Swedish journalist Anders Rydell wrote an excellent book on this very subject, called 'Plundrarna' (The plunderers). Highly recommended if you are interested in the subject and find it translated into English (or read Swedish, of course!)
He explores both the thefts themselves and the legal and moral issues which have yet to be resolved.
Published in 1994 any perceived fault of omission almost certainly should be attributed to the ca. '91-'93 thawing of Soviet era Russian archives which naturally include canonical seized evidence from occupied and overrun territory. This was a very brief window of opportunity for study before the doors closed permanently again, making investigations into thema prioritized over forensic exactitude. Unavailability but theoretical existence of probative evidence reinterred by Moscow hasn't been ignored by dealers in arguments in every conceivable way. (My late business partner dealt in antiquities from the late sixties until the end of the eighties although nothing of European provenance or at least knowingly tainted by this era)
Such stories can be told again and again and again.
Take Klaus Barbie, butcher of Lyon, who ordered killing 14 000 people. After war he became CIA agent and trained US agents how to torture people.
Germany also used a very "clever" trick to free from any responsibility tens of thousands war criminals using... Rules of the Road regulations [1].
How that was possible?
One, seemingly innocent, change in §50 of the German Criminal code said "If there is no clear, personal connections between the victim and the culprit then in case of victim's death such deed should be treated like an attempt to commit the murder not the murder". Kind of make sense in case of road accidents, but since that was added to Criminal Code, this was also applied to war criminals, because why not, law is the law. Clever, isn't it?
This was a godsend for German war criminals, a those who were giving orders obviously did not have any connection with the victims, so the new law applied. In addition statute of limitations for this offense (attempt of a murder) was just 15 years in Germany. As a result by 1960 all war criminals were free to go.
This law was passed as a initiative Eduard Dreher, who worked in post-war German Ministry of Justice, even though he was a higher-up official in Nazi administration, so he was also very interested in passing this kind of regulation.
> After war he became CIA agent and trained US agents how to torture people
Can you cite a credible reference for this claim? Records indicate that he was hired by the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) (source: Wikipedia). But I am unable to find evidence that the CIA hired him to train US agents in torture methods.
and then there was a subtle catch-up game [2] of legislation and prosecution to figure how to still prosecute nazi concentration camp murderers. And they closed the first legal loophole, statutory limitation for murder was extended to 30y and then completely lifted. and they found the loophole of the remaining loophole: they didn't prosecute Nazis for the motive of racism any more (a personal trait), but for the way of killing, "Heimtücke und wehrloses Opfer" (malice aforethought and defenseless victim)
That's why we still see 90+ year old guys in front of German courts, despite all right wing conservative efforts to get them out of jail free.
There was an article a while ago that said that American history since the civil war made much more sense if you assumed the South won, and made a reasonable case for them actually winning the peace, even if they technically lost the war.
I'd guess a similar argument could be made for the Nazis.
It's easy to look back and think the North had our modern values, and were fighting against 19th Century racists, when really it was (broadly speaking) 19th century racists vs 19th Century racists, so it's not surprising that the 19th century racists won.
Similarly, Nazi Germany wasn't being fought by modern liberals, it was being fought (from the west) by people who were generally more positive about Hitler destroying trade unionists than they were about the Russian Revolution deposing monarchs.
So, it's not really a surprise that the corporate-rich-military complex 'won', because they were on both sides. Though for a few decades afterwards, the average man in the street was needed to fend off wars, so got treated a little better than before, which could have seemed like massive and inevitable progress.
> Though for a few decades afterwards, the average man in the street was needed to fend off wars, so got treated a little better than before
Its more because the USSR literally won the war and became a superpower and invalidated the "Socialism cant work - they will come down crashing any minute" Interwar propaganda that was done by the capitalist establishments in the West to argue against social and economic reforms for better conditions. WW2 ended, USSR not only won but also became a superpower, lifting its people from mud huts to apartments, from illiteracy to space. Nobody could make any argument against reforms anymore so the left in the West got some time to breathe and push reforms forward. For a brief time, people in the entire West lived in better standards than ever before. Eventually forgetting that the living standards that they enjoyed were not hard-won rights that were based on left wing principles, but instead 'gifts' given to them by capitalism.
Then Reagan and Thatcher happened and gave them the capitalism they wanted.
Soviet state implemented food rationing everywhere to help the famine in Ukraine. And, at the same time the Soviets had famine, the US also had famine during the great depression. Except, Hoover government did absolutely nothing about it, leaving it to the 'free market' to solve for ideological reasons. The amount of people perished during the period is unknown. If the same formula that is being used for calculating 'deaths' in socialist states is applied to the great depression US, the death toll comes around a 7 million people.
What 'history' books did you get this alternative fiction from regarding the Holodomor [1]? The Soviet state as personified by Stalin was the main cause for the depths of despair and depravity experienced in Ukraine. If you can leave back that 'history' book I'd suggest doing so, otherwise use it to start your stove this coming cold winter - you'd still be better off than those who Stalin and the Soviet system of collectivisation followed by annihilation sentenced to starvation.
That's a very distorted view of what happened. The Soviet Union (and its colonies like East Germany) never came anywhere close to providing anywhere near the quality of life that the West provided. That's why the Berlin Wall and other militarized borders were created -- in theory to prevent invasion from the West (the Berlin Wall was officially the "anti-fascist defensive barrier" even though the border guards were looking East, not West), but in reality to prevent their populace (especially their educated populace with marketable skills) from fleeing to the West, often shooting them if they managed to get across the barriers. The fact is the Soviet system didn't work and couldn't provide for its citizens.
The Western leftist movement did provide many benefits such as weekends off and paid vacations that conservatives often ignore as coming from them, but this movement had little to do with the Soviets, but with the labor movement dating back to the 19th century.
> The Soviet Union (and its colonies like East Germany) never came anywhere close to providing anywhere near the quality of life that the West provided
Kennedy administration thought otherwise. Their internal memos say that they saw USSR industrializing too rapidly and raising life standards of its people and this being dangerous in that other countries could pick up the same model, resulting in a 'domino effect'.
Which is the origin of the 'domino theory' and the Vietnam war and all the wars that followed it. Along with the arms and space race plan that Kennedy administration started to starve the USSR out of GDP in 1960s.
The capitalist system in the us NEVER provided everything that the Soviet system provided to its citizens. At the peak of American prosperity, there were blacks and minorities from the 'undesirable' groups suffering poverty, discrimination and actual apartheid. Whereas every Soviet citizen was entitled to every single creature comfort that was available in 1960s. But even today, a white collar couple in well paid white collar jobs, have to work for 40 years straight to get and keep all the comforts and benefits that socialist countries' citizens had been entitled to from birth. From housing to cars to guaranteed employment to paid vacations, maternity leave, reasonable retirement to entertainment. Today even retirement is a thing of the past in the US as people see that the workaround that has been the 401ks may be shaky.
The 'success' of the system in the West was mainly built on propaganda: Soviet intelligence, propaganda ministries were never able to convince their people that behind the gilded and luxurious lifestyles from 5th avenue and manhattan that were being portrayed in the American movies, you encountered people sleeping in cardboard boxes if you just go two streets up the block. Even today, many Russians still don't believe that there are homeless in the US even as ~30 million people are calculated to be effectively homeless, ~3 million chronically homeless.
> There was an article a while ago that said that American history since the civil war made much more sense if you assumed the South won, and made a reasonable case for them actually winning the peace, even if they technically lost the war.
Do we have enshrined slavery and a system of states' rights so strong that the national-level government apparatus is vestigial? No? Then the South didn't win. This is awful revisionist history for the author to sound "smart" purely through cynicism.
You could make the argument that the fundamental mistake Americans made was in assuming that Reconstruction (aborted as it was) made enough of a dent that after a couple of generations, it would vanish. Then again for the civil rights movement in the 60s. It's become clear enough that American never "solved" the problem of getting everyone to agree on what rights and liberties the Constitution protects, but that's not the South winning, that's just complacency.
That isn't the South winning, it's the nature of government. Without "permanent revolution" which constantly keeps issues at the forefront to change their state of affairs, they are eroded. If you wanted to make another cynical, smart-sounding argument, it would be that rights in America make much more sense if you assume that conservatives are Trotskyists. The conservative party (Democratic, then Republican after the party flip) never accepted that the status quo was the final state of affairs.
> I'd guess a similar argument could be made for the Nazis.
Did the Nazis get Lebensraum, depopulate the East, form a 1000-year Reich, return the "Germanic people" to their ideal state as farmers on the land, etc? No? Then they did not win.
> It's easy to look back and think the North had our modern values, and were fighting against 19th Century racists, when really it was (broadly speaking) 19th century racists vs 19th Century racists, so it's not surprising that the 19th century racists won.
This is an argumentum ad absurdum when there were concrete differences between the factions.
> Similarly, Nazi Germany wasn't being fought by modern liberals, it was being fought (from the west) by people who were generally more positive about Hitler destroying trade unionists than they were about the Russian Revolution deposing monarchs.
As above. It was also being fought by people who were initially unwilling to believe that another European conflict would be prosecuted so soon after the last one -- a war which France's population numbers still had not recovered from -- at a time where information was far less democratized. It is not a reasonable position to assume that the West knew the extent of Nazi Germany's crimes or activities, particularly before the war. Even where intelligence reports gave some indication, it was harder to verify.
> So, it's not really a surprise that the corporate-rich-military complex 'won', because they were on both sides. Though for a few decades afterwards, the average man in the street was needed to fend off wars, so got treated a little better than before, which could have seemed like massive and inevitable progress.
There was not a corporate-rich-military complex on either side. The Nazi economy's only "complex" was plunder with "pie in the sky" budgeting from every direction which the financials did not support. The West developed a strong military-industrial complex only after the war, and even then, there was a strong push that the fruits of that labor should be free to the public. Eisenhower's warning was meant as a canary in the coalmine, not a statement of how things already were.
Do not say "which could have seemed like massive and inevitable progress" and devalue the accomplishments made and gains achieved. Progress is not inevitable, but the decisions made (the NHS was founded while the UK was bankrupt, Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act consciously surrendered the presidency, etc) and the sacrifices/struggles of the litany of people involved in the Civil Rights movement in the US, codification of many rights by the Warren Court, and a million other things. It was not an illusion. It was a not a completion, either; like Jim Crow appeared post-Reconstruction, the "emergency" mindset faded from the public eye, and some common acceptance of the notion that it was "solved" now pervaded the national consciousness.
That we have taken these as a given rather than something which must be constantly asserted does not mean they did not happen, that it was window dressing to ensure a supply of soldiers (the overlapping timelines of the Department of Defense realizing that drafted troops were nowhere near as effective as volunteer troops and the Warren Court expanding guaranteed rights is undeniable), or that it was an illusion.
It means only that manipulative actors can follow the same playbook as Goring's famous Nuremburg quote from Nuremburg of "why of course the people don't want war...", or Niemoeller's "first they came for..." eligy
> Hitler was named Chancellor in late January 1933. He called for elections in early March. With less than two weeks left before the vote, Herman Goering sent telegrams to Germany’s 25 leading industrialists, inviting them to a secret meeting in Berlin on February 20, 1933. Attending the gathering were four I.G. Farben directors and Krupp chief Gustav Krupp. Hitler addressed the group, saying “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany.
> According to Robert Jackson, the former Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, “[T]he industrialists…became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks [worth about $30 million today] to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power.”
> former SS member Lohse obtained a visa to visit America in the mid-50s to ply his trade in New York’s thriving art market
This surprises me. I was under the impression that New York's art market throve after WW2 largely due to refugees driven from European art markets by the war, particularly from, but not only, Paris and Berlin. New York had not previously been the art mecca it later became.
The New York art scene is like a small town even today. Everyone knows each other, at least in passing. People talk. I don't know how much Lohse could manage to smuggle and sell before running into someone with a serious ax to grind.
> The Soviets fired more than 500,000 ex-Nazis from administrative positions in their zone of occupation after the war, only to allow the German communist authorities to take them back if their public record wasn’t too awful.
Indeed. The Soviets touted their more comprehensive denazification vs the greater “rehabilitation” / whitewash by the west as an example of western hypocrisy. Of course they were better at propaganda.
But from the outside it looked like one of the reasons for the incompetence of the DDR was that they had purged everyone of any skill and experience. But despite the large body of writing on this subject it still feels like a broadly unexamined subject to me, at least in Germany and France.
There were many more important reasons than just the de-nazification:
- Companies and specialists moved to the West (before 1961) because many saw the writing on the wall (living under the Soviet yoke vs living a comfortable life in the 'free West'). As a result, Bavaria and Saxony essentially switched places in terms of industrialization.
- The East had to endure crushing war reparations, the Russians dismantled and moved entire factories to the Soviet Union, while the West was rebuilt through the Marshall plan.
- Despite all that, up until around the mid-60's the East German industry was actually still somewhat competitive, and many people still believed in 'the system'. The apathy and economic downturn mostly set in during the early 70's.
Under the hood, the East German authorities were well aware that they couldn't just get rid of all nazi sympathizers, there would simply be no population left to build a country on after all. So essentially if you were not an obvious war criminal, and pinky sweared that you saw the light and had converted into a good communist, the authorities didn't have much of a choice than forget about the past. It basically became a game of "don't ask, don't tell".
My mother used to go swimming with a woman who's dad was a Nazi officer who became the police chief in Hamburg. Who do you think took all the administrative positions in Germany after the war? The biggest part of the population was in favour of the Nazis. They didn't suddenly change their minds.
Part of what the Stasi(the east German secret police) did in eastern Germany was to hunt Nazis. Now you can say how horrible the Stasi was and you might be right about it, but there is no denying that a significant part of their work was hunting Nazis and Nazi collaborators. But given the demographics of the country I'd be surprised if a big portion of the Stasi weren't Nazis at some point themselves.
The western German BND(Bundesnachrichtendienst) which is Germany's intelligence agency was founded with the help of the CIA by Reinhard Gehlen who was a general major in the Wehrmacht. The Spiegel - one of Germany's major newspapers - actually had very close ties to the BND and was instrumental to whitewashing the institutions history.
Gehlen was also in Fremde Heere Ost, military intelligence geared against the USSR. And we all know just how good the German intelligence assessment of the USSR was during WW2. And yes, that the Spiegel was closer to ex-Nazis than they care to admit today. Same with Stern and Nannen (famour publisher in post-war Germany, founder of a renowned prize for journalism and a journalism school), that guy actively served in a joint SS-Airforce propaganda unit in Italy.
I feel like sometimes the US(the CIA or both?) is so clouded by their fear of USSR communism that they blindly ignored and funded extremely dangerous entities. Let's not forget that Gehlen got greenlit to feed Nazi groups in an effort to counter soviet influence. Similarly the strong support of China was done in order to counter the soviets. In the end the Soviet-Union collapsed and China ended up being a much stronger adversary than the Russian would ever be.
> I feel like sometimes the US(the CIA or both?) is so clouded by their fear of USSR communism that they blindly ignored and funded extremely dangerous entities.
It changed over time. During the late 40ties, the US was still confused about its position on the USSR - for example, in the occupied West Germany, the US confiscated hundreds of copies of Ukrainian translation of George's Orwel Animal Farm and handed it over to the Soviets to destroy it.
It is kinda shaky, because everyone and his brother suddenly realized Stalin was not angel in WWII due to Russian latest invasion.
But generally, among other things, it would be hard to impossible to find enough completely clean Germans after war. That country was thoroughly ideologized and engaged in very violent systematic opposition suppression for over a decade. For starts, and the myth of clean Wehrmacht is exactly that - myth. It was not as elite as SS, but ethnical cleansing was part of their mandate. (That includes both Holocaust with camps and all and campaigns against non-Jewish ethicities.)
Russians were originally blaming everyone who did not took arms against Nazi as cooperators. Initially, if you was not partisan you was enemy. Germany had no partisans. They also distrusted own captured people cause those were supposedly under German influence or allowed themselves to be captured. Any German man over 14 was supposed to be member of some fighting unit by law by the end of the war. (Badly armed and incapable of fight, but still)
> ...because everyone and his brother suddenly realized Stalin was not angel in WWII due to Russian latest invasion.
Erm, that was pretty much clear and official since Stalin's death right? Even the Soviet Union had its own de-Stalinization process, as well as the Eastern European countries under Soviet rule. If anything, the behaviour of the Russian army in Ukraine makes the excesses of the Red Army in WW2 in the 'liberated' areas more believable (this was very much a taboo in East Germany for instance, while Stalin's crimes could at least be discussed).
A bit offtopic, but in Russia, Stalin victims were not rehabilitated like they were in other countries. And lately in Russia, Stalin was getting framed as good maligned manager. Purges kinda just happened, as natural disasters happen, not that someone is responsible. Even years before this war, the Russian archives were closed to researchers and memoir organizations dedicated to communists crimes persecuted.
But here, I am referring to popular discussions where people really liked to ignore that Stalin was in alliance and that purges and such happened already before WWII. Claiming that WWII was real world example of clear good aliance vs clear bad. I mean, Germany was clear bad sure. And East and Russia were victim, absolutely. And also, German behavior in East was more brutal then their behavior in West - the colonization and quest for living space were different then quest for dominance.
Nevertheless, it the whole good vs bad framing here is kinda funny, cause one of good guys is Stalin.
I'm not sure how much about purges was known in the West at the time (USSR was pretty well cut-off from the rest of the world), but by 1940, the West already knew about the Katyń Massacre. I think it was clear for leadership there that they're allying with one monster to defeat another one, and they could very well do the same thing in reverse order if circumstances called for that. It was just that, at the time, it was Hitler who was bombing London and not Stalin, so he had to go first.
To be clear, I do not blame them. It was right choice. I am reacting to what people wrote on various discussion forums including HN now.
I remember reading in history book about Germany that news about purges affected situation in there - people seen communists and bigger threat and nazi as protection against communists more. So, at least something was known.
While East Germany was indeed more serious about the de-nazification process than the West, in reality it wasn't as strict as the propaganda would want to make the world believe.
It's also fairly well known by now that the National People's Army (or rather its shadowy predecessor 'Kasernierte Volkspolizei') was also built up with the help of experienced WW2 officers while turning a blind eye on their political past. Eventually the NVA dismissed at least the highest-ranking nazis (during the mid to late 50's), but it's naive to believe that East Germany didn't have its share of tolerated 'old nazi bureaucrats'.
Nazi party membership was huge and trying to vet former Nazi's post-war while there wasn't enough food to go around was pretty quickly dropped. In person interviews at the start became "this guy says he never did anything wrong and hates the Nazi party now". "DeNazified" papers were just rubber stamped at that point.
After the war, it was pretty much the UK who fought the hardest to "de-Nazify" the new Germany - from high level all the way down to anyone who had a smug of blood on their hands.
France was eager at first, but drama at home (and lack of funds for the occupation) made them drop the idea pretty quickly. Plus they had their own "cleansing" immediately after liberation so quenched their thirst for vengeance pretty early on.
Americans were focused on a strong Western Germany to counter the USSR. The centuries old European bad blood meant nothing to them, so once they skim off the worst of the Nazi's it was more about creating a functioning country.
Russia made a good showing at first, but like the Americans realized "the juice wasn't worth the squeeze" and if faced with a choice of "we can't fill this important position" and "we can just fill it with a low level Nazi who pinky promises not to do it again", the chose the 2nd option.
Eventually the UK gave up as well. They just held out the longest.
>> In the American-dominated West, as in the Soviet-dominated East, the intelligence services recruited experienced and well-informed ex-Nazi operatives. The US authorities even spirited Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, to South America, where he lived as a businessman until his extradition to France in 1987 to face trial for war crimes. In relation to Germany’s Nazi past the Cold War between the communist East and the capitalist West changed everything. Forgetting, for political purposes, became the order of the day.
Yep, this is pretty much true. In the West, ex-Nazis could claim that they have fought the right enemy in the East and that all the ware crimes have been conducted by the SS (myth of the clean Wehrmacht). That narrative was at least accepted if not supported by the Western Allies. The Barbie affaire was a travesty.
The funny thing about this, so, is that the BND, Germany's secret service, started as Organisation Gehlen. Gehlen used to work for Fremde Heere Ost at the Abwehr (Nazi germany's military intelligence's department specialized at the USSR). That organization had more plunders and intel fuck ups at the eastern front than the CIA in the war on terror and Vietnam combined (including the retreat from Afghanistan). Just why anyone would trust someone with this track record with doing the same job again is beyond me. In that light, using GESTAPO experienced operatives to kick-start the Stasi was actually a pretty smart move.
The biggest mistake after WW2, and yes that was mostly due to the looming cold war, was the botched de-nazfication. All the records were there, so it was quite easy to identify those ordering, enabling and conducting the Holocaust of Bullets and in the extermination camps. The SS kept detailed records for there slave labor services, so easy to figure out who and which companies profited from that. None of those records were used, instead everyone waited until the responsible people died of old age. Then a renewed drive to prosecute the camp guards and secretaries started, once those people were in their late 80s. Before that ex Nazi-judges hanging deserters in the last days of the war became, e.g. Prime Ministers (Fillbinger) and are respected people in the CDU / CSU and conservative circles to this very day.
As a side note, neither the Wehrmacht nor the NVA are part of the official lineage of the current German armed forces. For me, that is a missed opportunity. Having a history in enabling a war of extermination and two oppressive regimes is such a strong basis to build a truly democratic and human rights supporting organisation. Instead, the German army has constant issues with people supporting, of all things, the SS. And yes, some officers have more problems with Anti-fascists then they have with proto-nazis. Another effect from the cold war I guess.
He explores both the thefts themselves and the legal and moral issues which have yet to be resolved.