With the hot phase of War World II over, the Allies tried all of the ex-Nazis that they could find. Many of the big shots were sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Some, like Speer, received surprisingly light sentences (twenty years). Rudolph Hess got life at Spandau Prison, where he eventually committed suicide in 1986 at the age of ninety-five

That had to be some act of desperation for a man that old to commit suicide. He couldn’t wait five minutes?

Some of the more notorious ex-Nazis were unaccounted for. While the surviving ones insisted that their comrades had died before the fall of Berlin, many around the world simply didn’t believe them. It eventually reached the status of legend. Among the missing were Martin Bormann, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller, concentration camp inspector general Richard Gluecks, Walter Rauf, supervisor of the notorious gas trucks that killed 250,000 people, Adolf Eichmann and his deputies Rolf Guenther and Alois Brunner, concentration camp commandants Aribert Heim and Friedrich Wartzog, and, of course, Dr. Josef Mengele.

So, who give’s a rat’s ass about whether or not Hitler and Braun survived the bunker? The fact remains that hundreds of Germans, ex-Nazis and their families, escaped possible punishment at Nuremberg by fleeing to South America. Most likely, they carried their ideology with them, along with a stubborn belief in their own superiority. It isn’t farfetched to think that they may have also wanted some revenge for the butt-whuppin’ they took in two bloody conflicts. Maybe these expatriated Germans started sounding a little bit like the children’s cartoon show Pinky and the Brain. I can see them sitting around the table of a local café, sipping their espresso, waiting for night to fall. The guy who came late asks “Why? What are we doing tonight?”

His comrades answer, “Same thing we do every night, Wilhelm: try to take over the world!”

Like their animated counterparts, these white rats would seem to have been at a severe disadvantage. Even they couldn’t con themselves into thinking that they were as strong as ever, not without the tanks, airplanes, millions of troops and all.

Still, they weren’t completely powerless. We know, for example, that much of the capital that went to build the German war machine came courtesy of loans from American lenders. The Swiss, however, demonstrated unusual cleverness in fostering Nazi financial interests. When the Nazis invaded a nation, they immediately raided their gold reserves. Belgium, Norway and Sweden subsequently wound up considerably lighter in the pocketbook. The Germans would then deposit the loot – along with ingots made from the smelted gold teeth and wedding rings of holocaust victims – into their Swiss banks, who gladly took them without question. When the Allies threatened economic sanctions against the Alpine country if they continued to hide what amounted to stolen property, the Swiss still accepted German booty so long as it looked legitimate. So, when the Nazis took new gold, they smelted it, then recast it in their own moulds bearing their official inscription. For a flourishing touch, they stamped the date as 1939, so that it would appear as though these were reserves that Germany had before the war.

Swiss banks splintered up the ill-gotten gains into a number of different accounts, each bearing a non-German name, and listing the owner as a foreigner--typically American, British or Australian. For years they made records unavailable to the Allies, taking advantage of every loophole in the treaties they signed with them. Allied officials found that when investigating the whereabouts of Nazi plunder, the Swiss were usually courteous, but unhelpful, as if they were stalling for some reason. The banks also refused heirs access to the accounts of their loved ones who died in the holocaust. Why? Because the Swiss demanded that survivors furnish official death certificates, knowing full well that the Nazis didn’t provide them to people who perished in the death camps.

With this in mind, we might want to reassess the nature of Nazi ascendancy. Conventional wisdom and history pretty much localizes this movement to Germany of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Maybe it would be more accurate to view Nazism as an international movement that is ongoing. Those ostensibly on the Allies’ side supported the National Socialists of the Weimar government to the point where the nation could mobilize for war. While the Thulists, who formed the Nazis in the wake of the 1919 Bavarian massacre, wanted to divide German labor, get it to act against its own self-interest, and bring German-ethnics living in foreign countries into a bigger, united Germany, foreigners, many American and British, formed more ambitious plans, incubated as they were in esoteric halls.

Aside from the monetary support, a couple of instances wonderfully illustrate the depths to which American factions paved the way for Nazism to spread to the US. Fascist ideologue Irene DuPont, of the famed Delaware family, plotted with then-General Motors president William Knudsen and high-ranking officials of the Morgan Bank, to stage a violent overthrow of the FDR White House. Appalled by the socialist programs that the President initiated to stem the woes of national depression, they arranged at least three million dollars of 1934 money (some say $300 mil) to finance an elite cadre waiting to attack Washington and establish a Nazi government.

They might have been successful in at least launching their coup had it not been for one miscalculation. They asked Gen. Smedley Butler to serve as their Commander-in-Chief. At first glance, their choice would seem to be a prudent one. Butler, highly regarded for his tactical skills, had positioned himself as a rabidly outspoken right-wing critic of FDR and his New Deal. Unfortunately for DuPont and Knudsen, Butler was also loyal to the US Constitution. The General warned FDR of the oncoming coup, and went to Congress with the details. That pretty much doomed the plot. Roosevelt took no action against the parties involved, for it would look bad if scions of the Morgans and the DuPonts were hauled into court to face charges of treason in the middle of a depression. Imagine the panic that would elicit on Wall Street, and the subsequent trickle-down effect it would have on a population struggling enough as it was.

Another instance of pro-Nazi activity within Allied circles surfaced after the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Everyone pretty much knew that Germany would have to surrender soon. The conference dealt with economic strategies for after the war -- a good idea any way you look at it. After all, the Nazis got popular support in large part due to the disasterous economic conditions caused by reparations and depression. And very few wanted another war to end all wars.

One of the keystones of Bretton Woods, the adoption of the Safehaven Resolution, would prevent Germany from profiting from the hostilities. Article VI demanded that all property stolen from nations and concentration camp victims be returned to their rightful owners. In practice, however, this would never work unless all factions cooperated. Part of the responsibility for making Safehaven viable would rest upon such neutral countries as Spain and Portugal. Ha! Fat chance of that happening. Still, the Allies could have countered the neutrals’ inaction by imposing economic sanctions. But that didn’t happen. The US State Department and UK’s Whitehall stonewalled any attempts to implement Safehaven agendas after the war. Meanwhile, both American and British intelligence reported vast quantities of Nazi lucre being loaded onto Spanish cargo ships headed for South America. While some factions of the Allied governments attempted to take action to keep this from happening, they were again stymied by those higher up. Their reasoning was that this capital – not just gold, but diamonds, precious stones, ivory, art and other things – were owned by non-German corporations. But, like the phony Swiss bank accounts, these were only non-German companies on paper.

When it became clear to them that they would lose the war, the Nazis organized a capital flight program, codenamed Aktion Adlerflug (Operation Eagle Flight) under Bormann’s direction. Eagle Flight created a number of foreign dummy corporations – 58 in Portugal, 112 in Spain, 233 in Sweden, 214 in Switzerland, 35 in Turkey and 98 in Argentina – for the express purpose of moving out their stolen goods. Aiding them in this endeavor were a number of international interests, among them the J. Henry Schroeder Bank of New York, listed as an investor in some of these companies. New York Times correspondent Charles Higham reported that Schroeder’s business partners in these deals included Rockefeller & Co., Investment Bankers, Baron Bruno von Schroder of London, Allen and John Foster Dulles, and the Gestapo.

It stands to reason that if many of these banks, governments and industrialists supported the Nazis before the war and during the war, would they just dis their old buddies afterward? Or could expatriated Nazis still have had access to their accounts? Many of these accounts were not publically acknowledged to exist until the 1990s. The banks have also offered no evidence that they froze them after 1945. Then too, those Germans landing in Argentina weren’t exactly panhandling on the streets of Buenos Aires. They had money coming from somewhere.

The Nazis also had friends in key places. Back in Germany, Col. Reinhard Gehlen, served as the chief officer responsible for gathering intelligence on the Soviets during the war. In order to escape prosecution at Nuremberg, he embarked on a patented confidence scam, one that would embarrass both the East and the West. Gehlen worked hard to convince the USSR that the United States planned to build up nuclear weapons against them specifically, thus agitating Soviet, anti-American paranoia. At the same time, he convinced the Americans and the British that the Soviets wanted to steal their nuclear weapons and invade their countries. In short, Gehlen, who seemed to have a knack for manipulating people, concocted much of the Red Scare.

The CIA and the British Secret Service wouldn’t find out until years later that Gehlen had played all sides against the middle by drastically inflating the defense estimates of both the east and west, and ratting out everybody’s secret agents. In 1945, the West primary concerned itself with minimizing Soviet influence. They trusted Gehlen’s hatred for communists, and coveted his numerous files on Russian intelligence. Like many within the western intelligence community, Gehlen was also a Knight of Malta, which gave him a large degree of credibility in American eyes. The Nazi spy saved himself and many of his friends by promising to keep an eye out for the Bear, and by giving them intelligence and technical advisors.

The US government had declared virtually all ex-Nazi officials war criminals. Yet, they didn’t think it would hurt to let a few go if they had something that the West wanted. American intelligence therefore set up Operation Paperclip, a program designed to white-wash prior Nazi affiliations, thus allowing these guys to work for, and immigrate to, the US. One of Paperclip’s biggest scores was its acquisition of Dr. Wehrner von Braun, inventor of the V-2 rockets that socked big holes in the British landscape. Von Braun pretty much fathered the US space program, along with (approximately) 700 other sheepdipped scientists. Another 600 psychiatrists, chemists and other scientists began to lay the foundation for what would become MK-ULTRA.

As the late Mark Phillips used to say, the Nazis didn’t lose the war. They simply switched sides. Many of them maintained the core beliefs of their Thulist past, and were happy to find out that many of the American intelligence command felt the same way, having been initiated into some form of the arcana. Furthermore, many of the conservative factions in the US liked the racist notions espoused by the German esoterics, and couldn’t agree with them more.

The Nazis who escaped Nuernberg had more than just money. They had received support from private ruling factions before the war, and acquired contacts within the American and British governments afterward.

“That doesn’t mean they were planning on taking over the world, does it?” I hear you asking. “Surely we would have seen some manifestation of it by now, wouldn’t we?”

Actually, we did.