From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: Smelling Rats (Was: Re: Nazism and Socialism)
Date: 23 Nov 1992 19:35 PST
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Distribution: world
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Steven Fordyce, replying to me (<, my ** emphasis)

>... I don't think your problem is so much with me, Ron, as it is with the
>truth.  You seem to gauge truth by how it reflects (in your mind) on
>socialism.  Saying that National Socialism is a form of socialism, is no
>more an attack on other forms of socialism, than saying Hitler was a human
>being is an attack on you (or me).  It is simply the truth in both cases.

A definition is the beginning of an argument, Steven, not the end of
one.  But it would greatly help if you knew the real history of the
Nazis rise to power, and the real history of WWII.  See below.

[Steven Fordyce quoting me:]
<BTW, as long as we're discussing Nazis, does Steven Fordyce know who
<Reinhard Gehlen was, and how he ended up as founding chief of West
<Germany's secret service? Does he know the connection between Werner Von
<Braun, Nordhausen (*not* Peenemunde), and the Dora concentration camp? 
<Perhaps he would care to explain to me how Von Braun and his happy crew
<(including V-2 rocket project head German General Walter Dornberger)
<ended their careers at the very apex of the U.S. military-industrial
<complex.

>Because they were the world's formost experts on rocket science?  **Perhaps
>you could explain what any of this has to do with the subject?**  Is it your
>effort to smear capitalism as you think I have socialism (even though this
>has nothing to do with either)?

My comments on Gehlen et. al. have everything to do with the subject
of the real history of WWII and its origins; they were meant as
specific challenges to the mythology of WWII
perpetrated as history for the specific purpose of ideological
propaganda in the Western democracies.   Studying the subsequent
career of these dedicated Nazis (to be compared, perhaps, with
the FBI persecution of the men who served in the Abraham Lincoln
brigade in Spain) shows that capitalists have always greatly
preferred Nazis over socialists.   

Reinhard Gehlen was the head of intelligence operations for the
Nazi army on Hitler's Eastern front; after the war ended he was recruited
by the precursor of the C.I.A. because his `Gehlen Org' was considered
invaluable in the penetration of Eastern Europe.  (Actually, the
Gehlen Org was penetrated right from the start by the KGB; Gehlen was
merchandising Cold War fantasies to his American paymasters.)  One of the
men high up in the `Gehlen Org' was Franz Six, who during the war
was a key figure in Adolf Eichmann's organization.  The `Gehlen Org'
mutated into the West German secret service in 1955.

As for Von Braun and his crew of rocketeers, when I was growing up in
the sixties and enamoured of the space program, I got the impression
-- from reading Time/Life puff pieces on NASA, etc. -- that Von Braun
(and his fellow V2 rocketeers) was perhaps a *German patriot* during
WWII, but was certainly not a committed Nazi -- that he was working
for his country in the same way that the scientists in the Manhattan
project were working for theirs, and that Peenemunde was analogous to
Los Alamos. 

There was a 1958 black-and-white B movie "biography" of Von Braun and
the V2 project starring Curt Jurgens called "I Aim at the Stars" which
struck this theme (I saw this film years ago on late-night TV); I've
read that when it originally appeared a British movie critic
sarcastically titled his review -- "I Aim at the Stars, but sometimes
I miss and hit London by mistake".  More recently, Von Braun appeared as a
"character" in James Michener's 1982 "docu-drama" novel "Space" of the
U.S. space program, and is treated with great respect. (Von Braun died
of cancer just before the novel was published.) 

The favorable portrayals of Von Braun concentrate on the V1 and V2
projects at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea; the story is quite different
once one knows that late in the war (as a result of successful
Allied bombing raids) Von Braun and his crew moved to Nordhausen
in the Harz Mountains.  Nordhausen was built and operated with 
the aid of slave labor (including skilled technical labor taken from
the occupied countries) --  and contrary to the claims of Von Braun
that they were only obeying orders, people were worked to death on V2
production schedules **set by the rocketeers themselves.**

[Perhaps Steven Fordyce finds nothing instructive in the observation
that when Robert Oppenheimer -- who worked his heart out for his
country during WWII -- died in 1967 he was still considered an
official security risk by the U.S. government, whereas at the same
time Werner Von Braun -- who worked *his* heart out for the Nazis --
enjoyed the U.S. highest security clearance, and whose counsel was
sought at the highest levels of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
But I sure as hell do.   What evidence does it take before
Steven Fordyce smells a rat somewhere in the standard lies?] 


This ugly whole story, and much more besides is described 
in considerable detail in:

            "Blowback :
             America's Recruitment of Nazis 
             and its effects on the Cold War"

by Christopher Simpson, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, New York,
1989 paperback edition).

(See, also, "The Paperclip Conspiracy : the hunt for the 
Nazi scientists" by Tom Bower, 1987, which concentrates on the
specific "recruitment" of German scientific/engineering talent --
e.g. Werner Von Braun and his fellow rocketeers in the immediate
postwar period.  Bower has written a couple of other books
on the same general subject.)

Since I frequently make the distinction
between the American government and the American people, I should
again point out here that the people in U.S. intelligence agencies
making the decisions to recruit ex-Nazis ("ex-" really only by
virtue of losing the war; many were completely unrepentant)
in the immediate post-war period knew damn well that the American
public wouldn't stand for it **if they knew the facts.**

By the evidence Simpson presents, some of the most vociferous Eastern
European "anti-Communists" that came to the U.S. in the postwar period
and founded anti-Soviet political activist organizations (these were
regularly tapped for rhetorical support by U.S. Cold War
propagandists) had in fact been active Nazi collaborators during WWII.
One individual from the Baltic States was open about this; he said
something like (from memory, I don't have the book at hand), "Yes, I
collaborated with the Germans.  I would have collaborated with the
devil; the point is that I didn't collaborate with Stalin."  (On the
principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend.") 

U.S. intelligence agencies knowingly recruited committed Nazis in
the postwar period rather than prosecute them for war crimes because 
they preferred the Holy War against Communism to punishing Nazis.
(Frances FitzGerald, in her study of U.S. school history textbooks,
"America Revised" (1980) notes that the stuff that appeared about
the Soviet Union in American school textbooks in the nineteen-fifties
was more vituperative than that about Nazi Germany during WWII.
The role of the Catholic Church in all this also deserves some close
examination.)

Stalin was a monster and the Soviet people groaned under his tyranny.
[One can get the impression from various American neo-conservatives -- although
they never come right out with it -- that Soviet citizens **enjoyed**
being under Stalin's tyranny ---  and thus must have horns growing out of
their heads.  As George F. Kennan (U.S. Ambassador or sub-Ambassador
in Moscow in 1944, and no shrinker from harsh truths) has stated, 
if Stalin had not died when he did, he would certainly have been
assassinated, because his tyranny had become intolerable.]
But Soviet citizens had some very good reasons to be suspicious of the
professed good intentions of the Western democracies that immediately
recruited their most hated enemies.  U.S. "neo-conservatives"
have been fond of talking about the lessons of "appeasement at Munich"
with respect to the Soviet Union; but the Soviets have much
better cause to remember this lesson with a rather different interpretation.
(This "Munich Metaphor" is also trotted out every time the U.S. 
government wants to smash some Third World country.)

Ron Balden