Adolf Heusinger was far from being the only Nazi war criminal who would later serve at a top position in NATO
For decades former Nazis and German war criminals served at the highest echelons of NATO.
Most of them were highly decorated Nazis, who later served in top positions in the Western German army, and were later promoted to serve as Commander and Chief of all NATO forces in Europe.
This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post-WW2 Western Europe and especially in Western Germany.
Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry out the holocaust and other war crimes, genocides, and crimes against Humanity were almost never put on trial for their crimes against the Jews, the Poles, the Greeks, the Russians and the people of Europe, but instead were installed in top positions in NATO, in the western German government, army, industry and western German society at large.
The most famous of them was Adolf Heusinger, chief of the Operationsabteilung from 1940-1944.
He was actually Hitler’s chief of staff and helped plan the Nazi’s invasions of Poland, Norway, Denmark, and France. He was promoted to colonel on August 1, 1940, and became chief of the Operationsabteilung in October 1940, making him number three in the Army planning hierarchy.
After the war, this German war criminal, the man who helped Hitler plan and execute his invasion of neighboring countries which directly led to the deaths of millions of people, was not even put on trial, quite contrary he was allowed to take over the newly established West German army, the “Bundeswehr”.
In 1961, Heusinger was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (essentially he was NATO’s chief of staff). He served in that capacity until 1964.
Heusinger was far from being the only Nazi war criminal who would later serve at a top position in NATO, here’s a summary of a few more.
General Hans Speidel, a Nazi general who was Erwin Rommel’s chief of staff during WWII.
After the war, he served in the Western German army and became the Supreme Commander of NATO’s ground forces in Central Europe from 1957-1963.
Johannes Steinhoff, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot during WWII and recipient of the Knights Cross of the Iron across (the Nazi military’s highest award), was Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1971–1974 (among other NATO positions beforehand).
Johann von Kielmansegg (pictured left in the first image), General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1942-1944, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1967-1968.
Ernst Ferber, a Major in the Wehrmacht and group leader of the organizational department of the Supreme Command of the Army (Wehrmacht) from 1943-1945 and recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1973-1975.
Karl Schnell, battery chief in the Western campaign in 1940/later First General Staff Officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps in 1944 and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1975-1977.
Franz Joseph Schulze, a Lieutenant in the reserve and Chief of the 3rd Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241 and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1977-1979.
Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin; Lieutenant of 24th Panzer Division in the German 6th Army, a participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, adjutant to Army High Command, and recipient of the German Cross in gold, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1979-1983.
Some people would say that some of these people were just army officers in a professional army and not war criminals.
However the Nazi Wehrmacht was not just a normal “professional army”, it was an integral part of the German Nazi killing machine that was responsible for the deaths of 14 million civilians and the destruction of Europe and Western Russia.
Instead of facing trial for their participation in war crimes during WW2, they became top generals in NATO.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
From the very political point of view, the 19th century in Latin America started in 1808 when the emancipation of the subordinated people against the foreign (Spanish & Portuguese) rule started (and finished in 1826) and was over with the beginning of the Great War in Europe in 1914. The struggle for independence was extremely speeded up by the French military-political subjection of the Iberian Peninsula when both Spain and Portugal lost direct connections with their overseas colonies. Such a new geopolitical situation fostered domestic Latin American patriotic nationalism which demanded political independence, administrative sovereignty, and economic self-administration instead of ...
The role of the United States in the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is often overlooked by people who are critical of Washington’s intervention in the internal affairs of independent, sovereign countries.For it was in the former Yugoslavia that the precedent was set for future American intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo provided the launch pad for the West’s concept of humanitarian intervention, which, in reality, is a pretext for safeguarding and enhancing US global hegemony.However, intervention by Washington in the Balkans in the 1990s served a more immediate objective for the ...
“A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it”. – Frederick Douglass (former slave who would later become a great American statesman and diplomat)It has always been an utmost necessity to exercise caution when reading the historical accounts of great periods that threatened to change the course of the world. As is widely recognised though not reflected upon enough, ‘history is written by the victors’, and if this be indeed the truth, than we must be aware of what lens we ...
Why is France so interested in Syria? According to the Guardian, France’s policy in Syria has been “more forward than any other Western country”:“[France] was early in calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, still insists he must go, and recently joined airstrikes inside Syria against the Islamic State.”France joined the United States in bombing Syrian territory (without a U.N. mandate) even before the United Kingdom did. In 2013, France stood by Obama’s side despite the fact the United Kingdom’s parliament voted not to join Obama’s efforts to “punish” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for crossing Obama’s imaginary red line. ...
South-East Europe, and especially the Balkan Peninsula as the main part of it, have traditionally been the object of numerous geopolitical, geostrategic, and publicist analyses, as well as the subject of debates among the Balkan, European, and global experts in international relations. The new Iron Curtain or the Cold War 2.0 between western and eastern Europe was not the end of the Balkan’s importance for the US administration and NATO as well. At present, along with the Serbian and Macedonian national questions, the most controversial issue is the Albanian national question or, more precisely, the question of the Kosovo knot.[1] ...
As a matter of historical fact, a separate Macedonian ethnonational identity did not exist until the second half of the 19th century. This is partly due to the fact that Macedonia was ruled by Ottoman Empire for a longer period of time: from 1371 to 1912. It is known that Ottoman authorities did not recognize any kind of ethnonational or ethnolinguistic identities but rather only the confessional (millet-system). Therefore, the Christians of Macedonia were not differentiated between themselves on the ethnic bases. Furthermore, Macedonian territories were inhabited by different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups (Slavic- and Greek-speaking Christians, Turkish- and ...
Since the political change in Iraq took place in 2003 with the US-led invasion to change Saddam's regime, the Iraqi political and judicial system are unstable and very weak, even though the new regime has provided freedom and democracy to the state.The new political system is suffering from corruption and from the highest levels in the state. This led to looting the wealth of this very rich state. It also aggravated the woes of the Iraqis. There are no basic services provided by the government to the citizens. The electricity does not reach most of the citizens except for very ...
Barack Obama is the first two-term American president to have presided over war every day of his tenure in office. He bequeaths to a Trump administration ongoing operations in Afghanistan, continuing drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, the consequences of the 2011 destruction of Libya, the instigation of civil war in Syria, US sponsorship of the brutal Saudi interventions in Yemen, and the civil conflicts in Ukraine, the Caucuses and across Africa.Obama’s blood-soaked legacy, however, is most graphic in Iraq. There is a bitter irony in this, given the fact that he was elected in 2008 largely on the basis of ...
PrefaceIt is a very linguistic fact that the term “race” exists in all languages derived from the Latin one. For instance, the meaning of this term is identical in English and French like in some other languages or very similar regarding the meaning. However, the term “race”, basically, refers in all of those Latin derived languages to a group of people who are sharing a common origin. Nevertheless, therefore, the term is not clearly distinguishable from very similar terms of “ethnicity” or “nationality”.[1]Before 1945Historically, it was not up to the mid-19th century that any account of race became to a ...
There is a limit to economic manipulations by empires. All empires have perished due to economic hardships. The Ottoman, Soviet and the British empires were no exception in the past century. Waste was the key product of these empires. Whether the only empire – the US – understands it or not, the fact is that its economy is being undermined due to its wasteful policies, living beyond its means and by dictating it’s economic and foreign policies on free nations and by treating them as satellites. The US has used economic sanctions (strangulation) against countries to gain an advantage but ...
Both before and after Crimea left Ukraine and joined Russia in a public referendum on 16 March 2014, the Gallup Organization polled Crimeans on behalf of the U.S. Government, and found them to be extremely pro-Russian and anti-American, and also anti-Ukrainian. (Neither poll was subsequently publicized, because the results of each were the opposite of what the sponsor had wished.) Both polls were done on behalf of the U.S. Government, in order to find Crimeans’ attitudes toward the United States and toward Russia, and also toward Ukraine, not only before but also after the planned U.S. coup in Ukraine, which occurred ...
The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016.IntroductionHistorically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting what President Eisenhower called “The Military Industrial Complex”.What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called “US Foreign Policy”, namely ...
The full extent of the damage to international peace and security caused by the US-led Syrian strikes will take some time to become clear. But its impact on the very concept of legality in international affairs is already evident.Simply put, the most powerful county in the world and its chief satellites, the UK and France, have thrown the rule of law into the trash can. The only "law" now is the law of the jungle. There is no going back.Ironically, the attack itself was claimed by its perpetrators as enforcement of legality, not of its obliteration. For example, NATO Secretary-General ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
The public denunciation by thousands of women and a few men that they had been victims of sexual abuse by their economic bosses raises fundamental issues about the social relations of American capitalism.The moral offenses are in essence economic and social crimes. Sexual abuse is only one aspect of the social dynamics facilitating the increase in inequality and concentration of wealth, which define the practices and values of the American political and economic system.Billionaires and mega-millionaires are themselves the products of intense exploitation of tens of millions of isolated and unorganized wage and salaried workers. Capitalist exploitation is based on ...
The United States, Germany, Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom launched "Operation Jericho"Once again, the Obama administration has tried to force the change of a political regime that resists it. On February 12, an Academi (formerly Blackwater) plane disguised as an aircraft of the Venezuelan army was supposed to bomb the presidential palace and kill President Nicolas Maduro. The plotters had planned to place former MP María Corina Machado in power and have her immediately acclaimed by former Latin American presidents. President Obama had given a warning. In his new doctrine of Defence (National Security Strategy), he wrote: "We ...
No matter where you grew up in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the rebel flag as part of the dress code. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t know much about it, now is the time to be informed. That’s because this flag has a particularly controversial place in US history.“People find the flag offensive because they ...
Most veteran observers, including Israeli security authorities and Palestinian leadership, were dumbfounded by recent events in Jerusalem, where tens of thousands of Palestinians mobilized non-violently in response to the Israeli closure of the Old City and placement of metal detectors at the entrance of the Dome of Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. What was the secret ingredient that made such a mass action take place and be a successful example in Palestinian non-violent resistance to the 50 years of Israeli military occupation? How did it happen so spontaneously, non-violently and with seemingly no leadership?A new report by the group, titled, Relations Between Palestinians Across ...
The concept of human security is a controversial approach by a certain group of post-Cold War 1.0 academicians (after 1990) for the purpose of redefining and at the same time making broader the meaning of security in global politics and the studies of international relations (IR). We have to keep in mind that up to the end of the Cold War 1.0, security as both political phenomena and academic studies exclusively were connected only with the protection of the independence (sovereignty) and territorial integrity of states (national polities) from the military threat (war, aggression) by external factors (players) but in ...
