After decades of delaying, the United Nations finally released
archives from the Second World War-era war crimes commission investigating the
Nazi Holocaust. The source of those archives on Nazi war crimes were Western
governments, including those in exile at the time of the war, such as the
Belgian, Polish and Czechoslovakian. The time period covered is 1943-1949.
Washington and London had long sought to halt the release. Why?
Notably, the landmark publication of the files last month was
given scant Western media coverage. Surprisingly, perhaps, because the story
that can be gleaned from the documents tells of a hidden history of the Second
World War, namely the systematic collusion between the American and British
governments and the Nazi Third Reich.
As a report in Deutsche Welle remarked on the released archives:
«The files make clear that [Western] Allied forces knew more about the Nazi
concentration camp system before the end of the war than has generally been
thought».
This revelation points to more than just «knowledge» among the
Western allies of Nazi-era crimes; it points more damningly to state collusion.
This would also explain why Washington and London have been reluctant to make
the UN war crimes files publicly available.
There has
long been a controversial debate among
Western nations about why the US and Britain in particular did not do more to
bomb the Nazi infrastructure of death camps and railroads. Washington and London
have often made the claim that they did know the full extent of the horror
being perpetrated by the Nazis until the very end of the war when extermination
centers such as at Auschwitz and Treblinka were liberated – by the Soviet Red
Army, it should be noted too.
However, what the latest release of UN Holocaust files shows is
that Washington and London were indeed well aware of the Nazi Final Solution in
which millions of European Jews and Slavic people were being systematically
worked to death or exterminated in gas chambers. So the question again is: why
did the US and Britain not direct more of their aerial bombing campaign to
destroy the Nazi infrastructure?
One possible answer is that these Western allies had a callous
disregard for the Nazi victims. Washington and London establishments were
themselves accused of harboring antisemitic prejudices, as can be seen from the
scandals when both these governments spurned thousands of European Jewish
refugees during the Second World War, in effect sending many of them to their
deaths under the Nazi regime.
Not excluding the above factor of Western racist insouciance,
there is a second more disturbing factor. That the Western governments, or at
least powerful sections, were loath to hamper the Nazi war effort against the
Soviet Union. Notwithstanding that the Soviet Union was a nominal «ally» of the
West for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This perspective harks to a radically different conception of
the Second World War in contrast to that narrated in official Western versions.
In this alternative historical account, the rise of the Nazi Third Reich was
deliberately fomented by American and British rulers as a bulwark in Europe
against the spread of communism. Adolf Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism was matched
only by his detest of Marxism and the Slavic people of the Soviet Union. In the
Nazi ideology, they were all «Untermenschen» (subhumans) to be exterminated in
a «Final Solution».
So, when Nazi Germany was attacking the Soviet Union and
carrying out its Final Solution from June 1941 until late 1944, little wonder
then that the US and Britain showed a curious reluctance to commit their
military forces fully to open up a Western Front. The Western allies were
evidently content to see the Nazi war machine doing what it was originally
intended to do: to destroy the primary enemy to Western capitalism as
represented by the Soviet Union. This is not to say that all American and
British political leaders shared or were even aware of this tacit strategic
vision. Leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston
Churchill appeared to be genuinely committed to defeating Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, their individual views must be set against a background of
systematic collusion between powerful Western corporate interests and Nazi
Germany.
As
American author David Talbot documented in his
book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s
Secret Government (2015), there were massive financial links between Wall
Street and the Third Reich, going back several years before the outbreak of the
Second World War.
Allen Dulles, who worked for the Wall Street law firm Sullivan
and Cromwell and who later headed up the American Central Intelligence Agency,
was a key player in the linkage between US capital and German industry.
American industrial giants, such as Ford, GM, ITT and Du Pont were invested
heavily in German industrial counterparts like IG Farben (manufacturer of
Zyklon B, the poisonous gas used in the Holocaust), Krupp Steel and Daimler.
American capital, as well as British, was thus integrated into the Nazi war
machine and the latter’s dependence on the system of slave labor as provided by
the Final Solution.
This would explain why the Western allies did so little to
disrupt the Nazi infrastructure with their undoubted formidable aerial bombing
capacity. Far more damning than mere inertia or indifference owing to racist
prejudice towards the Nazi victims, what emerges is that the Americans and
British capitalist elite were invested in the Third Reich. Mainly for the
purpose of eliminating the Soviet Union and any kind of genuinely socialist
global movement. Bombing Nazi infrastructure would have been tantamount to
deleting Western assets.
To this end, as the war was drawing to a close and the Soviet
Union looked poised to roll up the Third Reich singlehandedly, the Americans
and British belatedly stepped up their war efforts from western and southern
Europe. The goal was one of salvaging Western assets remaining in the Nazi
regime. Allen Dulles, the director of the-soon-to-be-formed American Central
Intelligence Agency, extricated top Nazis and their gold looted from Europe in
secret surrender deals known as Operation Sunrise. Britain’s military
intelligence MI6 was also involved in the clandestine American effort to
salvage Nazi assets via ratlines. The bad faith on display to the Soviet
«allies» heralded the chill of the ensuing Cold War that immediately followed
the Second World War.
Significant
and damning testimony of what was going down was given recently in a BBC interview by Ben Ferencz, the most senior
surviving US prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials. At age 98, Ferencz was still
able to lucidly recall how scores of Nazi war criminals were let off the hook
by the American and British authorities. Ferencz cited US General George Patton
who remarked just before the final surrender of the Third Reich in early May
1945, as saying: «We’re fighting the wrong enemy». Patton’s candid expression
of deeper animosity towards the Soviet Union than towards Nazi Germany was
consistent with how the US and British ruling class had been colluding with
Hitler’s Third Reich in a geo-strategic war against the Soviet Union and
worker-led socialist movements arising across Europe and America.
In other words, the Cold War which the US and Britain embarked
on after 1945 was but a continuation of hostile policy towards Moscow that was
already underway well before the Second World War erupted in 1939 in the form
of a build up of Nazi Germany. For various reasons, it became expedient for the
Western powers to liquidate the Nazi war machine, along with the Soviet Union.
But as can be seen, the Western assets residing in the Nazi machine were
recycled into American and British Cold War posture against the Soviet Union.
It is a truly damning legacy that American and British military intelligence
agencies were consolidated and financed by Nazi crimes.
The recent release of UN Holocaust files – in spite of American
and British prevarication over many years – add more evidence to the historical
analysis that these Western powers were deeply complicit in the monumental
crimes of the Nazi Third Reich. They knew about these crimes because they had
helped facilitate them. And the complicity stemmed from Western hostility
towards Russia as a perceived geopolitical rival.
This is not a mere historical academic exercise. Western
complicity with Nazi Germany also finds a corollary in the present-day ongoing
hostility from Washington, Britain and their NATO allies towards Moscow. The
relentless build up of NATO offensive forces around Russia’s borders, the
endless Russophobia in Western propagandistic news media, the economic blockade
in the form of sanctions based on tenuous claims, are all deeply rooted in
history.
The West’s Cold War towards Moscow preceded the Second World
War, continued after the defeat of Nazi Germany and persists to this day
regardless of the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists. Why? Because
Russia is a perceived rival to Anglo-American capitalist hegemony, as is China
or any other emerging power that undermines that desired unipolar hegemony.
American-British collusion with Nazi Germany finds its
modern-day manifestation in NATO collusion with the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine
and jihadist terror groups dispatched in proxy wars against Russian interests
in Syria and elsewhere. The players may change over time, but the root
pathology is American-British capitalism and its hegemonic addiction.
The never-ending Cold War will only end when Anglo-American
capitalism is finally defeated and replaced by a genuinely more democratic
system.
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2017 Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to
Strategic Culture on-line journal www.strategic-culture.org. Views of the authors
do not necessarily reflect one's of the SCF Editorial
