It’s easy to forget that during the 1930s, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party—though seen as radical by many—were not necessarily considered a threat to world peace. It’s even easier to forget that Hitler had more than a few sympathizers, even outright supporters, in the United States. Here are some pieces of history that are seldom discussed, but should serve as a reminder as to how extremist ideals can take hold anywhere, anytime.

10The Bund

A great portion of Nazi ideology revolved around the purity of the German “race,” and Hitler shrewdly realized early on that this could be exploited in the German migrant populations of his potential foes. A mere four months after his rise to power in 1933, an American organization known as “Friends of the New Germany” was assembled from several smaller organizations around the US. Originally made up of both German nationals and US citizens of German descent, it was restructured in 1936 into the German American Bund (“Bund” meaning “Alliance”), which admitted only German-Americans.

Since a quarter of the US population at the time had some German ancestry, membership was higher than one might imagine. The Bund’s leader, Fritz Kuhn, was even dubbed the American Fuhrer. While taking care to ensure its perception as an American organization remained solid (expressions of American patriotism were plentiful in Bund gatherings, which often took place on American holidays or on presidents’ birthdays) the fact remains that American citizens gave the Nazi salute, shouted “Heil Hitler,” and otherwise behaved much as an attendee at any German Nazi Party gathering would have. Fritz Kuhn was exposed by undercover journalists in 1937 and jailed for embezzlement two years later.

9Nazi Summer Camps

After its 1936 restructuring, the Bund began making a concerted effort to advance Nazi ideology in the hopes that the US could be made sympathetic to, or even a stronghold for, Hitler and his armies. Among its most alarming projects: summer camps for American youths. While not supported by or directly related to the infamous Hitler Youth program, the similarities were nevertheless glaring. Parents and children alike saluted the Fuhrer and wore the same armbands their German counterparts did. By the time they were shut down shortly after the start of the war, 16 of these camps existed all across the country, from New York to Los Angeles.

Anti-Semitic sentiment was at an all-time high in the US at this time, and programs like these were intended to indoctrinate America to racist, fascistic ideologies. Children from eight to 18 were taught to speak German and participated in military-style drills. Nazi ideology and German heritage were essentially presented as part of the same package, and many German-Americans were receptive to the message.

8The New York Nazi Community

The most prominent of these camps was Camp Siegfried in upstate New York, outside the small town of Yaphank. The town’s small houses were originally built as bungalows for the summer campers. Anyone seeking to purchase land in the town had to be primarily of “German extraction.” Many of its main streets were named after Hitler, Goebbels, and other prominent Nazi Party leaders.

Even after the beginning of the war, pro-Nazi sentiment would, shall we say, not get one kicked out of the town of Yaphank. Nazi-themed parades were held on its streets, Nazi and SS flags were flown side by side with American flags, and residents carved a giant hedge into the shape of a swastika.

Though the land was eventually seized by the FBI after the war, the town still stands, retaining the original tract homes built for pro-Nazi summer campers. Unfortunately, though many of its residents are unaware, its racist bylaws are still in effect. Even today, virtually all of its resident are white and of German ancestry.

7The Madison Square Garden Rallies

Friends of the New Germany, and later the Bund, were headquartered in New York, making the state a primary hub of American pro-Nazi activity. As early as 1934, the predecessor organization was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden. Participants gave the Nazi salute, chanted slogans, and bore banners with sentiments such as “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans.”

The most infamous of these gatherings took place on February 20, 1939, when the Bund was at the height of its power. A Bund gathering wrapped in the title of a “Pro-America” rally at the Garden was attended by over 20,000 people that day. Four times that number protested outside the venue, attempting to storm it and shut it down. They were unsuccessful, but this was among the last such events. The Bund was dissolved after the US declared war on Germany in late 1941.

6The Bush Connection

Conspiracy theories have long examined a possible collusion between the US government and the Nazi regime. Circumstantial evidence abounds, from the similarities between the CIA’s reviled MKUltra program and similar programs developed by the Nazis, to the role of some of Hitler’s top rocket scientists in the development of NASA.

Among the many outlandish claims, a truth was revealed near the turn of this century that is somehow even more outlandish: Prescott Bush—a US senator and father of future president George H.W. Bush—had mutually beneficial business relationships with German companies that were directly involved with Hitler’s rise to power.

While the secretive nature of these dealings helped them avoid scrutiny for decades, the eventual reveal prompted speculation as to whether Bush should have been tried for war crimes. The assets of his company were seized in 1942 under the Trading With The Enemy Act. Not only may this relationship have played a substantial role in helping fund the Nazi war effort, it may have also laid the foundation for the Bush family fortune.

5Nazi Radio

As previously suggested, fascism was not as dirty of a word in the 1930s as it is today. Still, the vast majority of Americans were wary of fascist regimes and their tactics; after German paramilitary forces and citizens took to the streets on November 9, 1938—the infamous Kristallnacht—an American poll revealed that 94 percent of Americans disapproved, despite the pervading anti-Semitic sentiment of the time.

Yet throughout it all, one loud voice could be relied upon to defend and explain Hitler’s actions: Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and radio personality with an audience of millions. Coughlin had built his audience attacking “bankers” during the Great Depression, and he extended this criticism specifically to Jews in a broadcast that took place a mere 11 days after Kristallnacht. He railed against German Jews for appropriating Christian property and attempting to spread Communism.

Although his show was canceled shortly thereafter, the damage was done. Coughlin became the hero of Berlin . . . and America. The station owner reported that that, in response to the cancellation, “several thousand people encircled the block where our studios are located, denounced . . . WMCA as un-American, and shouted its slogan of ‘Don’t buy from Jews,’ ‘Down with Jews,’ etc.”

4American Roots Of Eugenics

Eugenics was a crucial component in Nazi ideology. The concept is largely thought to have originated with the Nazis or at least in Europe, but in reality, eugenics originated in America with some of the most prominent scientific and business leaders of the era.

Financed by such venerable entities as the Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation, many of America’s most respected scientists were busy working up theories of “race science” at the behest of their corporate financiers. Data was tweaked and faked to serve the premise that non-white races are genetically inferior and must be bred out of existence.

This “science” became prominent in the early part of the 1900s and became a vital part of Hitler’s ideology. The United States at this time actually had laws pertaining to eugenics on the books. Hitler was familiar with these, enabling him to frame his anti-Semitism in (completely invalid) medical and scientific terms. He once confided to a subordinate, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

3Failure Of The American Press

After Hitler’s initial rise to power in 1933, much of the American press seemed to be confused—and even at odds with each other—over what the ramifications were and how it should be reported. The Nazis had risen from small fringe party to majority political party in just a couple years. Many newspapers seemed to think that he would calm down with his expansionist rhetoric once in office. Some reporters even thought he’d bring peace and prosperity to Germany after all.

The Christian Science Monitor, in a 1933 piece, praised the “quietness, order, and civility” observed by a visiting reporter; there seemed to be “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.” Later in the decade, the New York Times reported “a new moderation” in the German political atmosphere since Hitler’s rise, with the New York Herald declaring stories of atrocities against Jews to be “exaggerated and often unfounded.”

While much of this can be explained by the Nazi regime’s deft handling of foreign press, much of it can also be explained by a deep misunderstanding on the part of Americans as to the nature of Hitler’s problem with Jews. Many US newspaper editors framed the conflict as one between ideologies of differing political views, rather than one between a race of people and those who wished them exterminated.

2Celebrity Supporters

Aviator Charles Lindbergh was an American hero of the 1930s. He performed the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and had endured the very public ordeal of the kidnapping and murder of his infant son in 1935. He was unfortunately also a proponent of eugenics, having become close with French scientist Alexis Carrel, who was a firm believer. In a 1935 interview, Lindbergh asserted, “There is no escaping the fact that men were definitely not created equal,” and discussed Dr. Carrel’s eugenics-based ideas on race. A 1939 radio address was the final blow to his weakened public image. In it, he opined that “our civilization depends on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back . . . the infiltration of inferior blood.”

Auto manufacturer Henry Ford was also an unrepentant anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, allowing recruiters for the Bund to work in his factories and employing Gestapo-like thugs to crack down on those employees who might have tried to unionize. Konrad Heiden, a biographer for Hitler, stated that Ford supplied Hitler with direct financial support totaling at least $340,000. Ford even paid for the reprinting and distribution of the racist hoax pamphlet “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” to libraries in the United States.

1Continued Influence

In politics and culture, “Nazis” and “Hitler” have become catch-all comparisons for those who would brutalize or subjugate others. Nevertheless, the legacy of America’s brief flirtation with this poisonous ideology is all around us.

White supremacist movements and neo-Nazi groups have long flourished in the US, but Hitler’s failed attempt at world domination gave many of them a new focus and a defined ideology. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, neo-Nazi organizations still exist in every single state as of 2016.

The CIA isn’t spotless, either. Documents uncovered in 2014 indicated that as many as 1,000 former Nazis were employed by the agency as spies during the Cold War, with some still living in the United States under government protection as late as the 1990s.

“All’s fair in love and war,” is an excuse some of these individuals may have to rely upon. Although many simply did what they had to do in order to survive Nazi terror, others sought to profit from National Socialist power. It was a war which tested the morality of millions, and whilst some chose to take the high road, an alarming number of famous individuals did not.

10The Vuitton Family

The Louis Vuitton store was the only shop permitted to remain open on the ground floor of the Hotel du Parc in occupied Vichy, throughout WWII. This grand property was none other than the headquarters of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s puppet government, and Henry Gaston (Vuitton’s grandson) had been urged to forge links with the Petain regime in order to help business.

Gaston soon became a regular at the Gestapo’s favorite café nearby and was even one of the first Frenchmen to be decorated by Pétain’s government. Although not mentioned in any of its business records, the Vuitton family has been accused of setting up a factory purely dedicated to creating busts which glorified the Pétain campaign. 2,500 of them to be precise. I wonder if they had the infamous LV engraved across them too . . .

9Hardy Kruger

Whilst most famous for his films with John Wayne and Richard Burton, Hardy Kruger began his career as an actor for the Nazis.

Alike many German boys of the time, at just 13 years old Kruger was a member of Hitler Youth. And by the young age of 15, had starred in a German film called Young Eagles. The film was released in 1944, and whilst on set, the young Kruger became particularly close to a veteran German actor called Hans Sohnker. It is believed that Sohnker knew details of the Holocaust taking place at the time and passed this information on to young Kruger.

Towards the end of the war, at 16 years of age, Kruger was recruited into the SS Division Nibelungen. When ordered to kill a group of American soldiers, Kruger simply could not do it and was almost executed by firing squad for cowardice. The order was stopped, however, and Kruger managed to abandon his squadron to take refuge in the mountains until the war was over.

8Ferdinand Porsche

If you say the word Porsche nowadays, most people picture lavish sports cars racing at top speeds. However, this has not always been the case.

In 1933 when Hitler took power, Ferdinand Porsche announced his idea for a small and most importantly, inexpensive car at the Berlin auto show. It was here that Hitler himself also announced his plans to turn Germany into a motorized nation, in the same way Henry Ford had transformed America. Consequently, in 1934, Hitler and Porsche met to discuss the plans for a “People’s Car” or translated into German, the Volkswagen.

As a result, the Volkswagen Bug/Beetle was created, and an estimated 23 million VW bugs have been produced since, making it one of the best-selling cars in history. In order to produce such numbers, at a time when Ferdinand Porsche was general manager, prisoners of war were sent to the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, to build the vehicles. A supposedly keen Nazi himself, Ferdinand Porsche not only used his influence to push forward new ideas but also profited economically in an immense way.

7Cristobal Balenciaga

Dress-making from the age of three, a Nazi invasion, in 1940, was not going to cause the determined Balenciaga to shut shop for long.

When the Nazis invaded France, they demanded that the country’s prestigious fashion industry move to Germany. However, Lucien Lelong negotiated a middle-ground with the Nazis; agreeing to hand over all of the industry’s Jews in return for France’s fashion industry to be allowed to continue to operate in both Lyon and Paris.

Balenciaga, although not a part of this deal directly, did profit from it, being one of sixty firms that the Germans allowed to function. He opened up his fashion house in Paris again in 1940 and did particularly well due to his connections with Hitler’s ally General Franco. The designer was a close friend of Franco’s wife, designing many dresses for her before the war and continued to do so throughout. In fact, Balenciaga’s final dress, which he came out of retirement especially to design, was General Franco’s granddaughter’s wedding dress.

6F. Scott Fitzgerald

The now infamous American author of the Great Gatsby had slipped out of the literary limelight by the mid-1930s. Fitzgerald was now desperately short on money thanks to his troubles with alcohol, the upkeep of his daughter, and his wife Zelda’s institutionalization bills.

However, in 1936, it was the world of Hollywood which suffered even more greatly. The studios were failing to break even thanks to Nazi censorship, and now only the three largest companies remained in Germany—MGM, Paramount, and Fox. In April 1937, the final volume of Erich Maria Remarque’s trilogy, Three Comrades, was released in the United States. This novel was prime Hollywood material and was set in the late 1920s, throughout the Nazis slow rise to power.

The MGM producer at the time, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, decided to hire F. Scott Fitzgerald to write the script. Fitzgerald was paid $1000 a week for six months; a desirable sum when the average yearly wage was $1780. The author wrote a powerful script which viciously opposed the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and could have been the first anti-Nazi film by a Hollywood studio. Unfortunately, the film was overtly sanitized, and whilst Fitzgerald made vast economic gains from painting the Nazis as poisonous villains, the public never gained the wisdom he imparted.

5Hugo Boss

Hugo Ferdinand Boss, the founder of the fashion label Hugo Boss, was an avid National Socialist, supporting the Nazis not only in a chase for profit but in their beliefs also.

The brand recently issued an apology for its maltreatment of forced workers in WWII, in which it used 140 Polish and 40 French workers. The initially family run business, at first solely produced police and postal uniforms. However, one of their first contracts was to provide brown shirts to the early Nazi party stormtroopers. Later, Boss provided the black and brown uniforms for the Hitler Youth, until finally mass producing the infamous black SS uniforms.

As you can imagine, Hugo Boss profited from these contracts immensely. And, although Hugo Boss did not design the SS uniform himself, it is now synonymous with evil, and we have its production to thank for the costumes of the Imperial Officers in Star Wars.

4Henry Ford

There is something odd in the association of a man who came to symbolize the forward thinking “American Dream” with the essentially backward thoughts of National Socialism.

And yet, in 1938, Henry Ford was presented with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday. Ford was the first American recipient of this Order, and it was the most prestigious honor given to a foreigner by Nazi Germany. It was presented in a display of Adolf Hitler’s indebtedness to the manufacturer. Ford is even mentioned admirably in Mein Kampf.

Hitler himself said he regarded Ford as his inspiration and supposedly kept a life-size portrait of the manufacturer on his desk. German engineers adopted some of the technological and functional techniques of Fordism in their modeling of the Volkswagen, even using Ford engineers to staff the new plant.

Although Ford was openly anti-Semitic, he furiously opposed war and despised the militaristic side of Nazism. Yet, before America entered the war, Henry Ford supplied Germany with military equipment but refused to build engines for Britain’s RAF.

3The Rockefellers

Hitler’s interest in eugenics and his quest for the “Master Race” of blonde haired, blue eyed Aryans was not a new concept thought up by the Nazi leader. By 1909, nearly half of the world’s coercive sterilizations had been done in California in the name of eugenics.

The Rockefeller Foundation was one group of these keen eugenicists. By 1926, they had donated $410,000, or $4 million in today’s money, to hundreds of German researchers. $250,000 of this money went to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Ernst Rudin, who later became the director of Hitler’s systematic medical conquest, studied and practiced his methods.

In 1929, when a Rockefeller grant of $317,000 arrived, the Institute for Brain Research was expanded and re-built, later becoming the centerpiece for Rudin’s murderous experiments.

Another recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin. And it was here, thanks to Rockefeller funding and the institution’s resultant expansion, that Joseph Mengele developed his grotesque fascination with twins.

Although the Rockefellers were not to know the monsters that their funding would produce, their donations helped to ground eugenics in supposed science and thus legitimize Hitler’s campaign.

2Prescott Bush

George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of the directors for Union Banking Corp: an investment bank based in New York, owned and controlled by the Fritz Thyssen family.

The Fritz Thyssen family were incredibly wealthy owners of almost all of Germany’s steel industry. After hearing Hitler speak, Fritz Thyssen became enthralled by the young politician and joined the Nazi Party in 1931. When the National Socialists remained simply a radical fringe party, Fritz Thyssen personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, stepping in many times to bail out the struggling party.

In 1928, Thyssen even purchased the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, Munich, which later became the headquarters of the Nazi party. Up until 1941, when Thyssen lost Hitler’s favor, the company relied on forced labor from concentration camps such as Auschwitz, a camp which led to the death of over a million people.

Yet, until Pearl Harbour in 1941, Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corp continued to fund the steel company responsible for building the planes and tanks which were at the time crushing the Allied Forces. The company’s assets were eventually seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. However, it is believed that Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker helped Fritz Thyssen transfer all his ownership documents to New York in order to avoid prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials.

1Coco Chanel

Designer Coco Chanel is most commonly associated with quilted bags, opulent dresses, and that infamous waft of Chanel No.5 floating through parties. It would surprise many, therefore, to think of Coco as a Nazi spy.

Chanel, however, was an opportunist, not only in her business ventures but in life. Although she did not care for the politics of Nazism, she naturally gravitated towards power in occupied France, and she found herself having an affair with a 44-year-old German officer Baron Hans Guenther von Dincklage. This German officer was, in fact, a professional Abwehr (German spy) officer, who had been working in France since the late 1920’s.

It seems the relationship was equally manipulative, both using each other for personal gain. Whilst Von Dincklage arranged for Chanel to live in the luxury of the Hotel Ritz, the designer was signed up as Agent F-7124, codenamed “Westminster,” to the German Abwehr.

Ever an opportunist, Chanel managed to maneuver the release of her nephew Andre Palasse, from a prison camp in Germany. In return, she traveled to Madrid, in August 1941, with special permission from the Germans, in order to gain political intelligence. The designer only exchanged trivialities with a British diplomat, however, and the trip was not revealing in any way.

Nevertheless, the next time you imagine Coco Chanel as the classic Parisian designer, prancing around a room wearing a tape measure and smoking dramatically on a cigarette, perhaps you should think twice.

When most people think about racial persecution and genocide during the Nazi regime, the Holocaust is usually the first thing on everyone’s mind. Although it’s true that the Jews endured horrible atrocities, they were not the only ones to suffer under Adolf Hitler’s twisted ideas of racial superiority.

The population of African people living in Germany was relatively small compared to the Jews, but the Africans weren’t spared when the Nazis decided to rid the world of anyone who did not fit their Aryan ideal. The stories of the Africans who lost their lives before, during, and after the war—as well as those who survived—are often forgotten. We believe those stories need to be told.

10 The Death Camps

Years before the Nazis came to power, the German army was methodically killing off Africans in a racially motivated genocide. When Germany colonized South West Africa, they created a death camp in what is now known as modern-day Namibia.

In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha gave the order that all native Herero people needed to be exterminated to make space for German colonists. He specifically ordered that the soldiers show no mercy to women and children. In just three years, the Germans killed thousands of people, wiping out approximately 80 percent of the Herero tribe and 50 percent of the Nama tribe.

A total of five different concentration camps were located in Namibia on Shark Island. It earned the nickname “Skeleton Coast” because of the mass graves that are still there. One missionary described a scene of an African woman lying on the ground and wasting away. When she asked for water from fellow prisoners, a German soldier shot her five times, outraged that she would have the audacity to ask for anything.^[1]

The soldiers were so proud of their “conquest” that they would have friends document the experience by taking photos of the soldiers surrounded by starving African prisoners. Then the pictures were turned into postcards to send back home. Some postcards even had pornographic images of German soldiers raping African women.

A man named Dr. Bofinger living in Namibia conducted experiments on the cadavers of these prisoners. He was known for decapitating the victims, preserving the heads, and sending them back to scientists living in Germany. At the time, Adolf Hitler was a young child, and none of these horrific crimes were actually associated with the Nazis.

9 Propaganda

Propaganda played a huge role in influencing the German people’s perspectives of Africans. The vast majority of Germans had no idea what went on in the African colonies. Propaganda was spreading about the friendship between Africa and Germany.

One propaganda poster shows a German woman with her arm around an African woman, claiming that there was no longer any “racial pride” in Germany. The government wanted to encourage citizens to move to all-German colonies in Africa, but the authorities couldn’t convince people to move unless it seemed like an appealing prospect.

After World War I, Germany lost their African colonies to the Allies. Before and after World War I, Germany was losing thousands of people who immigrated to the United States due to rampant unemployment and poverty.^[2]

After the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s, German filmmakers created movies to glorify the history of German colonization in South West Africa. One of the Nazi’s long-term goals was to regain their African colonies and spread the Aryan race all over the world. They wanted people to get excited by the idea through these films.

8 The Rhineland Bastards

After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. Allied troops were stationed in the area of western Germany known as the Rhineland. Many of these troops were black men from the French colonies in Africa.

Hundreds of German women ended up becoming pregnant with the babies of these African soldiers, giving birth to the first significant population of multiracial children Germany had ever seen. These children were nicknamed the “Rhineland bastards.”^[3]

The public was outraged. Propaganda began spreading about women falling victim to black men. One illustration titled “Jumbo” showed a Godzilla-sized naked black soldier holding nearly a dozen German damsels in distress. A metal coin was even minted with the image of a white woman being shackled to a gigantic penis on one side and the image of a black soldier on the other side.

The German public was taught to believe that these women had been raped by the African soldiers, although only one woman out of hundreds of mothers ever made that claim. Those who knew that the sex was consensual tried to paint the black men as oversexed predators and the women as demented.

Therefore, their offspring were not worthy. In Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he blamed the Jews for bringing black men into Germany, saying that it was all part of their plan to soil the pure blood of the Aryan race.

7 Rassenschande

Nazi Germany strongly pushed the idea of Rassenschande, which translates roughly to “racial pollution.” The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented Aryans from having sexual relations with or marrying non-Aryan people.

Most people remember this rule as it applied to the Jews, but of course, it also extended to Afro-German people. German citizens had to undergo medical examinations to get an Aryan certificate to prove that they were “pure-blooded.”

Publications around that time claimed that the Allies introducing African soldiers into Germany was itself an attack on the German population. The Nazis claimed that they were victims of the outside world trying to force racial integration. If they allowed Africans to defile their bloodline, it would mean the end of the German race as they knew it.

Though Germany once had diplomatic ties within Africa and wanted to eventually colonize it again someday, they strongly believed that black people belonged in Africa and nowhere else.^[4]

6 Murder And Sterilization

An anthropologist named Dr. Wolfgang Abel ran tests on Afro-Germans and Asian Germans and claimed that many of the children were aggressive, psychotic, and “genetically inferior” to Aryan children. He also claimed that the German mothers who gave birth to them were corrupted after being a sort of alien vessel.

In 1937, the Gestapo was ordered to round up any black people they could find. Many of these blacks were killed, sent off to be sterilized, or used in scientific experiments. Non-German black people who happened to be in Germany at the time were also killed or imprisoned rather than being allowed to return to their home countries.

During Nazi Germany, any person who was considered to carry undesirable DNA was sterilized, which prevented them from having children of their own. There was an order that every single one of the Rhineland bastards must be sterilized. Over 400 sterilization procedures were recorded.^[5]

5 The Extraordinary Life Of Hans Massaquoi

Hans Massaquoi was one of the few black children who survived growing up in Nazi Germany. Hans wasn’t just any boy. He was a prince. Momolu Massaquoi, the king of the Vai tribe in Liberia, was working as a consul general in Germany. His son, Prince Al-Haj, fell in love with a German nurse named Bertha Baetz. She became pregnant with their son, Hans.

However, Al-Haj was a university student in Dublin and never returned to Germany. King Momolu helped to raise Hans at the consulate’s mansion for the first few years of his life. Then the king returned to Liberia. Bertha did not want to leave Germany, so she chose to raise Hans as a single mother in Hamburg and returned to working as a nurse.

When Hans was a child, he was bullied and harassed over the color of his skin. But he was intelligent and friendly, so he was able to make friends with people in his neighborhood. He desperately wanted to become part of the Hitler Youth because they got to wear “cool uniforms” and all his friends were doing it.

Hans was the only child who was left out, and he desperately wanted to fit in. He even got his babysitter to sew a swastika patch on his sweater to wear to school. His mother tried to stop it, but Hans continued to support the Nazis along with the other brainwashed children, not fully grasping what the Nazis were really like.

As he grew up, the war caused starvation and unemployment. As a black man, he was not allowed to work a job. Though he hated what the Nazis stood for, Hans tried to enlist in the German army. He was denied.

In 1948, his father finally stepped up and brought Hans to live in Liberia where he was treated like the prince he actually was. When he grew up, Hans became a journalist for magazines like Jet and Ebony.

Thankfully, Hans was spared the sterilization imposed on others like the Rhineland bastards, most likely because German officials shared with him that he could be useful if the Nazis ever regained control of their African colonies. Hans grew up, moved to the United States, got married, and had children.

Later, he wrote his autobiography, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black In Nazi Germany, which was made into a movie in Germany.^[6] The entire film is available on YouTube.

4 Human Zoos

Theodor Wonja Michael’s parents were from a German colony in Cameroon. They were taught to believe that the “motherland” was a wonderful place, so they moved to Germany, believing that they could find a better life.

Once they arrived, they were horrified to learn that Africans were not allowed to be hired for normal jobs. Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough money to go back home to Cameroon. They all had to work as actors in a human zoo. They were called “People’s Shows,” where black actors dressed in grass skirts and sat in front of mud huts picking at a fire and pretending to act like savages.

These human zoos typically traveled with a circus. Many of them were set up inside actual German zoos, right next to the monkeys. The showrunners claimed that these were Africans who were recently captured from their homes and given a habitat just like where they came from, exactly like animals.

German people would watch, laugh, and mock these Africans, not knowing that many of them actually spoke German, too. Around 400 human zoos existed in Germany until the 1930s.^[7]

After the end of the Nazi regime, human zoos became a thing of the past—until 2005. The Augsburg Zoo in Germany set up a display of native African life, including mud huts, grass skirts, and tribal dance. They placed it with the baboon exhibit, which is exactly what happened during the Nazi era.

Considering that black people had been compared to wild beasts and baboons in Germany for years, it was a clearly racist exhibit. People were so outraged that the zoo began receiving threatening letters.

Protesters picketed the zoo until the display was removed. The Augsburg Zoo maintains that they were not trying to bring back “human zoos,” and they deny seeing any racist correlation.

3 The African Campaigns

History remembers the lives lost during the bombings of the Blitz in London and so many other attacks on civilians throughout Europe. Yet few memorials bring attention to the lives that were lost in Africa. Much of the fighting during World War II happened in the countries of North Africa between the European colonies, which kept the war far away from European civilians.^[8]

Similar to today’s wars, the battle was also waged over controlling oil supplies in the Middle East. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, roughly one million European soldiers died or were injured during the campaign in North Africa. Germany had control over Tunisia for a short time in 1942 and immediately set out to “neutralize civilians.”

The National WWII Museum has a chart of all the civilian casualties across the globe during World War II. Yet the countries of North Africa are suspiciously excluded.

Some may argue that the desert terrain where the battles took place was not highly populated, but civilian deaths in these countries were recorded elsewhere in biographies and personal accounts. Yet it seems as though no one stopped to recognize these people and keep track of the numbers.

2 Prisoners Of War

There is a code of honor that prisoners of war (POWs) should be left alive, even if only to be traded for the capturing country’s own soldiers. These prisoners are usually used for manual labor, extracting secrets, and as pawns against the enemy. As The Journal of American History points out, both the Axis and Allied powers were guilty of war crimes against POWs during World War II.

The Nazis had no qualms about killing the African soldiers who were fighting from the French colonies. In fact, the Germans probably saw this as revenge for the enemies’ “crimes” against the German women in Rhineland.

African prisoners of war were not allowed to set foot on German soil for fear that they would defile the purity of the German race. They were housed at prison camps called the Frontstalags in France. These prisoners came from Algeria, Tunisia, Southeast Asia, West India, Madagascar, and Morocco, just to name a few places.

Nonwhite prisoners were sent to the Frontstalags. Vintage photographs show that the prisoners were forced to live in flimsy handmade tents with virtually no protection from the cold.

In 1941, there were over 100,000 prisoners at the Frontstalags. By 1942, there were only 44,000 left. The prisoners were forced into hard labor, and tuberculosis spread rampantly among all the men, who were constantly in close proximity to one another. In 1943, Germany commanded the French government to take over guard duty for the prisoners at the Frontstalags.

Once the French were in charge of the people from their own colonies, they began to provide a “godmother” service where female volunteers would cook, read, educate, knit, and give religious sermons. Some of them fell in love with these prisoners of war, giving birth to mixed-race babies.

Unfortunately, even after the war was over, these men were not allowed to return home or marry the women with whom they had children. The men were still considered to be members of the French military and were regrouped to live in barracks.^[9]

1 After The War

When the war was over, soldiers from the United States occupied Germany, which resulted in the births of what Germans called Mischlingskinder (“brown babies”). The German media used these kids as an example of how much Germany had changed by accepting mixed-race children into their society. The media also said that within just 10–20 years, everyone had come to embrace all races.

Despite their portrayal, racist views were still very much alive and well after the war. The vast majority of mixed-race babies were abandoned in orphanages. One cover of Ebony magazine showed a picture of a black child with blue eyes. Under the picture was the caption: “Homes Needed For 10,000 Brown Orphans.”

In the 1950s, thousands of African-American families stepped up to adopt these kids. Still, many children were left unwanted and abused in German orphanages.^[10] A documentary filmmaker named Regina Griffin interviewed dozens of the now-adult Afro-Germans in a movie called Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story. The documentary shares incredibly tragic stories of these children, including one boy whose caregiver at the orphanage tried to drown him.

Today, there are few black people living in Germany. The United Nations released an official warning in 2017 to black tourists that they should never go into certain areas of Germany if they don’t want to get killed. The UN is also investigating reports that teachers grade Afro-German children poorly in schools on purpose and that there is rampant job discrimination.

Shannon Quinn is a writer and entrepreneur. You can find her on Twitter.

In the lead-up to World War II, it was well understood that the Third Reich was the most formidable force of science and technology that the world had ever seen. Blending occult lore and magic with cutting-edge engineering and physics, Adolf Hitler sought to master matter and spirit in much the same way as he sought to master the nations of the world.

So formidable did Hitler’s scientific might seem that many American business interests desired to ally with Nazi Germany rather than resist this growing global superpower. Chagrined with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal, prominent American businessmen even attempted to enlist the aid of decorated war hero Major General Smedley Butler in their plot to replace Roosevelt’s administration with a fascist American government.

As Nazi Germany grew in territory and influence, Hitler became increasingly envious of American manufacturing power. He dreamed of an unstoppable union of German occult science and American brute force that would solidify the Third Reich’s stranglehold over the planet’s future. Though history remembers Hitler as having lost World War II, his unholy fantasy was destined to come to fruition.

Unfazed by the war crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich during the war, leaders of the American military and industrial sectors imported dozens of top Nazi scientists to work in America after the victory of the Allies in World War II. Called Operation Paperclip, this secret initiative led to numerous medical and engineering breakthroughs, including the development of the Saturn V rocket and the founding of NASA.

In many ways, the Operation Paperclip scientists were directly responsible for the unquestioned military and economic supremacy enjoyed by America in the postwar years, yet their Nazi past was generally overlooked or whitewashed by the American media. In the following list, we’ll tell the stories of 10 Nazi scientists who survived the war and flourished as American assets.

10 Walter Schieber

Walter Schieber was a critical player in the Third Reich’s wartime production. His prewar experience in textile manufacturing made him immensely useful to the National Socialist Party, and in 1943, Hitler awarded him with the War Merit Cross.

After the war, Schieber caught the eye of Charles Loucks, a brigadier general with the US Army Chemical Corps. Loucks was assigned to the German town of Heidelberg to work on the development of nerve agents like tabun and sarin gas. Rather than being repelled by Schieber’s past, Loucks was drawn to this Nazi war criminal for his close connections with Heinrich Himmler and his intimate knowledge of the gases used by the Third Reich during the war.^[1]

Schieber worked for the Chemical Corps for 10 years and later became an asset of the CIA. Since he was useful to the American government, Schieber was never prosecuted for his war crimes. In fact, he played a pivotal role in the development of the sarin gas that has subsequently been used by the US military.

9 Hubertus Strughold

Known as the “Father of Space Medicine,” Hubertus Strughold helped the United States Air Force and NASA develop many of the principles of medical care in space that are still in practice today. For years, the Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA) gave an annual award named after Strughold to prominent contributors in the field of space medicine. But when his suspicious connections to Nazi war criminals came to light, AsMA struck Strughold’s name from the award.^[2]

Throughout his long career as a respected scientist in the United States, Strughold fervently denied any knowledge of the war crimes committed by the Nazis. However, he was implicated during the Nuremberg trials as having involvement with the atrocities committed at Dachau, and he spoke in detail at a Nazi conference in 1942 about the infamous “cold” experiments.

Beloved by his colleagues and students, many found it hard to believe that Strughold had lied about his involvement in Nazi human experimentation. But the evidence suggests that Strughold’s expertise in keeping people alive in space was derived at least in part from his intimate knowledge of just how much the human body can endure under extreme stress.

8 Dr. Kurt Blome

Ostensibly, Dr. Kurt Blome was Hitler’s head of cancer research. But in reality, he was in charge of the development of Nazi biological warfare capabilities.

Blome stood trial at Nuremberg for performing euthanasia and conducting human experimentation, but he was acquitted due to the intervention of the American military. The United States government wanted to expand on Blome’s intimate knowledge of human biological weaknesses to create even deadlier nerve agents.^[3]

Blome’s US Army Chemical Corps personnel file makes no mention of his involvement in human experimentation. He lived out the rest of his life in West Germany working on secret projects for the American government and remained active in the right-wing Germany Party until his death in 1969.

7 Arthur Rudolph

When Arthur Rudolph was brought into the United States in 1947 as part of Operation Paperclip, he was noted to be an “ardent Nazi,” but all mention of his war crimes was omitted from official reports. However, documents from two years later confirm that Rudolph had been designated as a war criminal by Allied officials.

In 1961, Arthur Rudolph joined fellow Nazi Wernher von Braun at NASA to design the Saturn V rocket. Without Rudolph’s rocketry genius, the Apollo project would never have come to be.

Though the American government was undoubtedly grateful for his service, the Justice Department charged Rudolph in 1984 with working thousands of slaves to death while overseeing the development of the V-2 rocket during World War II. Rather than face charges, Rudolph agreed to turn in his American citizenry and leave the country.^[4]

When it comes to American aerospace programs in the postwar era, it seems like asking for a history without Nazi influence is a bridge too far. We must simply content ourselves with our gratitude that NASA elected to avoid using slave labor as an expediency when paving the way to the 1969 Moon landing.

6 Magnus von Braun

Though admittedly less famous than his brother Wernher, Magnus von Braun certainly enjoyed a degree of infamy among members of the American military. They labeled him as a “dangerous German Nazi” who posed a greater threat to national security than “half a dozen discredited SS generals.” Serving as his brother’s personal assistant, Magnus negotiated the surrender of the German assembled rocket team in 1945.

After proving himself just as capable as his brother when it came to engineering, Magnus was welcomed by the US Army personnel at Fort Bliss, Texas, with a mixture of pragmatic enthusiasm and wary skepticism. Their qualms about the younger von Braun were quickly proven to be justified when Magnus was caught attempting to sell a brick of platinum that he’d stolen from the base to a jeweler in El Paso.

The incident was hushed up to avoid garnering any negative press directed at Operation Paperclip. Wernher von Braun meted out justice for the infraction personally by inflicting a brutal beating on his brother. His reputation seemingly untarnished by the incident, Magnus went on to enjoy a long and prosperous career with Chrysler before retiring to the Arizona desert.^[5]

5 Dieter Grau

As a member of the von Braun rocket group, Dieter Grau was an integral player in the development of the V-2 rocket during World War II. After the war, Grau was sent to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. He served as quality director on a number of rocket projects spearheaded by Wernher von Braun on behalf of the US government, including the development of the Saturn V rocket.

Before his work for the US Army and NASA, Dieter Grau performed quality control of a somewhat different kind. During his time as a Nazi asset in Germany, Grau was briefly posted in Mittelwerk, the underground slave labor rocket factory run by Arthur Rudolph.

At Mittelwerk, Grau employed his expertise in “debugging,” or the detection of worker sabotage. The slaves that he outed at Mittelwerk were subjected to a special punishment reserved for saboteurs: public hanging in the factory’s main hall by a crane that was raised slowly to extend the anguish.^[6]

Grau lived to be 101 and was fondly remembered by his American colleagues for his attention to detail in everything that he did.

4 Walter Dornberger

Unlike other Operation Paperclip Nazi assets who got away with their war crimes scot-free, Walter Dornberger saw prison time for the use of slave labor in the production of V-2 rockets. But Dornberger, who had reached the rank of lieutenant general under Hitler’s regime, only spent two years behind bars before he was released by the American military.

He was subsequently taken to the United States to rejoin his fellow Nazi rocket scientists, and SS General Dornberger was soon elevated to the post of vice president of the Bell Aircraft Corporation.

During his career as a Nazi general, Dornberger had fired over 1,000 V-2 rockets on residential areas of London. Dornberger was also there the day that the first V-2 rocket was launched in 1937, on which occasion he asked fellow Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun if he recognized the momentousness of the event that had just transpired. Von Braun responded, “Yes, today the spaceship was born.”

Dornberger believed that it was the Third Reich’s obsession with space travel that led to Hitler’s defeat. Yet when it came time to build space exploration vehicles for his new American benefactors, Dornberger was more than happy to oblige. General Dornberger lived out the rest of his life seemingly unhaunted by his past. He died in his homeland of Germany at age 84.^[7]

3 Hermann Oberth

It was Hermann Oberth’s pioneering work in rocket design that originally inspired Wernher von Braun to apply himself to the study of rocketry. When Oberth first posited the idea that rockets could operate in the vacuum of space, he was ridiculed.

But when he developed the German V-2 rocket alongside von Braun, his theories took an important step toward validation. And when Oberth rejoined von Braun in America to develop the Saturn V rocket, his dreams finally took flight.^[8]

While Oberth’s contributions to rocket science are undeniable, other aspects of his legacy are more open to interpretation. Potentially apocryphal quotes attributed to Oberth seem to indicate that this Nazi scientist was under the impression that human spaceflight capabilities weren’t developed by human beings alone. When asked who had assisted humanity in our quest to reach for the stars, Oberth supposedly replied, “The people of other worlds!”

Regardless of whether this quote is accurate, Oberth is on record as a firm believer that UFOs are spaceships from another solar system. Was this belief just a random supposition, or was this acclaimed Nazi aerospace scientist privy to evidence of extraterrestrial life kept outside the public sphere of knowledge?

2 Kurt Debus

Next to Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus is the most famous former Nazi to grace the ranks of American rocketry’s hall of fame. Debus was the director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida from 1962 to 1974.

But in another life, he was Hitler’s flight test director during the development of the V-2 rocket. Despite what we know about the horrors of the V-2 development program, Debus was never held accountable for his past and he still enjoys a glowing posthumous reputation.

Debus was part of the group led by Magnus von Braun that negotiated the surrender of the German rocket scientists at the end of the war. Almost immediately, Debus was whisked away to begin work at Fort Bliss. He was soon transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to oversee the construction of the NASA facilities at Cape Canaveral.^[9]

With Debus at the helm, NASA successfully launched 13 Saturn V rockets into space, including the rocket that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon. Yet Debus would never have been able to make these great American achievements possible had it not been for his involvement in forcing slaves to build rockets of war for the Nazi empire.

1 Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun was quickly recognized by Nazi authorities as being a physics and engineering genius. But von Braun was anything but bookish in nature.

His potent charisma and visionary prowess made him the perfect candidate for organizing large-scale production operations, such as the development of the V-2 rocket. At age 25, von Braun was in charge of a team of 400 people. By the time he was 30, his team had swelled to 5,000 strong.^[10]

During the war, Wernher von Braun visited the slave factory at Mittelwerk at least a dozen times. On one occasion, he toured the abysmal sleeping quarters for the forced laborers. Yet, during his tenure in the American space program, he did his best to distance himself from the atrocities committed by the Nazis by putting forth the position that there was nothing that he could have done to help.

Fully aware that hundreds of slaves were dying to bring his dreams to life, von Braun still feverishly dedicated himself day and night to the development of the V-2 rocket. Without von Braun, it’s doubtful that the Saturn V rocket would have ever seen the light of day. But because of von Braun, endless ranks of forced laborers toiled and died in the darkness.

At what awful price did America buy her incontestable supremacy in space?

Roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent fought in Hitler’s army. While their families back home were being corralled into ghettos and sent off to death camps, these men were in Poland, France, or Russia, spreading the fascist system that was killing their people across Europe.

It’s hard to understand, but many Jewish Germans signed up for military service. Each man had his own reason to do it—often one of necessity. Told together, their stories give an incredible insight into life for a German Jew at the break of World War II.

10 Werner Goldberg

There was a face you could find plastered on the walls of Nazi Germany: a swastika at his chest, standing proud over a proclamation that this was “The Ideal German Soldier.” But the ideal German soldier wasn’t a member of Hitler’s master race. He was half-Jewish.

Werner Goldberg had joined the army after years of struggling with his own identity. His father never told him he was Jewish; instead, Werner found out when he was 14 in the most humiliating way possible. His principal declared that their school would be Jew-free—and then publicly singled Goldberg out as the school’s Jewish problem.

In an instant, Goldberg found himself on the outside, and he was desperate to fit back in. He signed up for the army the first chance he could, getting in early enough to fight in the first invasion of Poland.

But back at home, his father struggled through the horrors of the Holocaust, and Goldberg was forced to use his influence to save his father more than once. At one point, after learning that his father was going to be sent to Auschwitz, Werner snuck into the building they were using as his prison and broke his father out.^[1]

It worked. At the end of the war, all but one member of his family had died. The only one left to greet Werner was the Jewish father he had saved from the death camps.

9 Nachemia Wurman

It has long been debated just how well the soldiers of the Nazi army understood what was happening behind the concentration camp walls, but among the Nazis’ 72nd Infantry, there was one man who definitely knew it firsthand: Nachemia Wurman.^[2]

Wurman was a Holocaust survivor. He was a Polish Jew who had been sent to labor camps in 1944, where he’d endured every horror imaginable. He’d seen his own father executed, and he’d even been forced to bathe using soap made from the bodies of his campmates.

In time, he managed to escape. He fled west, hoping to find the Soviet army—but instead, he ran directly into a Nazi battalion. Wurman knew he wouldn’t be able to sneak past them, so instead, he walked straight up to them, shook their hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” German-born chef.

Soon, Wurman was a part of the Nazi battalion. From then on, he spent the war with a swastika on his arm, feeding the soldiers and praying that nobody would realize who he really was. “The best hiding place,” Wurman said, “was in the mouth of the wolf.”

8 Arno Spitz

One of the more decorated men in the Nazi army was Arno Spitz. By the end of the war, he’d won three Iron Crosses, the highest award a Nazi could earn for bravery.

He was a paratrooper, one beloved by the Nazi army—even if they absolutely loathed his father. Spitz’s father was Jewish, and he’d suffered from such fierce persecution back home that, early on during the rise of Nazi Germany, he fled the country for the United States.

Spitz, however, stayed and made such an impression on his superiors that he didn’t even have to hide his parentage. In 1940, under Himmler’s orders, the Nazis kicked every half-Jewish soldier out of the army, but Spitz was such an effective soldier that he was allowed to stay.

To the end, he insisted that, by fighting with the Nazis, he did nothing wrong. He fought for Germany, not for Hitler, he told Dateline NBC in 2002, declaring: “There is a difference.”^[3]

Not everyone in his family, however, sees it the same way. Spitz said that his daughter has accused him of participating in the Nazis’ crimes against his own people. But despite her rebukes, Spitz refused to hide or apologize for his time fighting in Hitler’s military. “I don’t have to,” he said. “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans-Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans-Geert Falkenberg said. “I had to join the army.”

He joined the German army as soon as war was declared. Jews were already starting to see their shops destroyed and being harassed in the streets, and Falkenberg felt a need to connect himself to the German side of his identity to stay alive.

He’d heard his teachers tell his classes that the Jewish race was inferior, and, desperate to prove his equality, he’d spent his teenage years trying to be the best at everything the Nazis valued. Joining the army was just a natural next step for him.

But as he fought in France, his grandmother was sending him letters, letting him watch the Holocaust slowly unfold back home.^[4] Then, one day, the letters stopped. His grandmother, he would soon learn, had been sent to a concentration camp.

It was a shock—not just for him but for those who cared about him, as well. One friend of his wrote to him, with dismay: “I believe that the Jews are Germany’s misfortune, but that has nothing to do with grandmother!”

The rest of his family had already fled to England, and Falkenberg considered joining them. Trapped in the middle of Europe, surrounded by the Nazi army, however, he just didn’t know how it could be done. “The safest thing was to stay in the army,” Falkenberg would later say. “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp was the son of a German man and Jewish woman, but it was the Jewish side of his family that left him feeling persecuted.

As a boy, Kopp said, his maternal grandfather would openly disrespect him, refusing to view him as a part of his family. When he was chided by his wife and reminded that this was their daughter’s son, his grandfather snapped back that, no, this wasn’t his grandson—this was their son-in-law’s goy. “After how my grandfather had treated me,” Kopp said, “I didn’t want to own up to my Jewish past.”

When the war started, he signed up for the Wehrmacht, and when they handed him his papers, he marked himself down as “full Aryan.” For years, he fought with a Nazi artillery unit. Kopp was aware of the concentration camps, but he justified what he was doing by simply not thinking about it. “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation,” he said.^[5] “I thought only about myself—that either my tank or something will be hit and then I’ll be gone anyway, or I’ll make it through.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Licthwitz said. “It was a good bunch of guys. I felt comfortable there.”

Litchwitz claimed that, when he joined up with the Nazi army, he had no idea how bad the persecution against the Jews in Germany was becoming.^[6] He only knew that, in the army, he was accepted and treated as an equal and that, when he was home in Germany, he was not.

After he was kicked out in the 1940 military purge, however, Litchwitz found out exactly how bad it was. He was sent to a forced labor camp and then, after a failed attempt to escape, into Dachau: one of Germany’s deadliest concentration camps.

An NBC reporter asked him how he felt, having gone from the inside of the Nazi army to a death camp. “I can’t say,” was all Lichtwitz could reply. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik was working as a doctor in the Finnish 53rd Infantry. He was a Jew, but he was also a Finn—and that meant that, in the Soviet Union, he and the Nazis had a common enemy. That put him side by side with a German SS division, fighting against a Russian invasion and trying to help every man who was injured by the Russian shells, whether he was a Finnish soldier or a member of the SS.

“He had taken the Hippocratic oath,” Skrunik’s son told the National Post.^[7] “He wouldn’t turn away an injured man, whatever his nationality.” Skurnik, however, took it further than that. He helped clear paths for the German army to attack and, when a German soldier was in need, would rush into no man’s land, risking his own life to save wounded Nazis.

He saved the lives of more than 600 men, many of them members of the SS, by organizing an evacuation of a field hospital that was being bombarded by Russian shells. Skrunik led the wounded Germans across 8.9 kilometers (5.5 mi) of bogland and, when it was all over, was awarded with an Iron Cross.

Skurnik turned it down. He claimed that as soon as he got word that the Germans wanted to present him with their highest honor, he told his commanding officer: “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

“We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ ” Harry Matso said, “which is a lie.”^[8]

He was a member of the Finnish army, a man who fought for a force allied with the Nazis. If the war had ended in their favor, his race—the Jewish race—would have been exterminated. Still, Matso insists that he was no fascist.

“Finnish Jews fought for Finland’s independence,” he said. “Not for Germany’s war aims.”

He’d joined the war after being conscripted by his nation. He answered their call—even though he knew that his nation was allied with the Nazis and though, by 1942, he’d started hearing rumors of the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany.

But Matso feared life under Soviet rule every bit as much. Caught between two tyrants, he sided with the one nation he believed would take care of him: his homeland of Finland. Still, Matso fought, rebelling in his own small, quiet way. When he saw a German soldier, he said, he would staunchly refuse to salute.

2 Emil Maurice

One of the founders of the SS was, by Heinrich Himmler’s standards, a Jew. His name was Emil Maurice, and he was classified as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler himself.

Maurice had been a part of the National Socialist Party from the start. He joined up with Hitler in 1919 and soon rose up to be the supreme leader of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. He joined in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup d’etat in 1923, and sat with him in prison, where he even helped Hitler write Mein Kampf.^[9]

Maurice couldn’t have been closer to Hitler. The two even shared a lover: Geli Raubal, Hitler’s niece, had affairs with both men, a fact that would create the only split between them. Still, the bond between Hitler and his SS Member #2 was so strong that when Heinrich Himmler publicly exposed Maurice’s Jewish ancestry and demanded that he be expelled from the SS, Hitler had Maurice declared an “honorary Aryan” and saved his life.

1 Erhard Milch

There are Jews who fought for Hitler even though they knew the horrors of the Holocaust, but Erhard Milch went even further. He didn’t just fight for Germany despite the atrocities—he joined in. He was a member of the German War Cabinet and the Nazi Air Force’s chief of staff. Few were higher up in the Nazi party than he was, even though it was public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

Milch, however, had friends in powerful places. Hermann Goering saw him as his protege, and to keep his friend safe, he had Milch’s mother sign a statement saying that Erhard wasn’t truly his father’s son so that Goering could have him registered as “full Aryan.”

No part of Milch ever seems to have felt sympathy for his father’s people. During the Nuremberg trials, he was charged with experimenting on Jewish prisoners in Dachau. They accused him of playing a role in human experiments that sent Jewish prisoners into dangerous altitudes to see how high they could go before they died, as well as others that tested how cold water had to be before the temperature would kill someone.

Milch never apologized. When the trials came, he stayed true to his mentor, speaking out in Goering’s defense. In the end, he was prosecuted as a Nazi war criminal.^[10]

Prior to the breakout of World War II in 1939, the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany had caused concern throughout the Western world due to its anti-Semitic and aggressive policies. However, some within other countries harbored sympathetic and understanding feelings with the Nazi Party and their leader Adolf Hitler.

At the conclusion of the war and the reveal of the full extent of the Holocaust, many would strenuously deny any connection with or sympathy for the Nazis. Unfortunately for them, there were facts in place to contradict their denials. Read our list today to find ten people who were reportedly Nazi sympathizers.

10 Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was a famous modernist writer who was prominent during the early 20th century among writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in Europe, who he edited and collaborated with. After World War I, Pound had moved to Italy in apparent defiance to the UK and struck up support for Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator. Pound met Mussolini in 1933. He spent years before and during World War II broadcasting on Rome Radio in support of Mussolini and Hitler and against Jews.

Pound was arrested when Italy fell to the Allies and would be charged with treason by the US. During this period, he spent three weeks in an outdoor cage before suffering a mental breakdown. He reportedly called Hitler “a saint” when talking to reporters and had asked to record one last radio broadcast which, among other things, would ask for leniency toward Germany. Pound would spend 13 years in a psychiatric hospital in the US before returning to Italy, where he still harbored anti-Semitic views.^[1] He died in 1972, leaving behind a literary legacy which is revered but a personal legacy which is full of controversy.

9 Walt Disney

The assertion that the man behind one of the most famous and loved companies in the world harbored pro-Nazi sympathies is extremely controversial and somewhat shocking. However, there are reports that Disney was linked to a few events in the 1930s which were essentially US Nazi Party meetings. In the period before the war and the full atrocities of Hitler’s regime were known, there are smatterings of information that suggest elitist groups in the US and the UK held views similar to those of the Nazis, and Disney seems to have been one of them. In a book called Hitler’s Doubles, it is said that Disney was attending pro-Nazi meetings prior to the war.^[2]

It is also known that Disney had hosted Leni Riefenstahl and gave her a tour of his studios. Riefenstahl was the director of Nazi propaganda films Olympia and Triumph des Willens. Disney’s company was criticized for this move. Disney would go on to create anti-Nazi films such as Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, which somewhat muddies the waters. We will probably never know the true nature of his Nazi links.

8 Edward VIII

Edward VIII is perhaps the most visible and remembered person on this list who had pro-Nazi sentiments. His abdication of the throne in 1936 was caused by his marriage to the American Wallis Simpson, which caused a constitutional crisis, but it was said that he also had too close a connection with Adolf Hitler. Hitler was fond of Edward VIII, and his abdication in 1936 was seen as a blow to the relations Hitler hoped to keep with the UK. In 1937, the then-duke and duchess (Simpson) visited Nazi Germany and are famously pictured with Hitler during this visit.

During World War II, Edward was seen as a risk to the future democracy of the UK, as Hitler had plans to reinstate him upon successful invasion of England. He was made governor of the Bahamas during the war to keep him out of the way. There are numerous accounts of Edward professing his support of Hitler and his policies, with suggestions that he and his wife were fascists. It remains an awkward and contentious point of history in the monarchy of the UK.^[3]

7 Henry Ford

Henry Ford is an American pioneer who revolutionized the motor industry with the first assembly line for cars in the early 20th century, but some links exist between the man and the Nazi regime. In 1920, he gave an interview to New York World in which his anti-Semitic views were apparent, calling the “International Jew” a “threat” and accusing them of being behind World War I. The New York Times would also publish an article that suggested Adolf Hitler had a large picture of Henry Ford up on his office wall—in admiration of Ford.^[4] This admiration is made clear when Hitler actually name-drops Henry Ford in his book Mein Kampf, calling Ford a “single great man” who “still maintains full independence” from the Jewish threat.

In 1938, only a year before Hitler would invade Poland, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal possible for a person of non-German origin, with Ford being the only US citizen to receive the award. Ford’s name and collection of articles The International Jew was also brought up during the Nuremberg Trials after the conclusion of World War II as an influential piece of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Ford died in 1947.

6 Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh was made famous overnight in 1927 when he successfully manned a plane from New York to Paris and won the Orteig Prize. His life was also struck by tragedy in 1932, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in a ransom attempt which was widely covered in the US media, being dubbed the “Crime of the Century.” He is perhaps remembered least for his outspoken rhetoric against entering the war against Nazi Germany and for his pro-Germany actions.

In June 1936, Lindbergh visited Germany on behalf of the US government in an effort to learn more about how far German aviation had come. Lindbergh also sat near Hitler during the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Summer Olympics but, by all accounts, did not communicate with him.^[5] After this, Lindbergh became a pariah in the US, as he called for neutrality and nonengagement in the war with Germany, often attracting German American Bund (a US pro-Nazi organization) members to his speeches. Lindbergh was careful never to admit to Nazi sympathy, and to some extent, he may not have been a sympathizer, but his position was confusing for the US public, and his reputation undoubtedly suffered from it.

5 Charles Coughlin

Charles Coughlin, commonly referred to as Father Coughlin, was a Roman Catholic priest who used radio before World War II to reach millions of listeners to his doctrines. Coughlin expressed interest in fascist governments, including the Third Reich, in an apparent contrast to communism and Jewish control of banking. In November 1938, Coughlin effectively spoke out against Kristallnacht when asserting that Christian persecution came first. After this controversial broadcast, he became an outcast from mainstream radio and began to receive followers who were anti-Semitic, to the extent that public protests were carried out.

After World War II broke out, he was forced out of radio by the US government and was also made to stop publishing his newspaper, Social Justice. He was to cease all political activity and perform only parish duties. Coughlin denied his anti-Semitic views throughout his active political life, but there is a wealth of facts (including some evidence that suggests Coughlin received funding from Nazi Germany) that point to him being sympathetic with Hitler’s regime.^[6]

4 Cliveden Set

The “Cliveden set” was a name given to a group of wealthy individuals who would regularly meet at Cliveden, a home in Buckinghamshire that was the residence of Nancy and Waldorf Astor in the interim period between the World Wars. The group, who were dubbed the Cliveden set in 1937, were one of the most controversial of the period. They seemed to be deeply anti-Semitic and had considerable influence on some of the highest members of the British government. They also seemed to have connections with some high-ranking officials of the Nazi Party and were known in the US. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the UK from 1937 to 1940, was said to have been influenced by the group.

However, in more recent years, it has been discovered that the Cliveden set may have been misunderstood and were on a list of people who would be immediately arrested on the successful invasion of Britain by Germany. The Cliveden set were often written about by Claud Cockburn, the editor of The Week, and his shaming of the group is disregarded today as biased. It might be called “fake news” in 2019. It remains unclear if the group were really pro-Nazi, but they seem to be linked forever in history to being pro-German.^[7]

3 Sir Oswald Mosley

Sir Oswald Mosley is probably the most obvious Nazi sympathizer on this list. Mosley was a British politician who had failed to be elected in his constituency in 1931, despite being a convincing speaker. After visiting Mussolini in Italy in 1936, he became convinced that fascism was the best alternative to communism and that Britain needed to embrace it.^[8] He founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF targeted Jewish neighborhoods with Mosley’s Fascist Defence Force (nicknamed the “blackshirts”) but remained popular with some strands of followers in England. Mosley would perform the Nazi salute to his blackshirts, who, in turn, performed it back. In 1936, Mosley married Diana Guiness in the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance.

During World War II, Mosely attempted to convince the British government to accept Hitler’s offerings of peace, but he would be arrested and placed under house arrest. Mosely had extremely strong verbal skills, and this was considered dangerous in a turbulent time in Britain. However, public opinion on Mosley dipped after Nazi Germany began the Blitz on London. He spent the majority of World War II under house arrest, and after the war, he pursued trying to drive Europe to become a single state.

2 Philip Johnson

The architect Philip Johnson, known for designing the Glass House in which he lived in Connecticut, was an active supporter of Hitler’s Third Reich prior to the outbreak of World War II. Johnson was linked with Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic newspaper Social Justice, writing articles for them. Johnson was also known to have traveled to Nazi Germany to report on the huge rallies that were organized, including the annual Nuremberg rally. He was said to have been enthralled by them and made contacts with key Nazi officials during his visits.^[9]

In 1940, the FBI would uncover Johnson’s involvement in driving German propaganda to the US “on the Nazis’ behalf.” Johnson would refer to the destruction of Warsaw as a “stirring spectacle.” He was undoubtedly a Nazi sympathizer, but Johnson would try to distance himself once World War II broke out. Years later, in 2018, The New Yorker wrote that Johnson still professed admiration for Hitler as of 1964 by calling him “better than Roosevelt.”

1 Viscount Rothermere

Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, may not be a name you have heard before, but he was a groundbreaking journalist who was fundamental in the creation of the UK newspapers the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. To this day, his family have control over the newspapers and have had an influence on British politics due to this. During the years between the World Wars, Rothermere corresponded with Hitler and would publish articles in his newspapers that essentially promoted fascism. He was also supportive of Oswald Mosley and his BUF. To have a man in such an influential position as Rotheremere openly supporting the Nazi regime must have been deeply concerning.

Rotheremere also paid an annual fee to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a notorious German spy who was watched by British and American authorities and eventually arrested. This fee was said to be in the aim of promoting Nazi Germany and helping Rothermere get closer to influencing Hitler.^[10] In 1939, he wrote a book, My Fight to Rearm Britain, in which he detailed his fight for increased spending on defense and resources needed to protect the country. Regardless, he was heavily linked with the Nazi party in their earlier days, as many English aristocrats seemingly were, yet held such an influential position that it can only be regarded a miracle that many others were not persuaded by his publications.

N/A

As we have all been reminded these past few weeks, the royal family is no stranger to controversy. With so much money, power, and influence, this is hardly surprising. But when you have so much money, power, and influence, everything you do tends to be pretty well-documented, so no matter how well you think you hide something, who knows what historians in the future could uncover. In the case of the Royal family, it seems there are a few connections they tried to hide, but ones that historians today felt were too good to leave buried.

See Also: 10 Plans Hitler Would Have Put In Motion If The Nazis Had Won

10 Edward VIII

If you’ve seen the movie The King’s Speech, then you’ve already got an understanding of why King Edward VIII is so famous. That’s right, the man who worked so hard at overcoming his fears and inspiring the nation was none other than his brother George VI, who became the unexpected King when Edward abdicated in 1936. Now pretty much known as the man who gave us Queen Elizabeth, there is a lot more to Edward’s story than the first few minutes of that film would suggest.

You may think that working as an officer in World War 1 would have instilled some anti-German sentiment in young Edward, but it seems the opposite is true. Having witnessed the horrors of war, he grew up with a desire to ensure that the UK and Germany had better relations moving forward, and his sympathies for the Nazis are well-documented.^[1] In the early 1930s, this wouldn’t have been particularly uncommon, but the fact that he was heir to the throne made his support a little more controversial.

In 1934, the Prince began an affair with his future-wife, a twice-divorced American named Wallis Simpson. Although the public were unaware of the relationship, both British & US intelligence suspected Wallis Simpson of being a Nazi spy. She was accused of having a second affair with Germany’s ambassador to the UK, Joachim Von Ribbentrop,^[2] and of passing on sensitive information to the Nazis. However, neither of these allegations have ever been proven, and it is possible that they were simply character attacks aimed at a woman who had the gall to marry three times.

During World War 2, Edward gave speeches advocating reconciliation both before and after his abdication, much to the chagrin of the British people. In 1937, he even took his controversial new-wife on an official visit to Germany, where they were met with cheering crowds, Nazi salutes (which they reciprocated), and even joined the Fuhrer himself for some afternoon tea. Although Edward told an interviewer in 1966 that he had been “foolish and naive”^[3] about Hitler, it is hard not to look back and wonder if there was more to this story that hasn’t come to light.

9 Churchill’s Weeders

We often hear that history is written by the victors, but most of us probably underestimate just how much work goes into the editing process before that history is published. That saying is often (albeit, unreliably) attributed to Churchill himself, and while he may not have been the first to say it, he certainly took the advice to heart.

As soon as the war was over, one of Churchill’s first acts was establishing an elite team known as “the Weeders”. Their job was to sift through any records in Berlin that they could get their hands on, looking for any useful information, particularly any information that could have been damaging to the British. But while they did succeed in uncovering some potentially unflattering files, they unfortunately weren’t the first.

The files in question were a number of German telegrams sent in 1940, most notably one that describes a conversation Edward & Wallis had with Nazi officials. According to the telegram,^[4] the couple were intrigued when the officials said that the war could result in them returning to the throne if the Nazis were victorious.

As the telegrams had been intercepted by both US & French intelligence, Churchill got to work on ensuring they were not released. President Eisenhower agreed that they were likely Nazi fabrications aimed at sowing distrust amongst the Allies, and that no good would come from their release. Their publication was delayed until 1957.

The Weeders may not have retrieved enough solid information to enable us to make an informed decision on whether the telegrams were fact or fiction, but the fact that they are in the public domain does leave us with another big question: if these files were released after roughly a decade, what did the Weeders discover in the files that the Royals requested be locked up for 100 years?^[5] Come back in 30 years to find out.

8Operation Willi

With such strong ties between Edward VIII and the Nazis, it should come as no surprise that there was one final, last-ditch attempt to win him over to the Nazi cause. Or, more accurately, take him over by force.

Once France had fallen to the Nazis in 1940, Edward & Wallis fled to Spain in order to evade capture. Although Spain was technically neutral at that point, it quickly declared a state of “non-belligerency”, which essentially meant supporting the Nazis when provoked. That explains why, when the Spanish Foreign Minister asked how to deal with the royals, Joachim Von Ribbentrop requested that they be detained for 2 weeks, but without letting them know it was at the request of the Nazis.

During this delay, the couple continued on to Portugal and Edward allegedly spoke about his dislike for the royal family, their policies, and their treatment of his wife. While the Nazis gleefully listened and agreed that he’d be much better without the Royals, Churchill heard about the conversations and sent 2 telegrams to Edward. The first ordered him to return to Britain, with a reminder that Edward was technically a military man and could face a court-martial; the second announced his new role as Governor of the Bahamas, and instructed him to go there immediately.

Although Edward was reluctant, he seemed to be giving serious consideration to the Governorship, and it was at this point that Hitler began Operation Willi,^[6] a plan to kidnap the couple and either use them as peacebrokers or reinstall them on the throne of a German Britain. The first step of the plan was to intimidate the couple, which included throwing rocks through their windows, sending a bouquet of flowers with a threatening note, and spreading rumours amongst the staff that British intelligence was planning to assassinate the couple.

The operation came to a head on August 1st, when Hitler learned that the couple were making their way out of Portugal to the Bahamas. While the Spanish ambassador to Portugal tried to convince the couple not to go, the car carrying their luggage to the port was sabotaged, and a phoney bomb-threat was made against the ship they were supposed to be travelling on. Despite these efforts, the couple made their escape, bringing a decisive end to Edward’s relationship with the Nazis.

7 Charles Edward

When Charles Edward was 16 years old, he was asked to move to Germany by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Even though he had no knowledge of or desire to learn about German culture, the Queen had chosen him personally to become Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, where her husband was born and their family got its name, so he was shipped off without a second thought. In the ensuing years, he threw himself fully into his new life, ultimately marrying the niece of Wilhelm II, the last German Kaiser and King of Prussia.^[7]

When World War One broke out and the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha became the house of Windsor, Charlie decided to side with his new family instead of the old. When George V was replaced by Edward VIII, Charlie wore a full Nazi military uniform to the funeral, and immediately set to work on leveraging Edward’s pro-German feelings to his advantage. After Edward’s abdication, Hitler appointed Charlie as President of the German Red Cross,^[8] which sounds nice, but the position was really used to euthanize up to 100,000 disabled people. Despite his royal blood, Charlie was held in a brutal internment camp while he awaited trial after the war. Due to his deteriorating health, he was spared a prison sentence, but had essentially all of his wealth confiscated in fines.

6 Home Video

Because we now know so much about what the Nazis were doing during World War Two, it can be easy to look back with hindsight and wonder how people could have supported them or seen them as anything other than monsters. You can argue about how much people should have known and by when, especially when you see the information that was available at the time. But we could easily make the same arguments about all sorts of current political issues, so it should not come as a surprise to see well-known figures aligning themselves with the bad guys.

This was the essence of the statement put out by the Palace in 2015, when The Sun published a 17-second video of the royal family that was shot 82 years earlier.^[9] The 1933 footage, believed to have been filmed in Balmoral, features the Queen Mother alongside Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth, both of whom would go on to rule the nation. In it, all 3 are seen giving the Nazi salute, with Elizabeth giving the sign first and most frequently. Understandably, the Palace said that taking out-of-context footage of a child making a gesture before it had taken on any significance as a symbol of oppression was unfair criticism, but the video still made waves in the tabloids, and made people question what else the royal family may be sitting on.

5 Princess Alice

Although the Royal family does have some very questionable links to the Nazi regime, there are also some examples of Royal-Nazi relations that they can actually take some pride in. Probably the best example of this comes from Princess Alice of Battenberg (mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth), also known as Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, after her husband. While most royals have some sort of charity-work to their names, Alice is one of the ones who truly devoted a lot of her time to helping those in need,^[10] which many attribute to the fact that she was born partially deaf.

When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1943, Alice was contacted by Rachel Cohen, a Jewish widow of Haimaki Cohen, a longtime family-friend. Years earlier, Haimaki had helped King George, who promised to repay the favor one day. Although both men had since died,^[11] Rachel reached out to to Alice seeking refuge from the occupying forces. While four of her sons planned to join the exiled Greek government in Egypt, Rachel and her daughter needed shelter in Athens, and were later joined by one of Rachel’s sons who failed to make the journey across the mediterranean sea. The Cohen family stayed with Alice until Greece was liberated from the Nazis the following year, during which time the Gestapo became suspicious of Alice and interviewed her at her home. Using her deafness to her advantage, Alice pretended she had trouble understanding the questions (she was a fluent lip-reader in three languages) and frustrated the process enough to keep the family safe until the war was over.

4 Nazi Costume

Even though most of the royal family’s Nazi-related anecdotes understandably take place around the 1940s, possibly their most well-known Nazi scandal was a lot more recent, having taken place in 2005. As many of you may remember, that was the year a 20 year-old Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi while attending a private party.^[12] As you can imagine, many members of the public were upset, and he quickly issued a public apology.

Since Harry was still living with his father at the time, the statement was issued by the office of their residence, Clarence House, and Charles ended up taking a lot of the heat. A book released in 2011 claims that even the Queen blamed Charles for the incident, calling into question his skills as a father. While the scandal did not ultimately do too much damage to the royals as a whole, it is undoubtedly something that will follow Harry around for the rest of his life.

3 Prince Ernst

Prince Ernst August of Hanover may not be the most famous prince, but he is pretty emblematic of royalty in the modern era: a descendant of Queen Victoria, whose father is brother-in-law to Queen Elizabeth, and who himself is married to Princess Caroline of Monaco, Prince Ernst is not really a prince of anywhere since Germany became a republic, although the family still uses the styling “of Britain and Ireland”, despite the fact that his relatives are the royals of Britain, and Ireland has none. In general, Ernst is most well-known for his controversies, such as public urination and aggravated assault.

Despite the fact that he was only born in 1954, Prince Ernst found himself tangled in a web of Nazi legal troubles as a result of his grandfather, who was also called Prince Ernst (Duke of Brunswick). In the 1990s, the youngest Ernst brought legal action against Bild-Zeitung,^[13] Germany’s leading tabloid, which had claimed that his wealth was a result of Nazi operations against the Jewish community before, during, and after World War 2. The allegations were that the grandfather Ernst had taken huge, even majority, shares in Jewish-owned businesses, such as Munich Bank, and the largest construction firm in Germany at the time. Although they were never charged, both Prince Ernst’s grandfather and father (who was also called Prince Ernst) were Nazi supporters, with the middle Ernst even signing up to the SS. While that lawsuit went nowhere, the questions surrounding the Prince’s money persist to this day, with others claiming the family smuggled artefacts out of Germany to sell back to the German government after the war.

2 Princess Ileana

Despite being the great-granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II (not together), Princess Ileana isn’t a very well-known historical figure. While she did lead a relatively exciting life, living through two world wars, the forced abdication of her father, and was exiled from her country, Ileana is probably most well-known (among those who know her at all) for her anti-communist speeches and books. But not everyone is convinced that her public proclamations were an accurate reflection of her private beliefs.

In 1953, Ileana’s cousin Archduke Franz Josef wrote to a Senator in New York (where Ileana was living at the time) to alert him that the Archduke would be bringing legal action against the Princess. In it, he claimed that Ileana was not the anti-communist heroine she would lead people to believe, and that she had in fact leveraged her position as a royal to benefit from the Nazi regime.^[14] He claimed that when Hitler first invaded Austria, the Princess and her husband greeted him by telegraph. Because of this, Hitler allowed them to continue using their Royal titles, and the couple stayed in Nazi Austria for the next 7 years, schmoozing with the elites.

The Archduke also claimed that during this time, Ileana stole a number of his Austrian properties by travelling to Berlin and using her royal status to lay claim to the buildings. After Austria had been liberated from the Nazis, Ileana spent several years in Romania before moving to Argentina, where many Nazis fled after the war, before ultimately settling in America.

1 King George VI

Even though his brother may have been working with Nazis behind the scenes, there seems to be no doubt that the loyalties of King George VI lay with the British. While the British were planning Operation Overlord, which would culminate in the Normandy landings, they enlisted the help of the King for Operation Fortitude, part of a larger plan to deceive the Nazis about the Normandy invasion.

Throughout 1944, King George, Queen Elizabeth (the Queen mother), and Princess Elizabeth made visits to the troops around Britain. That is pretty standard stuff, so the public wouldn’t have had any suspicions. But the hope was that the Nazis would.^[15] The locations that the royals visited had been carefully selected to make the Nazis believe they were really there for planning, and the photo ops were just a cover. In reality, the sites they were visiting were intended to lead the Nazis away from Normandy, and suggested that Norway and Calais were the real targets. At the same time, newspapers published articles that “attempted” to conceal the location of the royals, while giving away just enough information for the Nazis to figure it out. In the end, the plan worked, with the Nazis taking the bait, and the Battle of Normandy is now seen as one of the main factors in their defeat.

About The Author: Simon can be found on Twitter @simongireland

Joseph Goebbels was the mastermind behind Nazi Germany’s propaganda machine, and has been hailed as the inventor of marketing strategies that are still in use today, in addition to creating the idea of ‘fake news.’

However, once the Second World War broke out in 1939, problems in Goebbels’ propaganda paradise soon surfaced. Under the constant threat of invasion, and frequent allied bombings, the German public were not as willing to simply absorb Nazi values and principles. The pressure of war led to blunders in propaganda, along with the ever more eccentric ideas of Goebbels failing to hit the spot with the German population.

Although Hitler’s National Socialist Party was successful in altering the ideology of an entire country, not all of the Third Reich’s propagandist pursuits went to plan.

Top 10 Things The Nazis Got Right

10 Hitler’s perfect Aryan baby

In 1935, Joseph Goebbels, launched a campaign in search of the ‘perfect Aryan baby.’

On the contrary to all Aryan values however, Goebbels selected a brunette, brown-eyed baby that opposed much of the Aryan propaganda at the time.

The baby’s face was soon appearing in printed propaganda of every kind across the country. But no one was more shocked to see a baby’s face appear amongst the usually militaristic propaganda of Nazi Germany, than the baby’s parents themselves; Jacob and Pauline Levinson. Particularly when they knew that their daughter was Jewish.

A rebel artist named Hans Ballin, had recently taken the Levinson’s daughter’s picture in his Berlin studio. Ballin hated the Nazi regime, and submitted this photo of Hessy Taft, in the hopes that it would undermine Goebbels’ entire competition.

Whilst Ballin did succeed in humiliating the Nazi regime, the artist’s decision put the Levinsons in a lot of danger, and they ended up having to flee Latvia.^[1]

9 Hitler’s Premier Example of a Full-Blooded Aryan Soldier

Werner Goldberg was a German who was of half Jewish ancestry, and appeared in posters across Nazi Germany as the ideal Wehrmacht Aryan soldier.

On December 1st 1938, Goldberg joined the German army and took part in the invasion of Poland in 1939. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Goldberg’s photograph appeared in the Berliner Tagesblatt Newspaper, with the caption “The Ideal German Soldier.” The photograph had been sold to the newspaper by the army’s photographer, and was later even used on recruitment posters.

Within less than a year, this ‘Ideal German Soldier’ would soon be banished from the army for which he had fought, after Hitler issued an order on April 8th, 1940, which stated that anyone with 1st degree Jewish ancestry must be expelled from the forces.

Not quite the ideal German soldier Goebbels had hoped for.^[2]

8 The Far Too Successful Degenerate Art Gallery

Before the Nazis came to power in 1939, Germany was the centre of Modern Art. Dadaism and the Bauhaus Movement were becoming renowned across the globe, and artists were looking to Germany for inspiration.

However, when the Nazis came to power, the liberty of the German art scene was destroyed. The party could sense the public’s anger towards these restrictions, and concluded that they were simply misled. An art exhibition, entitled, ‘Entartete Kunst’ or ‘Degenerate Art’ was arranged in Munich, in order to showcase why modern art was dangerous and shameful.

Over 650 pieces of art were taken from German galleries and arranged chaotically. Explanations on why the pieces of art did not support the Nazi regime were displayed alongside the works. At the same time, the Nazis opened an art gallery entitled the ‘Great German Art Exhibition,’ which showcased Aryan-approved art only, in a bid to prove the superiority of this art form.

This plan backfired however, and five times as many people visited the ‘Degenerate Art’ gallery. In fact, it was so popular that in one day over 36,000 visitors attended.^[3]

7 Radio Caledonia

Radio Caledonia’s sole aim was to turn the Scottish public against the British government, and was an arm of Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine.

Its broadcasts were written and hosted by Scottish fascist Donald Grant, who argued that a Hitler-Controlled Scotland was better than a Scotland ruled by an English Churchill.

Reception of Radio Caledonia in Britain was so poor however, that the station would frequently have lengthy periods of time off air. The Scots Independent actually openly denounced Radio Caledonia and regarded it as a risk, running a column which claimed that the radio station was not helpful to the cause of Scottish nationalism.

Radio Caledonia failed miserably, and ceased airing broadcasts in 1942.^[4]

6 Life Goes on

By 1944 most of the German population were prepared for an inevitable defeat, and a sense of hopelessness gripped the nation.

Even with the end of the war in sight, Goebbels still naively believed that propaganda would distract the German public. After watching, Mrs Miniver, which depicted Londoners banding together against the Blitz bombing, Goebbels decided that Germany needed its own uplifting film.

This film would come in the form of Life Goes On and Goebbels regarded it as his pride and joy; hiring the Third Reich’s leading cast and crew.

Filming began in January 1945, as Allied troops were quite literally driving onto German soil. In fact, by the time shooting of the film started, most of the Berlin buildings and landmarks in the film had already been destroyed by Allied bombings. Goebbels was determined to complete the movie, and even diverted vital materials from re-building efforts to the production instead!

Eventually, the director was forced to shoot his film on the run as the approaching Red Army would continually attack locations where the cast had been filming just hours before.

With only days left before German surrender, the production was finally suspended. The reels of film have never been found, with some rumours stating that they were hidden in the ruins of a cathedral. Historians have tried to track any remnants of the footage, however all that remains of Goebbels’ final piece of propaganda are storyboards and newsreel footage of the production.^[5]

Top 10 Plans Hitler Would Have Put In Motion If The Nazis Had Won

5 Jesse Owens- 1936 Berlin Olympics

The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, were the first to be televised around the world. Hitler consequently seized this opportunity for worldwide Nazi notoriety and channelled funds towards constructing an enormous new stadium.

At the time, Jesse Owens, a black American athlete, was taking the athletics track by storm- matching the world record for the 100 yard dash whilst only still in High School! American decision makers were aware of Nazi Germany’s discriminatory policies against Jewish athletes and nearly boycotted the 1936 Olympic Games. However, the politicians were overruled by the American Olympic Committee and their attendance went ahead.

Owens in fact openly expressed his desire to attend the Olympic Games, regarding the politicians’ stance against Germany as one laced with hypocrisy. Growing up in a country which endorsed Jim Crow Laws and blatant discrimination- in the eyes of most black athletes, the politicians who were debating the boycott had no moral high ground to stand upon.

The games reached viewers in 41 countries, and much to Hitler’s dismay, it was a black American, Jesse Owens, who instantly became the star of the Summer Olympic Games. Winning four gold medals in track and field events; Owens became the first American to win 4 gold medals in a single Olympics.

Whilst Owens couldn’t single handily halt the rise of the Nazi regime, he did managed to undermine an entire nation’s ideology and steal the spotlight from one of history’s most fanatical leaders.^[6]

4 William Shakespeare

By the end of the 19th Century, William Shakespeare became known in Germany as “our Shakespeare”, and in no other country on Earth were his plays performed more often. Shakespeare was thus a central pillar of Germany’s culture which could not simply be pushed aside by Nazification.

For the Nazis, theatre did not solely function as a political weapon; with Goebbels himself noting that “a good mood is an instrument of war…and even a factor in determining the outcome of war.” In May 1934 therefore, Goebbels introduced the Unified Theatre Law Act, which meant all theatres were officially under his control.

Nonetheless, a dynamic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet made its way onto the Berlin state theatre stage, and entirely undermined the principles of heroism that Goebbels wanted all main characters to follow. The production consequently contained subversive messages, and yet was proclaimed by Goebbels himself as ‘a summit of German theatre,’ and was even used as a piece of propaganda in a state visit to Vienna. The director Jurgen Fehling took this one step further and openly undermined the Nazi regime’s tyrannical dictatorship through a production of Richard III. The character of Richard of Gloucester was given a limp that directly mimicked Goebbels and the costumes replicated the same style as SA troops. Unfortunately for Goebbels, this was one of the most popular theatre productions throughout the Third Reich.

Shakespeare would not be squeezed and manipulated into such a tight fitting, propagandist straitjacket. Although endless Theatre Laws could dictate a theatre’s reparatory, the Nazis could never gain ultimate control of a population’s imagination.^[7]

3 The V-2

The V-2 rocket was the German army’s most advanced weapon of the Second World War. It was promoted widely as one of Hitler’s ‘revenge weapons,’ and paraded to the public as the weapon which would win Germany the war.

The V-2 was an enormous ballistic missile which carried a one ton warhead, it was rocketed to the edge of space before falling at supersonic speeds onto its unsuspecting target below. The weapon was used predominantly against London and Antwerp during the war, and there was no defence against it at the time.

Although the rocket’s development began before the war, it was not actually ready to be used until the Autumn of 1944- a time when arguably, Germany was already losing. Overall, the weapon inflicted very little damage in comparison to the huge sums of money that had been invested in its development. Only 3,000 V-2s were ever launched and it is believed that they killed a total of 9,000 people; a figure which was far lower than the number of slave workers who perished whilst building the missiles. Even more embarrassingly, the total quantity of explosives delivered by all of the V-2s ever launched, was far less than could be dropped by a single air raid from RAF Bomber Command.^[8]

2 Ark Royal

H.M.S Ark Royal was an aircraft carrier of the British Royal Navy that served during WW2, and was the first purpose built aircraft carrier.

Her reputation was enhanced when her crew successfully sunk the first German U-boat of the war, torpedoed the German Battleship Bismarck and successfully scuttled the German’s ‘Admiral Graf Spee’ – an embarrassing affair for the German Navy.

The Ark Royal soon became known as the ‘Lucky Ship’, narrowly avoiding two torpedoes which missed the ship’s stern by only a few 100 yards, surviving a U-boat attack and an attack from three Luftwaffe Dornier seaplanes.

The successful sinking of the Ark Royal was falsely reported on the German radio several times, with the British crew of the ship even choosing to listen in to the blatant propagandist lies as a form of entertainment. The sinking of the Ark Royal was so pivotal in Goebbels’ militaristic propaganda, that Lieutenant Adolf Francke who led the Luftwaffe attack on the ship and reported a successful sinking, was publicly decorated.

In reality, the bombing had broken nothing but the ship’s cutlery and Winston Churchill himself invited the US Naval Attache to view the Ark Royal in dock, in a bid to both reassure the Allied forces and embarrass the German Navy.^[9]

1 Axis Sally

Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, nicknamed ‘Axis Sally’, was an American broadcaster employed by the Nazis to broadcast propaganda on the German state radio.

In 1942, Gillars was cast in a radio show called ‘Home Sweet Home’, whose sole aim was to make US forces feel homesick. Gillars’ key tactic was to discuss the potential infidelity of soldiers’ wives and girlfriends back home. Gillars also broadcast a show called ‘Midge at the Mike’ which brought American Jazz interrupted by defeatist propaganda across the radio waves of Europe. Most disturbingly however, was her show titled ‘GI’s Letterbox’ in which she broadcast information on captured or wounded American soldiers in order to worry families in America.

Nonetheless, this propaganda did not have the effect that Goebbels had intended, and instead many accounts by US Troops found Axis Sally very entertaining- even gaining fans amongst the forces. How else were the troops going to be able to listen to hot jazz in the midst of war?^[10]

Top 10 Horrific Nazi Human Experiments

There are very few areas of research and scientific discoveries that have not at some point interacted with immoral behaviour or politics. Indeed, more often than not in the 20th Century, discoveries were made in circumstances which would be classed as illegal or at the very least unethical today.

The question remains therefore, that if doctors, scientists, researchers or the everyday consumer utilise inventions that have been discovered unethically, are we not simply complicit in the past? Can the discoveries and research of certain people be completely separated from their actions?

10 Nazis Who Killed Themselves With Cyanide Suicide Capsules

10 Fanta

How did this zesty refreshing drink originate in the Third Reich?
With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States formally entered WW2, and declared Nazi Germany an enemy. The Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917 was reinstated and the flow of Coca Cola syrup to German factories was halted.

Nonetheless, Max Keith, the German Coca Cola subsidiary manager at the time, was determined to continue trading. He decided to oversee the creation of an exclusively German soft drink; ridding it of its typically ‘American Dream’, patriotic branding.

Chemists concocted a new drink which was made from the leftovers of other food industries, such as fruit pulp and the by-product of cheese curdling. The flavour was similar to the Ginger Beer of today, and as one of the only soft drinks now available in Germany, Fanta soon became a household staple. As the Germans conquered more European territories, Max Keith continued to spread Fanta across the continent and saved other Coca Cola subsidiaries from collapse.

Once the Allies finally defeated Nazi Germany, the production of Fanta ceased and Keith handed over Fanta’s profits to the Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta.^[1]

9 The Hunger Disease Study of the Warsaw Ghetto

There is evidence and testimony of senior Gestapo personnel deciding that those residing in the Warsaw Ghetto would be murdered via starvation. According to their calculations, low-calorie food rationing would take nine months for everyone in the ghetto to die.

The hunger gave rise to cannibalism, violence and a lethal black market. A combination of starvation and disease led to thousands of deaths. In 1942 Dr Israel Milezkowski, decided to conduct a study of the physiology and pathology of the starving ghetto prisoners.

Dr Israel wanted to understand how hunger disease could be cured, whilst Dr Julian Fliederbaum aimed to conduct a study on hunger that would have scientific validity and consequently set up a research platform.

The study was divided into several sections with topics including blood circulation, aspects of starvation in children and more. The research project had over 100 participants and was conducted on an enormous scale. Women were used to smuggle medical equipment into the ghetto, and some of the finest medical minds of Europe worked collectively to study what happens to the energy usage of a person who loses weight- something which is still studied today.

The Jewish physicians themselves were hungry and endangering their lives, as it was prohibited for Jews to carry out research. These physicians did the research not in the knowledge that they could save themselves, but instead in the hopes of advancing medical research.

The physicians’ most important conclusion was that the rehabilitation process from starvation must be gradual, and if this knowledge had been made public at the time, thousands of liberated lives could’ve been saved at the end of the war.

The only way to arrive to these findings was sadly through an atrocity, and it is a study that can never be replicated ethically again.^[2]

8 Nerve Agents Tabun and Sarin

German chemists had invented and readied thousands of tons of lethal nerve agents, including sarin, in the build up to WW2. The deadly agents were not known to the Allies, and if used could potentially have altered the outcome of the conflict.

Nerve agents directly disrupt vital organs of the body, and as a result, the smallest amount of exposure can be fatal.

German scientists invented the two most dangerous nerve agents, Tabun and Sarin, in 1936 and 38 respectively. Even to this day the substances still rank among the most toxic chemical warfare agents. It is believed that the Nazis had over 30,000 tons of Tabun and smaller amounts of Sarin in storage by the end of the war- and yet, it was never used in combat.

Several theories exist as to why this was the case, with some historians even suggesting that due to Hitler’s own personal experience of chemical warfare in WW1, he chose not to engage in such acts. However, this becomes hard to believe when one considers what he was willing to do in death camps. Ultimately, we just don’t know why.^[3]

7 Audio Tape/Cassette

Whilst Gen Z may not even know what I’m referring to, this revolutionary invention actually has Nazi Germany to thank for its existence.

A German scientist, Fritz Pfleumer, created a way to coat paper with metal strips in 1928, and by 1935 the first magnetic tape recorder was created. This technology allowed for both improved audio material and also longer recordings.

When Allied forces intercepted radio transmission from Europe in WW2 they were often fooled into thinking that different people in different places were providing re-readings of messages simultaneously across multiple time-zones. This assumption was based on the Allied Forces’ knowledge of their contemporary recording equipment which did not allow for the audio quality and length of recordings that they were picking up.

It was only once an audio tape recorder was liberated from Radio Luxembourg, that they realised they had been mistaken. The technology was sent back to the US, and the release of the cassette two decades later was no doubt founded on this captured technology.^[4]

6 Jagermeister

The recipe for this herby liquor has not changed since 1934, and much to the company’s dismay, neither has the drink’s rumoured association with the Nazi party.

Curt Mast, one of the founding brothers of this herb liquor, is rumoured to have named Jagermeister as a nod to the Nazi Party’s second in command; Hermann Goring. In 1934 Goring gave himself the title of Imperial Huntsmaster, or in German; Jagermeister.

Rumours even exist that Goring came to personally visit Curt Mast for a hunting celebration at his property where the drink was first invented.

In 1933 Curt Mast joined the National Socialist German Workers Party and even bought his house in Wolfenbuttel on land that the state had seized from a Jewish family. Whilst the company and family members have tried to deny the company’s past-ties to the Nazis; no affirmative conclusion exists.^[5]

10 Nazi Scientists Who Survived The War

5 JerryCan

Without fuel, a military becomes immobile and consequently pointless.

With this in mind, the German army invented the “Armed Forces Unit Cannister”, intended to keep the tanks fuelled and ready for battle at any moment in turbulent pre-war Europe.

The Jerrycan didn’t get its nickname however until an American engineer, Paul Pleiss, picked up a few of these German inventions at the Berlin Tempelhof Airport. At first the Allied Forces were not interested in this invention, as they had their own poorly designed canisters, which were easily punctured and required a wrench to open.

Nonetheless it could not be denied that the Germans had designed a masterpiece, with very little changes made to this original design to date. The German canister could hold up to 5.3 gallons of fuel, and featured handles. Ultimately, their effectiveness was undeniable and the US made a swift decision to manufacture their own version – naming it the ‘Jerrycan’ after the Allied nickname for the German forces.

Over 19 million jerrycans were required to support the US forces in WW2, and President Roosevelt is noted as saying that “without these cans, it would have been impossible for our armies to cut across France.”^[6]

4 Pervitin- Amphetamine

When Germany was still known as the Weimar Republic its pharmaceutical industry was thriving, and the country was a leading exporter of opiates and cocaine.

At a pharmaceutical company in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild became inspired by the American’s successful use of amphetamines at the 1936 Olympic Games.

Hauschild consequently developed his own wonder drug, and patented the first German methyl-amphetamine; Pervitin. The drug quickly became a sensation and was available in many formats, including chocolate bars. Women were recommended to eat 2 or 3 a day, in order to help them get through housework faster and to curb their appetite.

In 1940 when Germany was planning to invade France through the Ardennes Mountains, a ‘stimulant decree’ was sent out to army doctors. The decree recommended that German soldiers take up to 5 tablets a day in order to decrease inhibitions when fighting and to make sleep unnecessary. The Wehrmacht ordered 35 million tablets for the army and Luftwaffe.

The tablet allowed whole divisions to remain awake for three days and three nights, and remain one of the key reasons Blitzkrieg was not only successful, but physically possible.^[7]

3 Night Vision

Okay fine, this one needs a caveat. Germany was not the first nation to invent night vision, however it was the first to deploy a portable version of night vision that could be carried by a single soldier.

Its codename, rather fittingly, was “Vampir” (vampire). Its real name doesn’t quite roll of the tongue; Zielgerat 1229.

The device was essentially an enormous backpack battery which powered an infra-red searchlight and an infra-red scope mounted on the gun of choice.

Whilst the search light emitted high infra-red, the scope then amplified this light. This device does not pick up body heat, and is essentially an ‘invisible light’, and can be spotted up by another Vampir user.

Deployed in 1945 these devices were rare and reserved for the unit known as the Night Hunter. Although too late to make a difference in the war, for a while there was paranoia around the German’s ability to spot people at night.^[8]

2 The Term ‘Privatization’

The coining of the term privatization has been falsely credited to Peter Drucker, when in reality it was the Nazis who coined the term.

Peter Drucker referred to ‘reprivatization’ in 1969, as he suggested handing executive responsibilities of the public sector back over to what was previously controlled by the private.

However, after researching the structure of the Nazi Economy, major work by Maxine Yaple Sweezy actually found that industrialists supported Hitler because of his economic policies. These policies consisted of what Drucker later termed ‘reprivatization’, in which the Nazi German government restored state controlled monopolies to the private sector.

Sweezy first published the term in 1941, where she describes how “The United Steel Trust is an outstanding example of the ‘reprivatization’.” And this may be the first use of the term ‘reprivatization’ in social science literature in English.^[9]

1 Counterfeit Money

One of Nazi Germany’s more elaborate plans to destroy not only the Allies but also their economies was titled; “Operation Bernhard”.

The operation involved creating huge sums of counterfeit British and American money, to be secretly introduced into England’s economy. The idea not only hoped to destroy the British economy, but also to ruin the trust of the people in their own government.

In 1942, SS Major Bernhard Kruger was ordered to carry out this plan, and he recruited 142 counterfeiters and artisans from the concentration camps. Together, they created some of the most impressive counterfeit currencies ever seen, and by 1945 they had created 182 million British Pounds, and had just finished the plates ready to counterfeit US American Dollars.

In May 1945 the operation was ordered to retreat to an Austrian village, and it was here that the equipment was dumped into a lake, the prisoners revolted and their guards fled as US army unit neared their base.^[10]

10 Famous People Who Were Nazi Sympathizers

Whenever a politician says or does something the other side doesn’t like, they are often compared to Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party. Many online discussions will eventually result in people who lack the cognitive facilities to rationally form an argument calling their debating opponent a Nazi and some countries are even passing laws (or pushing for the same) to remove free speech from those whose views they don’t like by using linguistic sleight of hand and calling it “anti hate speech” legislation.

Calling someone a Nazi or comparing the modern world to the socio-political conditions that precipitated the rise of the Nazi party has somewhat desensitized the world to the horrors of what that word represents.

Still, there are several aspects of modern society that, when examined objectively, show similarities to the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of the socialist Nazi party. This list takes a look at those similarities and examines how history may end up repeating itself if we are not careful.

Top 10 Myths Involving the Nazis

10 A Worldwide Pandemic

When the Great War concluded on November 11th, 1918, the world saw an end to a conflict that resulted in the deaths of 20 million people.^[1] That massive number of casualties escalated warfare to new levels, but they paled in comparison to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

That pandemic resulted in the deaths of 20 to 50 million people around the world, though some estimates put the number closer to 100 million. The pandemic is often recalled these days as a comparison to the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China in early 2020.

There are many similarities between the H1N1 Influenza A viral outbreak of 1918 and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that began in 2020. Both pandemics gripped the world, causing millions of infections and millions of deaths. They were both linked to a foreign origin and resulted in targeted xenophobia by various populations.^[2]

While the “Chinese virus” is far less deadly than the “Spanish flu” that preceded it by a century, it has severely impacted the way we live and work.^[3]

9 Scapegoating Is Alive And Well

The core of Hitler’s ideology was racially built around his belief that the German race, which he called Aryan, was superior to all others. Most conservatives in pre-Nazi Germany didn’t follow his views. Still, they went along with Hitler’s socialist party for all the economic good being promised. As the Nazis rose to power, they did so upon the backs of everyone Hitler believed to be inferior.

This included the Jews, Romani, the disabled, homosexuals, and other communities who weren’t considered pure Germans. The Nazis placed the blame for most of society’s problems on the Jews and enacted policies to strip them of their rights, property, and eventually, their humanness.^[4] Scapegoating worked well for the Nazis, and it’s alive and well today.

Fortunately, people aren’t being rounded up in concentration camps like they were in the 1930s, but scapegoating has become a powerful party platform for many worldwide on both sides of the political spectrum in equal measure. Conservatives blame illegal immigration and floods of refugees for the problems of their particular nations while liberals blame conservatives (mostly in the form of white males) for all of their problems.

While many point to the States’ vilification of South American illegal immigrants (deceptively conflated by the media as enmity with all immigrants including legal ones) and foreign refugees, it’s hardly the only country that does this. Scapegoating migrants and immigrants (legal or otherwise) has occurred in various countries during epidemics going back to the Black Death, and it’s been widely used to blame an economic downturn on outsiders in nations across the planet.^[5]

8 A Hyperpolarization Of Politics

For most of its history, the United States has featured a somewhat cooperative government. While the bi-party system has resulted in many disagreements, work was still completed, and the nation grew as a result. Unfortunately, the days of compromise are behind us, and the United States has devolved into a hyperpolarization of political ideologies.

This isn’t unique to the United States, and other countries around the world are seeing their political ideologies stand in opposition to one another. This limits government processes, and even more dangerously, it pits two ideological sides against one another, which can become dangerous.

The same happened in pre-Nazi Germany, thanks, in part, to a man named Paul von Hindenburg, the President of Germany. He took a burgeoning democracy and turned it into a dictatorship by ceding control to the chancellor, who built up his side to suit his purposes, and then blew past them when he rose to power. In like manner, the communists were a growing threat and fears were growing that they would perform a socialist revolt similar to the one seen in Russia in which the Tsar and his family were butchered along with all opponents of globalist socialism.^[6]

This was made possible by several issues, including the Great Depression. Still, it likely wouldn’t have happened had the German people not been so ideologically divided as they were. The hyperpolarization of politics in 1920s Germany resulted in the degradation of democratic norms, making it possible for the Nazis to take over.^[7]

7 A Rise In Sexual Liberty & Gay Rights In The 1920s And 2020s

In 1929, Germany had a serious movement to repeal anti-gay legislation known as “Paragraph 175,” which criminalized homosexuality. It was repealed in 1994, but it nearly happened 65 years earlier, before the Nazis rose to power.

Germany (and much of Europe) was on the cusp of liberating its gay (and transsexual and transvestite) citizens. As a result, the country was filled with gay bars and cafes. Gay people were more open and out at the time, and the movement had a strong chance of doing away with anti-gay legislation.^[8]

The Nazis’ rise to power and put a stop to all of that. They didn’t just keep the law in place — they rounded up and imprisoned anyone they believed to be members of the gay community. Those days are behind us in most parts of the world, but there is a correlation between the rise of gay openness in 1920s Germany and today.

Modern society has seen a great many changes made in the gay rights movement. Gay marriage is now legal in many nations, and previous prohibitions placed on homosexuals have been lifted.

6 Ruined Economies Foster Resentment

When WWI came to an end, Germany was left in ruins. The country was not only in need of rebuilding, but its economy was in shambles. Additionally, it was forced to pay hefty reparations to France and other countries on the winning side of the conflict and had large swathes of productive land confiscated.^[9]

The Nazis used the economic disaster and the Great Depression to their benefit. They developed a protectionist economic policy that promised to boost the German people from the ruinous post-war economy.

It worked by amassing a large population of people to their side with the promise of jobs, money which wasn’t hyper-inflated by the central bank, and a better tomorrow. Global economies are different today than in the early 20th century, but there are still many parallels.

The world saw a bank-caused Great Recession from 2007 until 2009, which saw many Americans lose their homes.^[10] The Great Recession did a number on the economy in the States, but it didn’t just impact the U.S., as nations worldwide suffered severe economic disasters. Greece underwent a government-debt crisis from 2009 until 2018, nearly destroying the country’s economy.

5 Widespread Distrust In The Media

When Donald Trump began his campaign for President of the United States, he wasn’t shy about calling out various news and media organizations as fake news. Trust in the media plummeted during his presidency. Even after leaving office, his claims of fake news persist primarily regarding the majority left-wing news outfits like CNN, the New York Times, and most others.

Hitler never used the phrase “fake news”, but he certainly adopted one that was similar. Lügenpresse is German for “lying press,” and it’s perfectly analogous to “fake news.” The term goes back centuries and the Marxists used it to refer to the media when they wrote damning articles about communism and socialism. Hitler often called the media out for lying and manipulating the truth by using the same term.

Widespread distrust in the media was prevalent in pre-Nazi Germany, and it’s prevalent now. When people lose faith in the integrity of the news media, they become susceptible to manipulation and influence from other spheres. That worked well in the 1920s and ‘30s for Hitler and his national socialist party and it works well now for those controlling the new means of news dissemination: social media and tech giants.^[11][12]

4 Socialist Globalism Is Back and So Is Socialist Nationalism

The Nazi Party was one thing above all else — it was a nationalist movement (extreme patriotism). It arose in Munich after WWI when people upset over the Treaty of Versailles met to discuss their political views. A trend toward socialist nationalism developed to combat the globalist principles of the burgeoning German Communist movement (as seen in the attempted coup of the 1919 Spartacist uprising), and the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was established in 1920.

National Socialism helped bring the Nazis to power, as it focused the people’s attention on their own national needs. It placed German workers above other communities and found scapegoats for the nation’s problems in the Jews, immigrants, and other “undesirable” members of society.^[13]

In the United States, the Republican party ran in the 2016 election with the phrase, “Make America Great Again,” which was further developed into an ideology that put “America First.” American neo-nationalism similarly prioritizes the country above others (much to the chagrin of the globalist movement again rising under the new brand of “Democratic” socialism). As has happened previously in the States, illegal-immigrants were blamed for the country’s problems.

America was hardly alone in moving back towards nationalism in the 21st century. It’s also making a comeback in Europe, with Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Italy, and others seeing a rise in Nationalist movements in their recent parliamentary elections.^[14]

3 Propaganda Has Taken Over Social Media For Millions Of People

The Nazi use of propaganda is one of the most successful tools employed by Hitler and Goebbels. Leading up to the party’s rise and well through its established dominance in Germany, propaganda stood as the most important weapon available to the Nazis.

Propaganda helped convince the German people that their political opponents and the Jews were responsible for all their troubles. It helped convince the people that their only salvation was the election of Adolf Hitler, and it kept the people in check when the government turned on those same people who put them into power.

Propaganda was a psychological operation of masterful deceit, and it has a modern comparison in social media. Social media platforms have given a voice to every person on the planet, and while some choose to speak out (at the risk of being “cancelled” or silenced), many more listen closely to what they’re told.

Propaganda spread through social media has impacted and influenced millions of people into believing all manner of bizarre things. Through sites like Facebook, Twitter, instagram, and others, people have been roped into believing all kinds of novel or crazy ideas, including many promoted at the time of the Nazis in the 1920s and early ’30s.^[15][16]

2 An American “Insurrection”

As the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election got closer and closer, the country appeared to be on a tipping point. The people were voting in what was often cited as “the most important election in history” by folks on both sides. More people voted in the election than at any other point in American history.^[17]

The result saw Joe Biden defeat the incumbent, Donald Trump, but it didn’t end there. Court challenges and claims of a stolen election ultimately reached a boiling point that saw thousands of people amass on the U.S. Capitol Building in protest.^[18]

The January 6th event was one of the most shocking developments in recent U.S. history, and it has a historical comparison to pre-Nazi Germany. In 1923, Adolf Hitler and other leaders in the Nazi party attempted a coup d’état in Munich. The “Beer Hall Putsch” resulted in 20 deaths and landed Hitler in prison for treason.^[19]

The U.S. protest wasn’t an attempted coup. Still, it does share similarities with the overall sentiment expressed by the Nazis of the 1920s. Specifically, a belief that dark forces betrayed the people, and the only recourse was a confrontation. The Nazis weren’t successful in ’23, but a decade later, they rose to power.

1 Growing Worldwide Instability

Before the Nazis rose to power, the Weimar Republic was in disarray. This was primarily due to the end of the Great War, but the Great Depression that followed didn’t help. In fact, the majority of the countries in the world were subjected to instability. New borders were drawn throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia, which caused many problems.

While Germany was only one nation among many dealing with these problems, it was right at the center of them, thanks to its participation in the war. Over time, resentment and further global instability helped the Nazis rise to power, resulting in even more instability with the global outcry from the peaceful annexation of Austria (known as the Anschluss or War Of Flowers due to the German military being greeted by cheering Austrians who showered them with flowers, a scene repeated during World War II during which Ukrainian peasants saw the Germans as their liberators from the horrors of socialism under the Soviet government), which was followed by German demands for the return of territorial losses resulting from the Versailles Treaty and, later, territory over which Germany had no legitimate claim.^[20]

The world is a complicated place filled with numerous governments, economies, and ideologies, so it’s always in a state of relative instability. Still, it’s been a lot more unstable since the 21st century began with the 9/11 attacks. The global fight against Islamic terrorism has destabilized the Middle East and caused problems around the world.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine are further indications of international instability comparable to pre-Nazi Germany in the 1920s and early ’30s.^[21] If these situations continue to devolve, the world may find itself in similar circumstances that precipitated the Nazi’s rise to power.

One thing is for sure, digital book burnings, cancel culture, and the abolition of free speech are not the answer to the problems of today.

Top 10 Plans Hitler Would Have Put In Motion If The Nazis Had Won