The even wilder thing is that the CIA actively hired former Nazis (and relocated them and their families) in Operation Paperclip after the war to aid in Cold War operations...
That's not exactly a wild thing; it was no secret at all that Werner von Braun was at the heart of the Apollo program while it was happening.
The Soviets and British did the same thing, IIRC.
The lesson is simple: if you're going to lose a war, lose a war as a guy who is good at something, because the new management will be a lot less likely to hold crimes against humanity against you.
Even mentioned in a darkly humorous tone in the 1968 movie "Ice Station Zebra" (cold war thriller). The character played by Patrick McGoohan has a line: " The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists."
It's not really all that wild when you consider that they were hired for their impressive achievements in various fields and not their loyalty to the nazi party.
Yes, they were hired _despite_ their loyalty (and sometimes despite their war crimes).
But not just because of their 'impressive achievements' during their time as Nazi scientists, part of why they were hired was because the US was afraid to lose them to the Soviet Union based purely on _potential achievements_. Some scientists even played this as a card to get hired by the US.
"Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.
One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews."
I don't think he's asserting they brought in Nazis for the fun of having them around. But it's surprising that while heightened ties to the Nazis would disqualify you from immigration eligibility, the most secretive circles of the state (and ones highly acquainted with Nazi brutality) were actively recruiting these people. Shows how deep the anti-Soviet derangement ran.
Derangement? Stalin was extremely suspicious of the west and even went so far as to accuse of us collaborating with Hitler himself. Not only that, the Soviet regime was excessively brutal. One of the worst in history despite not being mentioned much in modern history books. The treatment of captives during wartime, the Eastern Bloc in total, etc. While not a primary source "Soviet War Crimes" has a massive Wikipedia entry detailing just how bad the soviets were. At least related to WW2 alone we can look to how their treatment of the Polish was after pushing Germany out. They murdered Finnish civilians en masse during raids. Further, their deportation campaigns were enough to make most period despots blush.
To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.
If you take the Kolmogorov Option you’d better be Kolmogorov. Besides the creature being ended was Nazism, not its components. Some of its component individuals had to be ended (and if necessary, humiliated) to end it but that was the means.
In such a state, it's hard to be "respected in your field" unless you publicly pledge loyalty to the ruling party. This does not mean that all such people were all apolitical, just that their motives and outlook will vary. And that for people who were prominent when the Nazis came to power, there likely wasn't much middle ground between "leave the country, go far away" and "join the party".
This also applies to the US to a lesser extent. If you want to work in academia, there's a very strict subset of ideas you're allowed to even consider.
"Denial" crimes. There's at least 3 of them involving race, gender, and religion. Good luck getting funding or even keeping your shitty job if you commit any of these cardinal sins.
It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war. This isn't passing judgment on Soviet policies, only a recognition that conflict might not have been so heated if we'd learned our lesson from how the disintegration of US-Japanese relations had drawn us into the previous war.
Essentially, the US seems to have a habit of being "forced" to ally with undesirable elements after some lapse in geopolitical awareness or effort leads to hostilities (sound familiar?).
>It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
Only if you ignore communist antagonism in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Up to and including their own allies when they gave their citizens a little too much freedom. I have several books in Czech on my shelf with a copyright date of 1968, a year in which far more books were published than years prior, I wonder why they share that year?
I think what people find "wild" is likely the blatant contradictions in rhetoric between valuing humans and valuing "impressive achievements". The US and the NAZIs are merely the best examples of valuing the latter over the former. At least, for now.
Notably, nobody in this entire comment section has been able to articulate how the space race has improved humanity more than equivalent efforts that focus on human quality of life, like implementing a public healthcare system. Whitey On The Moon rings just as true now as it did 60 years ago. Political posturing that happened to spawn technological development is a poor excuse for lack of coherent values. The fact that we achieved something that is truly admirable does not excuse for the general lack of giving-a-shit-about-humans that surrounds national politics. You know what else would be admirable? Taking care of our neighbors even if they don't contribute to the GDP.
I think it's a decent book. If you end up reading / liking this book, I'd also recommend her book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182733784-nuclear-war. Both are well researched, the second one (Nuclear War) was a more entertaining read, in a morbid kind of way.
The Soviets did the same. Wernher Von Braun was famously recruited despite his past. Top National Socialists were not only recruited for their skills, but also to deny their expertise from the opposing sphere. Many of the common soldiers and officers who were not in the same demand joined the Foreign Legion. Some of those continued on in Africa to become mercenaries.
Otto Skorzeny allegedly worked for the Mossad after working with Nasser.
Makes more sense when you realize the purpose of Nazi hunting wasn't really to catch enough of them to establish some level of justice. It was to keep them closeted so they would not attempt a comeback. Before getting kidnapped to Israel, Eichmann was more than ready to be the spearhead of a resurgent Nazi movement.
The most exemplary story was the killing of Herbert Kukurs. West Germany was about to apply a statute of limitations to war crimes, which would have emboldened Nazis to come out of the woodwork. To the Mossad found a Nazi and beat him to death.
It's only wild if you're incredibly naive and divide the world into "good" and "bad" guys.
Before someone thinks I'm a nazi apologist, I want to clarify this is about making a point of the world being extremely grey, even in areas where you perceive the good guys to operate.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to execute people with knowledge that would otherwise be useful to the enemy. If we didn't, the soviets would. There was a lot to learn from them that didn't have to do with their prior allegiances that proved valuable for weapons development, spycraft, and space exploration.
Even in post-war West Germany, "denazification", e.g. excluding ex-nazis from roles in the new German society, was a failed policy that got discontinued after a few years.
For all it's flaws, it was far more successful than reconstruction.
Germany as a whole hates Nazis, both because they were absolute monsters in human skin, and because they brought unprecedented and absolute ruin and devastation to the country.
Any right-thinking southerner should feel the same way about the Confederacy. And yet, a good chunk of them actively think that those animals were some kind of national heroes, unafraid of proudly broadcasting their affiliation with them.
For all the apologists white-washing history, you don't see a lot of elementary schools named after Heinrich Himmler in Berlin.
The world might not have a lot of heroes, but it has no shortage of utterly irredeemable villains.
It got sabotaged by the ex-Nazi West Germans, who realized they could use West German re-armament and NATO membership (which was needed against the Soviets) as leverage to pressure the Allies to drop denazification and look the other way at them pushing the "Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip