Nazis in America: The Secret CIA Programs that Shaped the New Global Order

Abstract:

On May 8, 1945, the Allied powers—represented by the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—formally accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces, on a day known as “Victory in Europe,” or “VE” day. Although the war was formally over, the world remained very much in disorder. Allied countries convened in Yalta, San Francisco, and Potsdam to debate and construct the postwar international order. Even before the official cessation of hostilities in Europe, major figures of the US intelligence community, anticipating a global conflict between the United States and Soviet Union, initiated a series of secret operations that laid the groundwork to establish hegemony in a world of dueling superpowers. In their efforts to do so, the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps, Office of Strategic Services, and Central Intelligence Agency courted a wide swath of Germans, including high-profile former Nazis. Operations Sunrise, Paperclip, and Rusty respectively saw the US intelligence community negotiate with the leader of the SS in Italy to propel and early surrender of German troops in Italy, bring hundreds of thousands of German scientists to the United States, and deputize Hitler’s former head of anti-Soviet intelligence. This thesis explores how American intelligence subverted denazification in its early Cold War efforts to establish a coherent “Western bloc” to counter the ideological and geostrategic influence of the Soviet Union. Although lofty rhetoric about the cultural unity of the West emerged in the intelligence documents discussing each operation, all three were principally geostrategic in nature. They sought guarantee cohesion in Western European and American approaches to containment, at a time when West Germany was divided over whether to seek national unity through Cold War neutrality.