain the USSR and occupy territory that might otherwise fall to the Red Army.
The Soviets had reason to be suspicious. Some in Washington, including Dulles, viewed the USSR as America’s biggest longterm threat even as the countries worked together to defeat Germany.
Save the Nazis
As confirmed by documents that were finally declassified more than half a century later, US intelligence agencies were soon to hire upward of 1 000 Nazis as Cold War spies.
By then, America already had a history of finding common cause against Moscow with unseemly allies. As the Soviets remembered well, the US had invaded Russia in 1918 in a failed effort to help overthrow the Bolshevik government.
At the time, Washington was allied with White Army counter-revolutionaries, some of whom had a nasty taste for pogroms and other murderous atrocities.
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Even as then-President Woodrow Wilson moralised to world leaders about self-determination and opposing external aggression — principles that would be applied only according to US self-interest in the generations ahead — he sent American forces to intervene in the Russian Civil War.
He was to set a precedent that has continued to play out to this day, from Germany to Central Asia to the current Ukraine crisis.
The pattern was clear: Portray America as the virtuous champion of freedom while working with anyone — however abhorrent their deeds and views might be — as long as they share Washington’s burning desire to hurt Russia.
In 1945, Dulles got his way with Wolff, formerly Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man. The general and his group of SS officers, which was called the Black Order, agreed to surrender northern Italy to Allied forces. The deal didn’t avail much for the US, coming just six days before the full German surrender, and it sowed seeds of distrust with the Soviets and other allies.
For his part, Wolff was spared the gallows, as the Nuremberg prosecutors mysteriously took him off their list of major war criminals and treated him as a “witness” to Nazi atrocities, rather than a perpetrator, according to historians.
Dulles went so far as to send a rescue team to save Wolff when the general’s villa was surrounded by Italian partisans.
US intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the FBI helped whitewash the records of the Nazis they wanted to employ after the war. In other cases, notorious war criminals were hidden from America’s allies.
One such useful rogue was Klaus Barbie, who was known as the “Butcher of Lyon” when he was torturing Jews and resistance fighters as a Gestapo officer in Vichy France.
He worked as a spy in occupied Germany for the US, and after the French demanded that he be extradited to stand trial as a war criminal, Washington whisked him away to Bolivia in 1951.
As a US investigation finally revealed in 1983, the Americans had lied to their French allies about Barbie’s whereabouts.
The US Army paid to have Barbie and other anti-communist agents evacuated from Europe through a “rat line” operated by fascist Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic. “Officers of the US government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and arranging his escape from the law,” US investigator Allan Ryan Jr. said.
In addition to directly employing many Nazis, the CIA reportedly paid millions of dollars to tap a large spy network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who was formerly Hitler’s chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front. The German general was granted immunity from prosecution for his alleged war crimes and helped some of his Nazi cohorts flee Europe to avoid arrest.
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The US government employed Nazis for more than just spying. Over 1 600, including scientists and engineers, were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip to help win the Cold War with their technical skills.
For instance, the Pentagon brought rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to America along with his new wife, his parents, and his brother. Von Braun, whose team in Germany used slave labour to build V-2 rockets for Hitler, became a hero of the US space programme and was the subject of a Disney movie and a Time magazine cover story.