Nazis After the War

After invading Iraq, the Americans fired all individuals at the top of most institutions (army, police, bureaucracy). Why? Because, by definition, the top guys would have appointed by and thus supportive of Saddam’s policies. The results were disastrous since now there was nobody with “work experience” available to take the top jobs of governance and providing security.

 

But when Nazi Germany fell, nobody did any such cleansing. Sure, the very top Nazis were prosecuted (if captured). But the majority of the next rung weren’t. William Boyd writes in his summary of Danny Orbach’s book, Fugitives:

“Most – it stands to reason – quietly blended back in to postwar German society. It is estimated that at the end of the conflict in 1945 the Nazi party had around 8.5 million members. Only a tiny percentage were hunted down and prosecuted. What happened to the millions of others?”

These Nazis had no good choices, esp. if they were ideologically inclined. Join the hated West (whom they had fought bitterly), or join the communist Soviet Union (another set whom they had viciously fought), or join whoever paid the most.

 

Both the West and the Soviet bloc absorbed the Nazis – some for nation building and running the country, others for their scientific/military skills, and yet more for their expertise in espionage and the reams of information they had from World War II about German, Soviet, American, British and French spies. That last part – the espionage “hires” – were a mixed lot. Some truly had lot of high quality information while others were double agents. More problematically, the espionage hires continued to work the way they did during the World War, i.e., with least supervision and the focus only on results. Inevitably, a lack of supervision led to a lot of betrayals and traitors both for the West and the Soviet blocs.

 

The Nazis who couldn’t bear to join either of the former enemies – West or USSR – turned to the Middle East. An added attraction was that those countries hated Israel – and the Nazis hated Jews. That in turn led to Israel launching terror campaigns (including assassinations) of all such German scientists, not only in countries like Egypt but also inside Germany itself. Some of those attempts failed, or led to collateral damage, in turn souring relations between Germany and Israel.

 

While they definitely created benefits and problems, they weren’t just referred to as scientist or bureaucrats or arms dealers. The “Nazi” word was also tagged on when referring to them. And because of the association with that word, everyone’s perception of the amount of threat such actors created was almost always grossly exaggerated.

 

While Boyd finds the book excellent, he doesn’t agree with the author’s calling of the Nazis as “losers, the detritus of history”. After all, says Boyd:

“(The ex-Nazis) generated a huge amount of alarm and crisis in Europe and North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.”