Where have all the Nazis gone Part 1
The way I was taught history was that all the influential Nazis were either executed or went into hiding. Turns out many had successful influential second careers.
The picture you have below is Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi intelligence officer responsible for atrocities, and above as the secretary general of the UN. Quite the reversal, you must think? And he wasn’t the only one to get off the hook and go make history. How did this happen? This series looks to explore both why we let it happen and the very consiquential consequences of these Nazis.
In order to understand where the interest in psychologically coercing people in the US government and US society comes from, and where the methodologies they used originated, I dug for the roots. They kept comping back to one source: Nazism. The early MK Ultra experiments, the psychological theorists of MK Ultra, and other important programs to the military industrial complex were heavily influenced by the work and participation of Nazis.
Even more horrifying, an untold number of war criminals seem to have been excused or ignored to such an extent, it is not clear that denazification ever really occurred to an extent that it had an impact other than driving Nazis to conceal their past. Nevertheless, they went on to have a huge impact on the state of our world, both on the right and the left. One went on to be an incredibly consequential secretary general of the UN. Another turned South and Central America into a war zone, and created the drug boom that was responsible for the American crack cocaine epidemic. And they participated in political and cultural institutions which have repercussions which are hard to estimate.
The whole time I was doing this research, I kept asking myself, “What the hell were the Allies doing giving so many unfathomably evil war criminals shelter from justice to continue to spread misery?”. I would circle away from the obvious answer by trying to justify their actions as pragmatism, but kept coming back to the chilling truth. Top brass at the OSS and other institutions which aided the Nazis escape didn’t see Nazis as monsters. At best, they saw them as fellow travellers who may have gone too far. At worst, they saw them as examples.
How could this be? It turns out that nothing the Nazis did was unique to them. All of their ideology, their methods and their racist values were popular ideas around the world were born of colonialism, monarchism and the pseudoscience still popular at the time. My first instalment of the series, “where have all the Nazis gone” explores the origins of Nazi ideology and the reasons why a substantial potion of the US elite was both sympathetic to Nazi war criminals and helpful to them.
THE ESOTERIC ARYAN: AN INVITATION TO ANYTHING YOU WANT
Essential to the Nazi agenda was an ideology of Aryan superiority, part of a greater ideology of racialism. This began in an esoteric place. The Nazis began as an esoteric society, the Thule society. While Hitler de-emphasised the esoteric background to the party to appeal to a predominantly Lutheran nation, it remained at their soul in the SS and Ahnenerbe, an institution dedicated to building “Aryan” culture.
Their ideology was based on Aryan people being descended from the mythical godlike people of Atlantis. As a race they considered Aryan’s the most beautiful, heroic, spiritually advanced, and deserving of the right of conquest. This bizare belief was not in fact was not a unique belief for them.
Although the idea has origins in the French Aristocracy, one woman who was really responsible for popularizing them them was Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Hers was the wellspring that the various German Ariosophists like the Thule Society originally drank in Aryanism.
Blavatsky claimed Theosophy brought together world religions, but it really emphasized the ones believed to be Aryan origin. She also had a distinctly antisemitic and anti-black racism while being enthusiastic about Indians, who she perceived as being fellow Aryans because Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. Her enthusiasm for the supposedly “Aryan” Indian people was continued by died-in-wool Nazis like Savitri Devi, and should not be interpreted as any sort of racial tolerance or egalitarianism.
Blavatsky’s ideas were enthusiastically received in the American west, as her ideas of spiritual evolution and Aryanism complemented the manifest destiny ideas driving the western expansion and dehumanizing the indigenous peoples it displaced. Theosophy and similar forms of mysticism would remain popular in the West, where it would be the stronghold of I AM Theosophy (a theosophical cult dedicated to the alchemist/ likely con man Comte de St. Germain).
Believers in I AM vision of Theosophy live on in the GAIA network, previously known as GAIAM (see: GA I-AM). The actual organization itself has a large stronghold in the community of Mount Shasta, nearby the juggernaut of the most mystical NAR church, Bethel Redding.
Aryanism also influenced evangelicism. It is not clear to what extend this was caused by Theosophy, which was popular or the time, or whether it was an independent development, but mystically inclined founder of the Church of the Nazarene, J. P. Widely spilled a significant amount of ink on how the Aryans, as the superior race, are destined to displace inferior races. As a California pioneer, he was doubtless influenced to justify the work of displacement and genocide his fellow whites were accomplishing (1).
Widley was an incredibly influential man in his world, having helped found the University of Southern California (attended by two people who will pop up later, fellow Nazerine, James Dobson, and John Signlaub) and doubtless represented a large swath of the elite of his day. His writings, or the general racist milieu he helped spawn within and without the evangelical community, may have influenced Herbert Hoover’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Mexicans from the newly established American territories, where they had lived for centuries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/02/21/herbert-hoover-deportation-immigration-trump/
The audacity of Hoover’s move no doubt set the precedent that Hitler would follow to its natural conclusion in the Holocaust, as did the eugenics inspired Johnson-Reed National Origins Act, which limited immigration on a racial basis.
THE RUSSIAN MONARCHISTS AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN ANTISEMITISM
It should be of no surprise that the two great powers of Russia and America restored many of the Nazis. They both had a lot of ideological overlap with them.
The next source of Nazism was the Russian government propaganda “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Its origin is speculated to be Tsarist secret police, already known for producing false flags. It was first fully published appended to the apocalyptic writings of Sergei Nilus.
Nilus was a Russian civil servant who was also a mystic and a disciple of weird cult leader and suspected Khlyst Spiritual Christian John of Kronstadt, who was sort of a proto-Pentecostal healer with a cult following similar to William Branham.
Like Branham, he was a healer and had a close deification cult around him, including adopting for him a name associated with the Gnostics, Lord Sabaoth, or Lord of Spirits, as Sabaoth in gnostic cosmology displaced his evil father, Yaldebaoth equivilant to Yahwah, to become king of the material universe and undo the evil work of his father.
John of Kronstadt was very popular with the ruling class including the Tsar who he loyally supported. His unique beliefs could have been descended from the gnostic dualist sect known as the Bogomils which also influenced medieval Europe.
If this is the case, it would explain the incredibly gnostic worldview expressed in Nilus’s antisemitic writings. Protocols itself is very much a concrete implementation of the Gnostic worldview.
In Gnosticism, the Jewish God, Yahweh is actually equivalent to Satan. When the Jewish people (and orthodox Christians) worship this deity, the Gnostics believed they were actually giving allegiance to a demon. The gnostics also believed that the demon god was controlling every aspect of life in the material world through its servants, or archons. Protocols talks about Jewish rulers or elders, who it says are the servants of Satan, secretly controlling everything behind the scenes.
This was all in service of Sergei’s main interest, the rise of the Antichrist, who in this scheme was also Jewish, of the line of David. In order to do this Sergei says the Jewish elders planned wars, used banking and media for power to cause political conspiracies, sedition, usurpation of the old established hierarchy, the destruction of Christianity, classical literature… basically every far right conspiracy you can think of. This is where many of them started, although some also had origin in Illuminati and anti-Catholic conspiracies as well.
When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, it was considered an emergency throughout Europe and the Americas, especially with industrialists, who considered the union movement to be a fifth column for left wing radical movements. They eagerly received the Russian monarchist refugees.
A number of them also interacted with the Monarchists by providing aid during the war as America’s most famous fascist William Dudley Pelley did for the Red Cross, a moment that marked his transition into full throated fascism. He would found the theosophical Silver Shirts, whose members went on to form most of the major militia movements like the Minutemen as well as being major players in the Christian Identity movement and Christian Fundamentalism like Gerald Winrod.
The Monarchist, especially a rather radical and violent group responsible for many atrocities, known as the Black Hundreds, brought their assorted bits of mystical antisemitic anticommunist propaganda, which many American and German elites gladly received.
One American elite who received their ideas was industrialist Henry Ford, whose paper the “Dearborn Independent” published the antisemitic conspiracies in Protocols in an expanded form known as “The International Jew”.
Ford’s publications were incredibly prolific, and were received and reused in propaganda by none other the Adolf Hitler, who was so appreciative that he gave Ford a medal.
Ford’s writings were recycled by antisemites like Nesta Webster and John Birch Society leader Oliver Revilo. The JBS conspiracies toned down the direct antisemitism but ended up influencing modern conspirators like Alex Jones and Mike Flynn, whose mentor was John Singlaub, and whose mother was close allies with famous JBS activist Phyllis Schlafly.
HISTORICAL REASONS: IMPERIALISM
I think it is important to ground these abstract ideas of racial superiority in the actual historical events which necessitated their development. I will cover one, imperialism, but the same could equally be said for the dark legacies of the westward expansion, slavery and Jim Crow. These ideologies propagated and became powerful because they created ideas of racial superiority and entitlement for whites. Read the first stanza of the arch imperialist White Man’s Burden written by Rudyard Kipling on the occasion of the US takeover of the Philippines:
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Ideologies like Aryanism and Social Darwinism gave white people license to do… well whatever they want to people who they deemed inferior and feel noble about it. And they did. Hitler was an intensification of these already existing instincts, activities and tendancies. He took it so far that it changed western peoples consiousness negativily towards such acts. But that did not mean all western peoples. There were many holdovers.
Smedley Butler was one of the most famous soldiers of his time. As a talented, ambitious Marine, he had served in most of the hotspots of his time. His career was a bellwether for the growth of American imperialism. These adventures were motivated by a feeling of entitlement due to a feeling of racial superiority, and most often, by powerful investors who refused local sovereignty over their investments. Almost inevitably, his work was done on behalf of US interests like the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, the United Fruit Company and J. P. Morgan (1).
On these imperialist quests, they took methods they learned from fighting and suppressing indigenous people in America, and used them to create repression which the Nazis would gladly imitate, including concentration camps and genocide. The “colonies” became breading grounds for reaction. Following Butler’s imperialist adventures, we run into a lot of characters who we later encounter as being powerful sources of racial or anti-communist reaction, like Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur, who would both become significant figures on the far right.
More importantly, Wall Street had become so contemptuous of democracy, that they attempted to overthrow it in their own country and replace it with a French inspired fascism when they didn’t get their way in the democratic system in 1933. Naturally, they turned to Smedley Butler, who had put down so many other governments on their behalf, to put down their own with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the lead.
But Smedley had had it with them. He followed along and took notes, and then reported it to congress. It turned out that the same players who manipulated the process to broker near ownership of countries like Nicaragua and Panama were trying to do it at home, including J. P. Morgan and of course Sullivan and Cromwell.
Although Smedley blew the whistle and stopped this takeover attempt, this disdain for democracy would continue unchecked throughout the years. For instance, the first head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who was a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, was also the author of a coup in Honduras on their behalf. He went on to found the Nazi inspired MK Ultra program intended at controlling populations. Pepsi put pressure on Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile. Former Sullivan and Cromwell partner Peter Thiel is now a large security contractor and is simultaneously financing an online resurgence in racialism known as neoreaction.
There’s much more to tell about this same group of people sponsoring religious movements to enforce racialism and fight New Deal programs, but this is for a different story. The point is that at the end of WW2 there was an elite in the US who felt sympathy for the Nazis anti-democratic positions.
(1) Califoria’s Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglosaxon Protestantism1850-1910
Sandra Sizer Frankiel
(2) Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
Jonathan Katz