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.
Adolf Heusinger was far from being the only Nazi war criminal who would later serve at a top position in NATO
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.
Der scheidende Nato-General Hans Speidel schreitet bei seiner Verabschiedung am 19.09.1963 in Mönchengladbach eine Ehrenformation von Soldaten auf fünf Ländern ab. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg kämpfte er an fast allen Fronten. Er war engster Mitarbeiter von E. Rommel und gehörte zum Widerstand gegen Hitler. In den Jahren 1954 und 1955 vertrat er Deutschland bei den Verhandlungen über den Eintritt in die Nato. Am 01.04.1957 wurde Speidel Oberbefehlshaber der alliierten Landstreitkräfte in Mitteleuropa mit Sitz in Fontainebleu, musste aber auf Druck de Gaulles 1963 sein Amt räumen. Hans Speidel wurde am 28.10.1897 in Metzingen geboren und verstarb am 28.11.1984 in Bad Honnef. (Photo by Heinz Ducklau/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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).
Johannes Steinhoff
Johann von Kielmansegg (pictured left in 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.
Johann von Kielmansegg (left)
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.
On March 23, 2018, the US media published an interview with the newly-appointed National Security Advisor John R. Bolton, where he stated that the only solution for North Korea is complete disarmament – following the example of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. This scenario is exactly what Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un need to discuss during their negotiations.John R. Bolton is well-known as a hardliner regarding Pyongyang. During his work for the Department of State in the 2000s, he was one of the most furious opponents of any dialogue with North Korea, and more recently he advocated a preventive strike against ...
With the March 24 ICTY decision condemning Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for war crimes, exactly 17 years after NATO began its bombing spree on Serbia, international criminal justice revealed itself once again as an instrument of US and NATO foreign policy.[They chose that the 24th of March to render judgment regarding Karadzic iquite deliberately with a view to erasing the history of NATO crimes.]If any doubts persist, it is worth remembering how the Former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer, perceived that tribunal. Writing about it in his memoirs, Scheffer wrote unabashedly:the tribunal was an important judicial tool, and I had enough ...
Today the Old (dying out) Continent is under multi-faced crises pressure some of them having older roots but the others are the product of current political decisions and moves by the European decision-makers (and those who are behind them across the Ocean).The European oldest and mostly painful crisis-problem is a biological declination of the whole continent what from the economic point of view means, at least for the western countries, an import of a huge number of the „outsiders“ in order just to keep the same level of the economic production and national GDP. This solution of course produces a ...
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...
Despite claims made during NATO Summit Warsaw 2016, that “NATO remains a fundamental source of security for our people, and stability for the wider world,” it is clear that the threats and challenges NATO poses as existing to confront are in fact threats of its own, intentional creation and continued perpetuation.From the ongoing refugee crisis triggered by NATO’s own global-spanning and ongoing military interventions, invasions, and occupations, to its continued expansion along Russia’s borders – violating every convention and “norm” that existed during the Cold War to keep it “cold,” NATO has proven that it is to the populations it poses as protector over, ...
Croatia's President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic with Croatian diaspora in Canada holding the flag of WWII Nazi-Ustashi Independent State of CroatiaCroatia’s president, the former deputy NATO secretary general for public diplomacy Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, decided to pay homage to Nazis of the Ustasha Nazi puppet regime of Croatia shot by Yugoslav partisans at the end of World War II. Grabar-Kitarovic’s tone deafness in choosing Victory in Europe week to honor dead Nazis shocked the Balkans and the rest of Europe.The Ustasha, along with their Slovenian and Serb loyalists to the Nazi puppet regime, were killed by the partisans under the command of anti-fascist ...
Maybe it is the best agreement ever signed… Maybe by applying it, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will enter an era of great friendship and enormous prosperity…Maybe… The only small detail is the majority of the deputies of the Greek Parliament do not know the agreement is so good. Their parties declared they are opposing the agreement and they won’t ratify it. Even the An.Ell. party, which is the junior partner of SYRIZA in the government, does not know how profitable is this agreement. They said they would vote No to the agreement when introduced in the ...
Every day signs are looming larger than life as we know it in the wealthiest nation on earth that it’s about to crash and burn, forever changing not for the better. The latest wake-up call arrived in a Guardian article earlier this week. The story features a secret prison not unlike the CIA torture detention centers all over the world whereby the Chicago police hold rounded up US citizens for hours or days at a time for interrogation. The same internationally illegal roundups of suspected “potential terrorists” (which by latest Gestapo America standards can easily be you or me) that the CIA ...
America is unique among history’s warrior states – prioritizing endless wars, not ending them to achieve a new era of peace and stability.The notion is anathema to the nation’s military, industrial, and media establishment. Wars are waged for power and profits, no other reasons.All post-WW II US wars were and continue to be acts of naked aggression against nations threatening no one – raping and destroying them, the human cost incalculable, the villainy unprecedented.Throughout its history, America has been perpetually at war at home and/or abroad, never a time of peace and stability – a shocking indictment of its abhorrent ...
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” - D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American LiteratureIndividual U.S. Presidents come and go, but the Oval Office is reserved for the Killer-in-Chief. If, as these war-mongers like to say, “the buck stops here,” then our latest incarnation of a “leader,” Donald Trump, has in a few months accumulated enough guilt to last endless lifetimes. There are no excuses. While the headlines scream distractions from the bloodbath, Trump and his “team” are slaughtering innocents in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and countless other places off the American ...
The U.S. State Department annually publishes an extremely biased report on human rights around the world. Conveniently, the report omits one of the most systemic violators of human rights on the planet. Under Donald Trump, the United States has graduated from systemic human rights violator to human rights pariah, as witnessed by recent murders and assaults by police of innocent people on the streets of America. Although the United States has historically been more than willing to criticize the human rights policies of other countries, including in the venue of the United Nations, it has bristled at attempts to have ...
A complex geopolitical situation in the region forces the Baltic States and their NATO allies to take unprecedented efforts to increase defence capabilities to counter potential aggressors. A new Lithuanian military strategy approved in March describes Russia actions along with terrorism as the main threats for the security of Lithuania, as reported by Delfi.Unfortunately for pacifists, the Alliance and Russia today are arming and demonstrating their military power. They constantly compare their armed forces’ strength and capabilities, conduct large-scale military exercises, respond to each other by deploying new contingents and military equipment closer and closer to the NATO-Russian border.The Baltic ...
In examining the future, we must look to the past.As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war.Under this mass ...
The Russian government’s sincere and diligent effort to prevent chaos in Syria and additional massive refugee flow into Europe, all the while avoiding conflict with Washington and its vassals, has been brought to an end by Washington’s intentional attack on a known Syrian army position, thus wrecking the cease fire agreement that Russia sacrificed so much to achieve.The response to this fact by the Obama regime’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, reveals that Washington will lie to the hilt in order to achieve its agenda of reducing Syria to the same chaos as Washington has reduced Iraq and Libya. ...
Twenty-five years commemoration of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March−June 1999 once again opened the question of the Western foundation for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and its unilateral proclamation of a quasi-independence in February 2008. Kosovo became the first and only European state today that is ruled by the terroristic warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). This article aims to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in 1999 which has as an outcome the creation of the first terroristic state in Europe – the ...
How incredible is this...The United States is technically not at war with any country right now but dropped more than 26,000 bombs in just 2016 and this under an "anti-war" President.We have an entire generation of Americans who have lived only under a system of "perpetual war".The time is long overdue to redefine these issues.Map of the US bombed states in 2016 with the number of dropped bombsOriginally published on 2017-01-06Author: Ben SwannSource: Ben Swann FBOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider ...
There was an interesting announcement recently that went almost entirely unnoticed in the Canadian media.On June 17, Peter Szijjarto, foreign minister of Hungary’s centre-right government, made the startling declaration that his national security forces will erect a four-metre wall along the entire 175 kilometres of shared border with Serbia.Szijjarto’s rationale for resorting to such a drastic measure results from a months-long flood of asylum seekers pouring into southern Hungary. While tens of thousands of these desperate illegal immigrants have been caught, detained and returned into Serbia, the vast majority have used the processing time for their asylum applications to simply ...
The Kosovo Question recently once again became an important issue of global politics and international relations for two reasons: 1) The Albanian “government” of the “Republic of Kosovo” announced to officially proclaim the existence of the Kosovo Army (that is a violation of the 1244 UN Resolution in 1999), and 2) The “president” of the “Republic of Kosovo”, a war criminal Hashim Tachi, participated on November 11th (2018) in Paris to the world leaders’ celebration of a centenary anniversary of the end of the WWI (the signed armistice with Germany) as the official representative of an “independent” Kosovo. He was ...
Strange things happen in civil wars: During the Russian Civil War in 1919, 13,000 U.S. troops were dispatched by President Woodrow Wilson to occupy the cities of Archangelsk in the Arctic and Vladivostok on the Pacific.Half a century earlier, thousands of Imperial Russian Navy sailors and their officers flooded the cities of San Francisco and New York. But the circumstances were very different. They were there to defend the United States from foreign invasion – not to threaten it and they brilliantly succeeded in their tasks.The incredible story is well told in “Friends in Peace and War: The Russian Navy’s ...
An earlier abridged version of this post was published by Middle East Eye under a different title on June 5, 2016. The focus is upon the misuse of anti-Semitism by those defending Israel to deflect a rising tide of civil society activism and public criticism of Israeli policies and practices.Zionism as Racism? Zionism and the State of Israel8 Jun 2016 – More than 40 years ago the UN General Assembly adopted controversial resolution 3379 by a vote of 72-35 (with 32 abstentions), determining “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This resolution was bitterly opposed by Israel and its ...