Let us all take the time to remind ourselves of NATO’s 75 year legacy
By Cynthia Chung
Snow is Now Black
Bertrand Russell discussed in his book The Impact of Science on Society (1951) that the subject which “will be of most importance politically is mass psychology,” that is, the lens in which an individual views ‘reality’ and ‘truth.’ Russell is very clear that such ‘convictions’ are not generated by the individual themselves but rather are to be shaped by the State.
Of course, individuals are not encouraged to think about an absolute truth or reality. They are rather encouraged to think on a much smaller scale, on individual ‘facts.’ In this way, it is much easier to control and shape (and also limit) ‘problematic’ thinking such as the ponderance on cause and effect.
Russell, in his Impact of Science on Society, goes on to talk about how one could program a society to think snow is black rather than white:
“First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
This is of course a program for the most ambitious reframing of ‘reality.’ However, as we see today, we do not need to start before the age of ten for other sorts of reframing to function, and nowhere does this seem to be more successful and effective with any age group than the West’s foreign policy.
Snow is something that we see and experience regularly. It is much more difficult to ‘reframe’ something familiar. However, something that is ‘foreign’ has always been a rather blurred and undefined concept for millennia, and thus is a much easier candidate for the State to reframe as our collective ‘reality,’ or, in some cases, our collective ‘existential fear.’ Thus, for most of history, our understanding of who is our ‘friend’ and who is our ‘foe’ has rarely been determined by the people themselves but rather by the invisible governing structure behind their perceptions.
Such a governing structure is free to determine for us what is ‘truth’ vs. ‘falsehood,’ and what is ‘fact’ vs. ‘fiction’ because the people, despite all the abuse and exploitation they may have experienced from such a governing force, still tend to look to this very thing to protect and shield them from the frightful ‘unknown.’
They make think to themselves ‘better the Devil you know.’ In this case, ignorance is most certainly not bliss…
However, the ‘facts’ emboldened by the State have shown themselves to not be so ‘fact-based’ after all. Amidst our current bewildered age, a new force has arisen as defenders of ‘justice’; the flawless, omnipotent, and anonymous ‘fact-checkers’ who teach us that ‘truth’ is not a matter of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but rather, about semantics, priorities and what one chooses to emphasize in their narratives of reality. In other words, whose side are you on?
In a world of increased division, where we are told there is only black or white, the best we mere ‘civilians’ can hope for is to not get hit by the crossfire. However, that is becoming increasingly harder to do. It is not a matter of holding ‘opinion’ any longer, but rather it is about upholding a ‘conviction,’ not earned with your own personal scrutiny and research, but by your ‘faith’ in such a conviction and the authorities who shape it. And thus, increasingly, it does not truly matter what the ‘facts’ are, but the question of ‘whose side are you on?’
If this is troubling to you, I suggest we do a little exercise together. Let us dare to discern the ‘facts’ for ourselves. Only then, will we cease being mere cheerleaders for a team; only then, can we qualify ourselves to ask in all honest sincerity, ‘whose side are we truly on?’
Better the Devil You Know?
“Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
– President Abraham Lincoln
In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567)[1]. These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
A research group was put together to compile and organize key elements of this massive newly declassified database, the result was the publication of U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis in 2005 published by the National Archives. Part of the content declassified reveals how the FBI and CIA knowingly worked with Nazi war criminals right after WWII and in several cases before the war was even over.
Timothy Naftali writes in U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis:[2]
“The U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) shared the CIA’s view that the pursuit of Nazi war criminals was incompatible with meeting the demands of the Cold War…‘At this time, 1952, the apprehension of war criminals is no longer considered a mission of CIC,’ the 430th Detachment wrote to higher headquarters in the U.S. Army in Austria, adding, ‘It is also believed that the prosecution of war criminals is no longer considered of primary interest to U.S. authorities’…” [3]
What was causing this abrupt turnabout within certain corridors of the United States to shield Nazi war criminals, and in many cases, those that were not even in service to the United States? Why were these Nazi war criminals so quickly pardoned and judged ‘harmless’ to the world now that they had lost the war?
The reason for this decision by the FBI and CIA had to do with the belief that combating Soviet communism was not only the first priority in a post-WWII world, but it appeared the only priority of these security agencies. These same agencies went so far as to publicly declare that their job did not include going after German war criminals, even if those war criminals happened to be residing within the United States.[4] It was believed that as long as the Nazis were focused on solely the destruction of the Soviet Union, they were now to be considered as indispensable ‘allies’ to the cause of the so-called ‘free world.’
However, what this book will demonstrate is that was most certainly not the case and instead terrorism and tyranny, such as Operation Gladio, McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, were unleashed onto the so-called ‘free world.’ Anything that did not fit within the agreed upon narrow script of acceptable mass perception of reality was to be scrubbed and purged. This included human rights activists and democratically elected political leaders who disagreed with the post war agenda. No one was allowed to challenge the script that had now been chosen for them. What was the script? A gradual move towards fascist right-wing governments, all for our apparent protection against Soviet communism.
Those political leaders who would stand in the way of this were summarily executed by the hit-squads of Gladio including Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, Turkey’s Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, German industrial financier Alfred Herrhausen, and Italian industrialist Enrico Mattei.
Timothy Naftali writes in U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis:[5]
“In 1953, when a congressional request to determine whether Eichmann [one of the leading Nazi organisers of the holocaust] was hiding in the Middle East… the CIA explained to interested U.S. senators that it was no longer responsible for tracking down Nazi fugitives, even the notorious Eichmann. ‘While the CIA has a continuing interest in the whereabouts and activities of individuals such as Eichmann,’ explained a CIA officer with the approval of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, ‘we are not in the business of apprehending war criminals hence in no position to take an active role in this case.’ The senators apparently accepted this mission statement…[and thus with no further information on Eichmann] the inquiry was suspended in 1954.”
Incredibly, the 430th Detachment added to this “not in the business of apprehending war criminals,” in their note to the higher headquarters in the U.S. Army in Austria that:
“Therefore, it appears the Salzburg police authorities should be advised that the arrest of [Adolf Eichmann] and [his] transfer to CIC is no longer desired.”[6]
Timothy Naftali writes:[7]
“United States commanders did not fully agree with the decision of Detachment 430 to wash its hands of the responsibility for dealing with Eichmann. Nazi war criminals remained on a watch list, and if the Austrians were to pick up Eichmann, he would have to be handed over to the CIC. But there would be no new U.S. efforts to track him down.”
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbann-führer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust – the Nazi ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question,’[8] which was the official code name for the genocide of Jews during the Second World War, which was not restricted to the European continent. Eichmann was tasked with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during WWII. Eichmann is reported to have once lamented to SS colleagues that only six million Jews were murdered under his supervision.[9]
On May 23rd, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rose in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to make a stunning announcement “Adolf Eichmann, one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, is in Israeli custody.” Nearly two weeks earlier, Eichmann had been captured by Mossad agents in Argentina on May 11th, 1960. He was living under the alias Richard Klement for a decade after the war.
Timothy Naftali writes:[10]
“Eichmann’s abduction came as a complete surprise to the U.S. government. The Israelis had given no warning to the CIA (the principal point of contact between the Israeli intelligence community and Washington since 1951) that they had tracked down the most famous living Nazi war criminal and would summarily bring him to justice.
…the Israeli capture of Eichmann did more than refocus attention on those men who had managed to elude justice in the chaos of the immediate-postwar period; for the CIA, this unexpected event would force a re-examination of some of the former Nazis it had recruited in the rush to produce intelligence results in the 1950s. Some of Eichmann’s associates, it turned out, had worked for the CIA…
Why did the CIA have any postwar relationships at all with individuals who had worked alongside Adolf Eichmann in persecuting and exterminating millions of people? Under what circumstances could individuals with these records be considered acceptable agent material? Leaving aside the moral dimension for a moment, what operational value could these veterans of the war against the Jews have had in the clandestine struggle with the Soviet Union? The organization for which they worked, the SD and later the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), was the intelligence arm of the SS and of the Nazi Party. Like most intelligence services in totalitarian regimes, the SD was more the watchdog of ideology than of truth. The fact that some of these men were in the anti-Jewish office of this already ideological service should have made their intelligence credentials even more suspect.”
However, this very obvious fact did not deter the U.S. government from sponsoring Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence service, in a CIA backed surveillance apparatus established in West Germany; called the Gehlen Organisation (1946-1956) which subsequently became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) from 1956-1968 to which Gehlen was the founding president.[11]
West Germany was told it needed to be kept on a short leash for its Nazi crimes and ambitions during the Second World War, such that they were occupied for nearly 10 years by British, French and American militaries. Yet, at the same time, a high-ranking ‘former’ Nazi was to be in charge of their security and intelligence?!? West Germany’s occupation only ended on May 5th, 1955 after West Germany agreed to join NATO in 1954. It was only after West Germany’s agreement to join NATO that they were permitted to have a military force of up to a half-million men and resume the manufacture of arms.
In other words, it was only after West Germany agreed to seal its fate with the rest of the NATO countries in an eternal stand-off with the Soviet Union that they were then granted their crumb of ‘freedom.’ The rights of Germany were not being restricted because of its Nazi war crimes, as the CIA and NATO clearly showed they were so ready to pardon in its war criminals. The reality was that Germany was being used as the bulwark against the Soviet Union, and the German people were now going to pay the price for the crimes of its Nazi leaders. It would be the German people who would have to bow their heads in subservience while ‘former’ Nazis were given first class treatment by the CIA and company – with much of this paid for by the American taxpayer.
Timothy Naftali writes:[12]
“Materials released by the CIA and the Defense Department under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 permit a thorough analysis of the origins, implications, and results of the U.S. government’s postwar sponsorship of Reinhard Gehlen and of the organization that became the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND), the West German Secret Service, in 1956.
Four broad conclusions emerge…First, despite being the principal source of funding for Gehlen’s activities for close to eleven years, the U.S. government never achieved the control of Gehlen’s operations that it had expected, sought, or should have had. Second, Reinhard Gehlen often acted in bad faith in his dealings with the United States. He deceived a generation of U.S. intelligence officers about the details of his operations and violated the basic agreements that were designed to undergird the system of cooperation. Third, a substantial number of former members of SD Foreign Intelligence, the Gestapo, and the Waffen-SS were recruited into the organization when it was being funded by the U.S. government. Gehlen’s recruitment of these individuals was not done at the behest of the U.S. government; however, after Washington learned about Gehlen’s use of war criminals, it opted to do nothing about it.
Finally, the CIA did not hold Gehlen and his organization in high regard as intelligence assets. The Agency’s major goals in the Gehlen affair were to facilitate U.S. penetration of a future West German intelligence community…”
As a result, the German people would never be allowed to be sovereign. They were to be the eternal losers of the Second World War, and they would have no choice but to do the will of their masters at the CIA and NATO headquarters, the latter of which would have its fair share on its staff of ‘former’ Nazis who would go on to become high-ranking commanders in NATO after WWII.
NATO’s Dubious Allegiance
It was not just the CIA who was willing to work with ‘former’ Nazis as part of America’s post-WWII foreign policy; such as the case of Nazi affiliated OUN-B’s Mykola Lebed and the CIA’s AERODYNAMIC,[13] where Stepan Bandera-Nazi affiliated-ultra-nationalist propaganda continued to be heavily promoted in Ukraine during the Cold War years with CIA funding. This ultra-nationalist radicalization of certain groups of Ukrainians was justified for the very plain fact that it encouraged hatred of the Soviet Union. Ukraine would also be an anti-Russian bulwark of sorts but considered more expendable than the Germans. One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and… there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.”[14]
This philosophy was seen very clearly in NATO’s choice of staff.
Adolf Heusinger, served as the Operations Chief within the general staff of the High Command of the German Army in the Nazi German Armed Forces from 1938 to 1944. He was then appointed acting Chief of the General Staff for the Nazis. Heusinger, like Gehlen, would never be tried at the Nuremberg trials. Instead, he was given control over the newly established West German army, as general of the Bundeswehr from 1957 to 1961. He then became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961-1964. This overlapped with the period of heightened assassination attempts against de Gaulle, to which NATO’s Operation Gladio was implicated.[15]
Hans Speidel, a Nazi general, was one of the major military leaders of West Germany during the early Cold War. He was a principal founder of the Bundeswehr. He was a major figure in the German rearmament and oversaw the Bundeswehr’s integration into NATO.[16] He became a military advisor to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Supreme Commander of NATO’s ground force in Central Europe from 1957-1963. According to an article in Der Spiegel,[17] which cited documents released by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (foreign intelligence agency of Germany) in 2014, Heusinger and Speidel may have been part of the Schnez-Truppe, a secret illegal army that veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS established in Germany in 1949.
You would think such a thing were unlikely or even impossible, but the truth was that such a secret illegal army made up of Nazis post-WWII follows NATO’s Operation Gladio to the script.
Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter pilot during WWII and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (the Nazi military’s highest award), became the German Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee in 1960, served as Acting Commander of Allied Air Forces Central Europe in NATO from 1965-1966, as Inspector of the Air Force 1966-1970 and as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971–1974.
Johann von Kielmansegg, General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1942-1944, was lieutenant general of NATO’s Supreme Command of Allied Land Forces Central Europe in Fontainebleau and NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1967-1968.
Jurgen Bennecke was also a general in the Wehrmacht and was NATO’s Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces Central Europe from 1968-1973.
Ernst Ferber, a Major in the Wehrmacht and group leader of the organizational department of the Supreme Command of the Army (Wehrmacht) from 1943-1945 and recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1973-1975.
Karl Schnell, battery chief in the Western campaign in 1940, later First General Staff Officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps in 1944 and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1975-1977.
Franz Joseph Schulze, a Lieutenant in the reserve and Chief of the 3rd Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241 and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1977-1979.
Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, Lieutenant of 24th Panzer Division in the German 6th Army, adjutant to Army High Command, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1979-1983.
This is not a complete list of ‘former’ Nazis who served under NATO.
Thus, from 1957 to 1983, NATO had at least one if not several high ranking ‘former’ Nazis in full command of multiple departments within NATO.
The position of NATO Commander and Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe was a position that was filled SOLELY by ‘former’ Nazis for 16 YEARS STRAIGHT, from 1967-1983.
***
Were these ‘former’ Nazis successfully defanged as was claimed by U.S. intelligence and beholden to the newly formed post-WWII global structure of ‘Western democracy’? Or had the fascists only lost the first phase of what would be a several decades long war, and that the second phase would be fought on an entirely different terrain. It would no longer be a war fought with armies by day but rather a clandestine war fought by night; waged via covert operations, secret intelligence, propaganda and psychological warfare.
Those who had celebrated the victory of the Second World War and vowed never again were almost entirely oblivious to the fact that while they celebrated, there were those who planned for the next phase of war, and it is a war that they have been winning, for the lovers of democracy could never fathom the lengths such villainy would go to achieve its aims.
This book is dedicated to answering the question of how such a tremendous villainy succeeded in these endeavours while the ‘free world’ slept by day and dreamed by night.
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.
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On matters of geopolitics, counterintelligence, revisionist history and cultural warfare.
[1] Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (FOIA). (1998) Nazi War Crimes (P.L. 105-246) and
Japanese Imperial Government (P.L. 106-567) Disclosure Acts. https://web.archive.org/web/20220909072007/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/nazi-war-crimes-disclosure-act.
[2] Naftali, Timothy et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 338.
[3] Throughout this book anything marked in bold or underlined within a quote is to be considered as ‘emphasis added’
[4] Naftali, Timothy et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 338.
[5] Ibid, pg. 337.
[6] Ibid, pg. 338.
[7] Ibid, pg. 338.
[8] For more on the Nazi Final Solution, see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution. Retrieved October, 2022.
[9] Naftali, Timothy et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 337.
[10] Ibid, pg. 337.
[11] Lardner, George. (Mar. 18, 2001) CIA Declassifies Its Records On Dealings With Ex-Nazis. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/18/cia-declassifies-its-records-on-dealings-with-ex-nazis/2fa93bad-62ee-42f2-833a-b1d04bc63079/. Retrieved October 2022.
[12] Naftali, Timothy et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press, pg. 376.
[13] See Chapter 5.
[14] Breitman, Richard; Goda, Norman J.W. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives, pg. 89.
[15] See Chapter 6.
[16] Large, David Clay. (1996) Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era.
[17] Wiegrefe, Klaus. (May 14, 2014) Files Uncovered: Nazi veterans Created Illegal Army. Spiegel Online. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/wehrmacht-veterans-created-a-secret-army-in-west-germany-a-969015.html. Retrieved October 2022.