This article on 10 forgotten nazi war criminals dives deep into the lives of those whose monstrous deeds have largely slipped from popular memory. Most people who know the history of World War II and the Holocaust are familiar with major Nazi war criminals—Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goering, and Eichmann. Those Nazis are not on this list. This list is for those who committed major war crimes but are often overlooked or forgotten.

Why These 10 Forgotten Nazi War Criminals Matter

10 Friedrich Flick

Friedrich Flick was a major industrialist in Germany. By the 1930s, he became the director of United Steelworks—the largest steel firm in Germany at the time. A major supporter of the Nazi Party, he donated seven million marks to the party, as well as providing 10,000 marks a year for the SS. During World War II, Flick profited enormously through the use of slave labor provided by the SS. The slaves numbered at 48,000, and 80 percent are estimated to have died due to brutal treatment.

Flick was tried by an American court in Nuremberg and sentenced to only seven years imprisonment. He was released in January 1951 by High Commissioner John J. McCloy, who was interested in revitalizing German steel production. Flick was subsequently estimated to be the wealthiest man in Germany and the fifth wealthiest man in the world. He died in 1972, never having paid a cent to the families of the slaves who died so he could be filthy rich.

9 Alfried Krupp

Alfried Krupp was the son of steel industrialist Gustav Krupp. Alfried ran the Krupp factories during World II, supplying tanks, arms, and munitions to the German military. In 1943, he was appointed head of the department of Mining and Armaments. Krupp was a heartless slave driver, initiating the request to the SS for slave labor. He actively cooperated with the SS to procure labor from Auschwitz. Approximately 100,000 slave laborers from concentration camps worked in his factories, with around 70 percent of them dying as a result of horrible conditions and the brutal treatment from SS guards.

In 1948, Krupp was tried by an American court. He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment and deprived of his wealth. However, in 1951 High Commissioner John J. McCloy not only pardoned him but returned his assets. In 1953, Alfried again became head of the firm and restored the Krupp company to its former prestige. He died in 1967, the last of the Krupp family to run the firm.

8 Bruno Tesch

A chemist by profession, Tesch was the co‑inventor of the Zyklon B pesticide. By 1942, he was the sole owner and director of the firm Tesch & Stabenow—a major supplier of Zyklon B to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme camps. Most of the gas went to Auschwitz, where it was used to kill primarily Jewish inmates. Tesch not only knew what the Zyklon B was being used for, but he had also recommended its use on humans as a substitute for shooting, and he trained SS soldiers in its use against humans. Tesch thus served as a critical accomplice in genocide.

After the war, Tesch was tried in a British court, along with his aide Karl Weinbacher and the firm’s chemist, Joachim Drosihn. The court found that Drosihn had no role in Zyklon B distribution and thus no knowledge of its use on humans, but Tesch and Weinbacher were found guilty, sentenced to death, and hanged in 1946.

7 Franz Boehme

Wehrmacht General Franz Boehme served as Hitler’s commanding general in Serbia, as well as the military commander of German forces in Norway. He stood out for his brutality. In Serbia, there was constant partisan resistance to the Nazi occupation. While serving there, Boehme not only vigorously conducted reprisals against civilians, but he upped the ante to a ratio of 100 civilians executed for every German soldier killed. For every German soldier wounded, 50 civilians were to be executed. All Jews and communists were ordered imprisoned. Thus, the “Final Solution” was implemented in Serbia through reprisal killings.

After being captured in Norway, Boehme was to be tried at the Hostages Trial. However, in 1947, when it became clear that he was going to be extradited to Yugoslavia where he would have undoubtedly been executed, Boehme leaped over a third‑floor railing of his prison. He died two hours later from the resulting skull fracture.

6 Ludwig Fischer

Serving as Governor of the Warsaw district of Nazi‑occupied Poland, Ludwig Fischer was a vicious administrator. He initiated terror campaigns against Poles and Jews and ordered the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were rounded up and imprisoned. The conditions in the ghetto were horrible. It was overcrowded, and disease and starvation ran rampant. With a ration of only 184 calories for Jews, 50 percent of the ghetto’s population was starving to death, with 30 percent in a consistent state of starvation. It was Fischer’s policy that “The Jews will die from hunger and destitution and a cemetery will remain of the Jewish question.” During 1942 and 1943, he called for the liquidation of the ghetto, which eventually happened in 1944 after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. The surviving Jews of the ghetto were then sent to extermination camps.

After World II, Fischer was captured and extradited to Poland, where he was sentenced to death and hanged in 1947.

5 Horst Schumann

SS Major Dr. Horst Schumann, like many of the killers of Auschwitz and other death camps, got his start in the “Aktion T4” euthanasia program. After he arrived to Auschwitz, he employed X‑ray sterilizations on men and women, which caused severe burns on the torso, groin, and buttocks. Most of the subjects either died from radiation or were subsequently gassed because the radiation burns prevented them from working. He also injected typhus‑infected blood into people and then tried to cure them.

After the war, Schumann fled to Egypt and then Sudan. However, after an Auschwitz survivor recognized him, Schumann fled to Ghana, where he was given protection by President Kwame Nkrumah. After Nkrumah was ousted in 1966, Schumann was extradited to West Germany, but legal wrangling, combined with Schumann’s heart condition and general poor health, resulted in his release in 1972. The case was not pursued further, and he died in 1983, never having stood trial for his crimes.

4 Carl Clauberg

Dr. Carl Clauberg was one of the most vile Nazi doctors. Before the war, he was a respected professor of gynecology, researching female fertility hormones at the University of Königsberg. Eventually, Clauberg asked SS General Heinrich Himmler if he could be allowed to sterilize women in concentration camps. Himmler agreed and assigned the doctor to Auschwitz. There, Clauberg worked alongside the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and was arguably just as murderous. Dr. Clauberg injected formaldehyde into thousands of women’s uteri without anesthetics. This produced inflammation that shut the Fallopian tubes. Many women died from this medical experimentation, while others were killed for autopsies. Clauberg also conducted artificial insemination experiments on 300 women. He reportedly taunted the women, saying that he had inseminated them with animal sperm and that monsters were growing in their wombs.

Unlike Dr. Mengele, Clauberg went to trial in 1948 and was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment by a Soviet court. Although he was released in 1955, he was soon arrested by the West German authorities after bragging about his “scientific achievements” at Auschwitz in a televised press conference. Clauberg died in jail in 1957, before a new trial could begin.

3 Christian Wirth

SS Major Christian Wirth stood out for his endless capacity for evil and cruelty. At first, Wirth was placed in charge of the T4 operation, which gassed the mentally and physically disabled. Wirth was then appointed the Commandant of Belzec and, later, the Inspector of the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. At these camps, he forced Jews into gas chambers using a whip. He was called “Christian the Terrible” by SS guards, and everyone was subject to the wrath of Wirth and his whip. His subordinate and fellow mass murderer Franz Stangl said of him: “Wirth was a gross and florid man and my heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time, and came back often. Whenever he was there, he addressed us daily at lunch, with an awful crude language.”

Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder described Wirth as a “tall, broad‑shouldered man in his middle 40’s with a vulgar face. He was a born criminal, ‘The extreme beast.’” Wirth’s cruelty was especially demonstrated when he buried children and infants alive in a large pit. His immense evil set the tone for the operation of the camps. The SS leadership, possibly eager to get rid of Wirth and his fellow executioners, reassigned them to extremely dangerous anti‑partisan combat in Yugoslavia. Wirth was killed by partisans in a roadside attack in 1944.

2 Arthur Greiser

As District Leader of Western Poland, Arthur Greiser stands out as one of the most brutal Nazi leaders. He fought for influence in his region and chose to formulate policies on Jews and Poles himself. He sought to make Western Poland a home for Germans and made room by kicking Jews and Poles out of their homes and resettling hundreds of thousands of Germans. He was the first to initiate mass gassings of Jews in occupied Europe and generally treated Poles with extreme inhumanity. Greiser’s attitude was described by his housemaid as such: “And the Poles, he treated them with great contempt. For him the Poles were slaves, good for nothing but work.”

The Chelmno death camp fell under Greiser’s jurisdiction. In a letter to Heinrich Himmler, Greiser cruelly advocated for tubercular Poles to be sent to the camp for “special treatment.” His treatment of the Poles was unlike that of the District Leader of Danzig‑West Prussia, Albert Forster, who adopted an assimilation policy in which non‑Jewish Poles were considered Germans. This did not bode well for Greiser’s “following orders” defense when he was tried by a Polish court after the war. In 1946, Greiser was sentenced to death and publicly hanged.

1 Erich Koch

Erich Koch was the District Leader of Prussia. He was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 Poles as Commissioner of the Bialystok region from 1941 to 1945. When the German army entered the Ukraine, he was appointed the area’s Reich Commissioner, serving from 1941 to 1943. Although the Ukrainians were initially glad to be free of Stalin, Koch soon made them pine for the Soviet days. His first act as administrator was to close the schools, stating “Ukrainian children need no schools. What they have to learn will be taught them by their German masters.”

His attitude toward the Ukrainians was one of a master to a slave. He once said, “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.” Four million Ukrainians and Jews perished under Koch’s tyrannical regime. Two million were sent to Germany for slave labor. He also had one of Kiev’s most famous churches blown up just to demoralize the population, an action which horrified Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who correctly believed such actions increased armed resistance.

After World II, Koch managed to live in hiding in Hamburg, until he was apprehended in 1949. He was extradited to Poland and, after many delays, he was convicted in 1959 of the extermination of 400,000 Poles and sentenced to death. Due to his extremely poor health, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment later that year. Koch, however, managed to recover and lived to be 90, dying in prison in 1986. Had Koch been apprehended in 1945, he would have probably been tried at Nuremberg with Goering and the other major Nazis.

The 10 courageous Nazi hunters listed below devoted their lives to hunting down those who orchestrated one of history’s darkest chapters, ensuring that justice was not lost to the passage of time.

Why the 10 Courageous Nazi Hunters Matter

From the ruins of World War II to the quiet corridors of modern courts, these men and women chased shadows, exposed secrets, and forced perpetrators to answer for the six million Jews murdered. Their relentless pursuit reminds us that evil does not fade simply because decades have passed; it demands vigilance, bravery, and sometimes a touch of madness.

10 Hanns Alexander

Born amid the turmoil of the First World War, Hanns Alexander grew up in a German household where his father, a well‑known physician, regularly entertained the intellectual elite—Albert Einstein among the guests. When Adolf Hitler rose to power, the Alexander family, being Jewish, escaped to Britain. There, Hanns enlisted in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army. After the war ended, he became one of the first volunteers tasked with investigating war crimes, a mission he pursued with a ferocious personal vendetta. His temper could be explosive; legend has it he once roamed Europe with the corpse of a dead Nazi strapped to the roof of his car.

The most infamous target he ever pursued was Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Alexander tricked Hoss’s wife into revealing her husband’s whereabouts by threatening that her son would be sent to Siberia. Armed with that intelligence, Alexander and a squad of soldiers moved in on Hoss. Accounts of the capture differ: some say the Jewish soldiers beat Hoss mercilessly; others claim they forced him to trek naked across a snow‑covered road. Regardless of the exact method, Hoss was apprehended, taken into custody, and subsequently hanged a short time later.

9 Wayne Stringer

In 1992, the Simon Wiesenthal Center turned to former New Zealand police officer Wayne Stringer, tasking him with tracking down 47 alleged war criminals who might have found refuge in his country. Over the next year, Stringer criss‑crossed the globe—journeying from New Zealand to Australia, Canada, and the Baltic states—leveraging previously classified KGB files to compile a list of suspects who could still be alive. He even conducted personal interviews with many of the individuals on his roster.

The most notorious figure he pursued was Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian who had settled in Australia during the 1950s. Pukas was suspected of serving in the 12th Lithuanian Police Battalion, a unit implicated in the mass murder of Jews throughout Eastern Europe. When Stringer confronted Pukas, the latter chillingly recalled that the Jews who were rounded up “screamed like geese” as they were shot, and he seemed to relish the memory. He denied direct participation, insisting he merely heard the executions.

Despite Stringer’s exhaustive investigation, no charges were ever filed against Pukas or any of the other suspects. Pukas passed away a few years after their interview, leaving the case unresolved.

8 Efraim Zuroff

Often dubbed “the last Nazi hunter,” Efraim Zuroff has spent more than three decades chasing former Nazis as the Israeli director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He also curates the Center’s annual “Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals” list, which serves as a global alert system for investigators.

Unlike the rugged bounty hunters of the 1940s who trekked through jungles and deserts, Zuroff’s work resembles that of a meticulous desk sergeant. He spends his days sifting through archives, interviewing witnesses, and coordinating with foreign prosecutors. Yet his role brings a unique set of challenges: many of the Nazis he pursues are now frail octogenarians or nonagenarians, men whose physical frailty often elicits public pity rather than condemnation.

Critics have dismissed his efforts as a “circus act,” especially when a 97‑year‑old former SS officer was finally arrested under Zuroff’s pressure. Zuroff rebuts such criticism, asserting that the passage of time should never shield perpetrators from accountability. He continues his mission, fully aware that the end of his career looms ever closer.

7 Elliot Welles

Born in Vienna in late 1927, Elliot Welles and his mother were torn from their home when the Nazis launched their campaign of terror. The pair were separated; his mother was forced onto a bus that the Nazis later drove into a forest and opened fire upon. Two days later, the Nazis returned the stripped garments of the victims; Welles recognized his mother’s dress among the piles.

Welles himself was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, where he endured the brutal conditions until the war’s final months. As the Allies advanced, he was compelled to join a forced march toward Magdeburg, Germany, and it was there that he managed a daring escape.

When the U.S. Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was established in 1979, Welles seized the opportunity to use its expansive archives to locate the SS officer responsible for ordering his mother’s execution. He succeeded, securing a conviction, though the court handed the perpetrator a mere two‑ to three‑year prison sentence.

Fuelled by this experience, Welles dedicated over two decades to heading the B’nai B’rith Anti‑Defamation League’s task force on Nazi war criminals. Under his leadership, the team captured numerous long‑missing offenders, including Boleslavs Maikovskis and Josef Schwammberger.

6 Rafi Eitan

Born in 1926, Rafi Eitan eagerly joined Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, and soon found himself at the helm of several high‑profile missions aimed at snatching suspected Nazis. The crowning achievement of his career occurred on May 11, 1960, when Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and smuggled him back to Israel for trial—a bold operation that sparked an international diplomatic uproar, as Argentina demanded Eichmann’s return.

Less widely known is the fact that the same team came tantalizingly close to capturing Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death.” When Argentine intelligence supplied a tip about Mengele’s whereabouts, Eitan personally vetoed the pursuit, arguing that Eichmann represented a higher‑value target and that diverting resources could jeopardize both missions. Consequently, Mengele evaded capture and lived out his remaining years as a free man.

5 Tuviah Friedman

Tuviah Friedman endured the horrors of a Nazi labor camp, where nearly his entire family perished except for his sister Bella. He managed a daring escape in 1944, emerging into a world still reeling from the war’s devastation.

In the immediate post‑war period, Friedman was enlisted to aid Soviet and Polish authorities in gathering evidence of the Holocaust. Known among his peers as “the Merciless One,” he pursued, captured, and even executed several Nazis, at times whipping them before delivering them to death.

Employing a daring disguise, Friedman would pose as a captured SS officer, infiltrating prisoner‑of‑war camps to identify suspected members of the SS. Eventually, he joined forces with Simon Wiesenthal, entrusting the judicial system with the final punishment of captured war criminals, content to see them locked away for life.

Friedman’s ultimate obsession was Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Final Solution. Although Mossad and Rafi Eitan ultimately seized Eichmann, Friedman’s relentless lobbying of the Israeli government helped galvanize the political will that made the capture possible.

4 Serge And Beate Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld, a French Jew whose father perished in Auschwitz, and his German‑Protestant wife Beate formed an indomitable duo in the 1960s, dedicating their lives to tracking down former Nazis. Their inaugural target was Kurt‑Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi propagandist who later served as German Chancellor during the 1960s. In a bold act of protest, Beate slapped Kiesinger in the face, an offense that landed her in prison for four months.

Unwilling to settle for public humiliation, the Klarsfelds turned their attention to Kurt Lischka, a former Gestapo chief. During Lischka’s capture, Serge placed a gun to his head, but ultimately relented, securing his arrest and a ten‑year prison sentence. Their most celebrated triumph came with the capture of Klaus Barbie, another ex‑Gestapo chief. Although an earlier kidnapping attempt failed, Barbie was later extradited to France, tried, and died after serving eight years behind bars.

Today, the Klarsfelds have retired from active Nazi hunting, focusing instead on commemorating Holocaust victims and campaigning against contemporary genocides and persecution.

3 Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, born in 1908 in Austria, survived five different concentration camps during the Holocaust. After the war, he assisted American intelligence by providing crucial information on Nazi war criminals and helped facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. With the establishment of Israel, Wiesenthal joined the precursor to Mossad, where he helped capture notorious Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann. He later worked directly for Israel’s intelligence agencies, tracking down not only war criminals but also former missile scientists.

Over the course of his career, Wiesenthal identified thousands of ex‑Nazis, bringing hundreds to trial—including Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps. He was a steadfast opponent of vigilante justice, insisting that every suspect receive a fair trial as a moral imperative.

Wiesenthal rejected the notion of collective German guilt, emphasizing that responsibility rested with individuals. When a mortally wounded SS officer begged for forgiveness so he could die in peace, Wiesenthal refused, underscoring his unwavering commitment to accountability.

2 Eli Rosenbaum

Eli Rosenbaum entered the world in 1955 to Jewish parents who rarely discussed the Holocaust. His first indirect exposure to Nazi atrocities came as a child when he switched on a television reenactment of the Auschwitz trial, hearing a survivor recount horrific medical experiments. That moment ignited a lifelong dedication to justice.

In 1979, Rosenbaum began as an intern at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI). By 1995, he rose to become its chief. Initially, OSI focused solely on Axis war criminals, but under Rosenbaum’s leadership, the office expanded in 2004 to investigate modern crimes against humanity as well.

Rosenbaum’s tenure was not without controversy. He uncovered that Kurt Waldheim, the fourth Secretary‑General of the United Nations, had served as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht. Waldheim later ascended to the presidency of Austria, highlighting how some nations still elected individuals with Nazi pasts.

1 Israel Carmi

Israel Carmi founded the Jewish vengeance group known as Nokmim—Hebrew for “The Avengers”—after losing much of his family in the Holocaust. In the immediate post‑war years, governments showed little interest in prosecuting Nazis, leaving the task to private citizens like Carmi.

Working alongside the British military, Nokmim roamed Europe, hunting down verified Nazis. When they located a suspect, they would masquerade as police officers seeking an interview. In the subsequent phase, dubbed “Operation Judgment,” they would reveal their true identities and intentions to the captured Nazis.

According to Carmi, some Nazis confessed outright, while others remained silent. The group typically executed their targets in secluded locations, favoring strangulation as the method of death. Beyond their lethal pursuits, Nokmim also facilitated the immigration of tens of thousands of Jews to Israel, playing a dual role in post‑war Jewish resurgence.

Crystal methamphetamine has ripped through communities worldwide, and its reach now stretches into places you’d never expect—think Iran and Iraq. When we talk about the “10 moments history” of Nazi speed freaks, we’re diving into a twisted tale where chemistry met conquest, and the Nazis turned a simple pill into a weapon of terror.

10 moments history: The High‑Speed Nazi Saga

10 German History

The amphetamine story is a very German one. Just as Bayer famously pushed heroin into over‑the‑counter shelves, German chemists first synthesized amphetamine in the late 1800s, an era that celebrated chemistry as a path to a better life.

It wasn’t until after World War I that amphetamine hit the market as a consumer product. By the 1920s and ’30s, it was sold over the counter as an inhaler and in other forms, quickly becoming a favorite among artists and intellectuals seeking a creative boost.

Benzedrine, the most popular brand, burst onto the scene in the early 1930s, helping fuel a period of astonishing productivity across Europe.

9 Early Daze

Nazi drug policy borrowed heavily from the Weimar Republic, the German state that existed between the two world wars. The Nazis toppled the Weimar Republic—symbolized by the burning of the Reichstag—and seized power under Hitler.

The Weimar era was a surprisingly liberal, progressive, and thriving period for a nation reeling from defeat and the punitive Treaty of Versailles. The “Roaring Twenties” brought jazz, heroin, and swing dancing to German streets, mirroring America’s cultural explosion.

Germany’s social scene was a whirlwind of smoking, drinking, and partying, and with that came a permissive attitude toward drug use.

8 Cocaine, Opium, And Morphine

When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, their stance on drugs shifted dramatically. Initially, they tolerated a wide range of substances, but soon began to denounce cocaine, opium, and morphine as “Jewish” drugs, casting them as symbols of inferiority.

This antisemitic framing painted Jewish people as drug‑dependent, turning public opinion against those substances and reinforcing the regime’s hateful ideology.

7 Pervitin

The real breakthrough for the Nazis came with Pervitin—a methamphetamine pill that looked like candy. The regime fell head over heels for the drug, and the romance between the Nazis and Pervitin became legendary.

Hitler himself was rumored to consume a dizzying array of substances: opiates, testosterone, regular amphetamines, methamphetamine, and—believe it or not—bull semen, which he reportedly touted as a primitive Viagra.

The active ingredient on the Pervitin label was pure methamphetamine, turning each tablet into a compact dose of raw, unfiltered speed.

6 Double Standards

The Nazis displayed a glaring double standard. While they castigated drug dependence as a “Jewish” vice, Hitler himself was a compulsive drug user, and his troops were expressly ordered to take methamphetamine.

Civilians were forbidden from most narcotics, yet soldiers were handed pills to keep them hyper‑alert, sleepless, and relentless in battle. The regime justified this as a means‑to‑an‑end, using prescription drugs to fuel the ferocity of their attacks.

In short, the very people the Nazis demonized for drug use were the same people receiving the most potent stimulants on the front lines.

5 The Invasion Of Poland

Blitzkrieg’s lightning‑fast assaults were no accident. In September 1939, the invasion of Poland unfolded in a matter of days, with German troops moving nonstop, seemingly without need for sleep.

The secret behind this ferocity? Pervitin tablets. Soldiers on the Polish front wrote home constantly, often pleading for more pills to keep their momentum going.

In Poland, the Nazi war machine turned into a massive, drug‑fueled party—soldiers high on meth, firing indiscriminately, and marching forward without pause.

4 The Invasion Of France

Poland served as a rehearsal for the next massive strike: France. After World I left Germany shattered, the Nazis were eager for vengeance, armed with cutting‑edge weapons and a steady supply of meth.

Before the French campaign, the Wehrmacht ordered a staggering 35 million Pervitin tablets, turning their troops into seemingly unstoppable killing machines.

The French were blindsided as the German “stormtroopers” surged forward, eventually forcing Allied forces into the chaotic evacuation at Dunkirk.

3 African Theater

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the famed “Desert Fox,” swore by meth, calling it “my daily bread.” His tank crews chewed on the drug to stay combat‑ready for up to 24 hours straight, outpacing the British forces.

When Rommel later turned his sights to France, he again demanded meth tablets for his regiments, prompting the Allies to issue their own amphetamines just to keep pace with the German onslaught.

The desert battles became a high‑octane showdown, with both sides fueled by stimulants as they exchanged fire across the North African sands.

2 Downsides

For a time, the Nazi formula seemed unstoppable: meth, alcohol, opiates, and other stimulants turned soldiers into hyper‑focused, sleepless machines capable of extraordinary feats.

Methamphetamine delivers intense euphoria, heightened awareness, and a dramatic reduction in the need for food and sleep—perfect for a rapid‑strike war strategy.

However, the drug’s dark side soon emerged. Chronic use wrecked the central nervous system, leading to severe psychosis, paranoia, and a disconnection from reality.

Eventually, exhausted soldiers faced harrowing withdrawal amid artillery fire, eroding morale and weakening the very engine that had driven the Nazi war machine.

1 High Hitler

Adolf Hitler spent much of the war in a drug‑induced haze. One infamous encounter with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini illustrates this: as Mussolini begged Hitler to let Italy bow out after the Allied landings in Sicily, Hitler, high on a cocktail of substances, ranted for hours, leaving Mussolini unable to interject.

The mix included Pervitin—nicknamed “Panzerschokolade” or “tank chocolate”—and later, cocaine used for everything from sinus relief to eye drops. By war’s end, Hitler was reportedly taking up to eighty different drugs daily.

Allied intelligence even speculated that Hitler’s personal physician might have been sabotaging the Führer by flooding his regimen, hoping to render him ineffective.

Ultimately, the drug‑laden dictator met his downfall as the Soviet Red Army overran the Eastern Front, sealing the grim finale of a regime fueled by meth.

When we think of the Nazis, we picture Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and Speer, the political architects of the Third Reich who drove Germany’s devastation across Europe and into the Soviet Union. Yet the machinery that powered that carnage was forged by a cadre of engineers and scientists. In this roundup of the 10 engineers scientists who built the Nazi war machine, we’ll explore the minds behind the metal and the code.

10 engineers scientists: The Architects of Destruction

10 Ferdinand Porsche

Ferdinand Porsche’s surname rings a bell for anyone who loves high‑performance automobiles – he founded the company that later produced the iconic Porsche sports cars – but he also threw his considerable talents behind the Nazi war effort.

He sketched the Volkswagen Beetle, Hitler’s so‑called “people’s car,” and almost secured the contract for the fearsome Tiger tank. The Nazis deemed his tank’s drive system overly intricate, repurposing his work for the massive tank‑destroyer nicknamed the Elephant.

Porsche was fundamentally an inventor obsessed with vehicle engineering. After designing equipment for the Austrians in World War I, he and his son launched their own engineering firm in 1931.

His reputation was such that Stalin personally tried to lure him in 1932 to head the Soviet automobile industry, a proposal Porsche declined because he didn’t speak Russian.

When Hitler announced the quest for a “people’s car” in 1934, Porsche’s Beetle design won the competition. After a 1935 meeting, Hitler lavished praise on him and even offered to name the production plant after Porsche – an offer the engineer politely refused.

Later he devised the Kubelwagen, a military Jeep‑like vehicle derived from the Beetle, which the German army embraced; roughly 55,000 units rolled off the line during the conflict.

Following the war, Porsche spent 22 months incarcerated in France for his Nazi affiliations. By 1950, he and his son had unveiled the first Porsche sports car, marking a new chapter in automotive history.

9 Kurt Tank

Kurt Tank, a distinguished aircraft designer and test pilot, first saw combat as a soldier in World I before studying electrical engineering and earning his pilot’s wings.

After stints with several aircraft firms, he landed at Focke‑Wulf in 1931, where he transformed the company into a premier aircraft manufacturer.

Tank’s portfolio includes the Fw 190 fighter, which out‑performed the famed British Spitfire and earned a reputation as the best German propeller‑driven fighter of the war, and the Fw 200 transport, a long‑range aircraft that terrorized Allied shipping.

Although only a few hundred Fw 200s were built, each could cover more than 3,200 km (2,000 mi). Their raids sank up to 90,000 metric tons of shipping per month, prompting Winston Churchill to dub the type the “scourge of the Atlantic.”

After the conflict, Tank emigrated to Argentina, dabbling briefly in jet design before moving to India, where he contributed to the Indian Air Force’s jet fighter programs. Two decades later, he returned to Germany as a consultant for a major aircraft conglomerate.

8 Ernst Heinkel

Ernst Heinkel’s inaugural aircraft crashed and burned, but that setback didn’t dampen his resolve. He had already designed planes during World I and later founded Heinkel Flugzeugwerke.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Heinkel’s firm enjoyed a prosperous run, producing record‑breaking racers and, notably, the He 187 – the world’s first jet aircraft, which first took to the skies in 1939, a week before the outbreak of war.

His most recognizable creation, the He 111 twin‑engine bomber, became a staple of the Blitzkrieg. Although its vulnerabilities surfaced later, the aircraft saw extensive early‑war service.

By the early 1940s, Heinkel grew increasingly vocal against the Nazi regime, a stance that led to the state confiscating his factories in 1942. Nonetheless, he remained a Nazi Party member and employed forced labor in his plants.

After the war, Allied authorities detained him and put him on trial. He was ultimately acquitted, largely because of his documented resistance to Hitler. In 1950, Heinkel pivoted to civilian production, manufacturing scooters, bicycles, and small automobiles.

7 Willy Messerschmitt

During World I, Willy Messerschmitt trained at a German flying school and even set a world record for the longest glider flight.

In the 1920s he launched his own firm producing low‑cost aircraft, but a series of crashes forced him into bankruptcy by 1931.

The Nazi rise to power in 1933 rescued Messerschmitt from financial ruin. Although a senior Nazi official’s son perished in one of his planes, Messerschmitt cultivated other influential party contacts.

When the regime announced a massive re‑armament program, Messerschmitt, together with Robert Lusser, unveiled the Bf 109 prototype. The Luftwaffe’s chief of air‑force development personally test‑flew the aircraft and declared it fit for front‑line service.

The Bf 109 became an icon, fighting on every theater for Germany and famously dueling with the British Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. Messerschmitt later added the Bf 110 night‑fighter and, most impressively, the Me 262 – the world’s first operational jet fighter.

Post‑war, the United States held Messerschmitt for two years. Upon release, he pivoted to prefabricated housing and sewing machines because Allied occupation forces barred aircraft production. By 1952, however, he was back in the aerospace sector, producing missiles and combat aircraft for West Germany.

6 Robert Lusser

Robert Lusser wore many hats: celebrated aircraft engineer, award‑winning pilot, and later, a designer of one of the era’s most infamous weapons.

After periods at several manufacturers, Lusser joined Messerschmitt, where he helped shape the Bf 109 and played a major role in the Bf 110’s development. A brief return to Heinkel in 1938 ended abruptly after a dispute over a jet fighter design.

Subsequently, Lusser moved to Fieseler, where he conceived the V‑1 flying bomb – the first of the Nazi “revenge weapons.” Thousands of these pulse‑jet cruise missiles were launched against Britain, delivering a terrifying new form of warfare.

Following the war, Lusser entered the United States under Operation Paperclip, although he did not arrive until 1948, later joining Werner von Braun’s team in the American space program. He famously mis‑predicted that a lunar mission was impossible, believing spacecraft reliability was insufficient.

In 1959, Lusser returned to Germany, re‑joining Messerschmitt’s organization and continuing his work in aeronautical engineering.

5 Hans von Ohain

When Ernst Heinkel sought academic expertise for a groundbreaking jet‑powered aircraft, university supervisor recommendations pointed to a bright young mind: Hans von Ohain.

In 1936, Ohain officially joined Heinkel Flugzeugwerke, dedicating himself to the development of the world’s inaugural jet engine.

By 1939, the He 178 – the first jet‑propelled airplane – completed a near‑perfect test flight, a milestone that proved the viability of jet propulsion. Ohain’s engine work also paved the way for the Me 262, the first jet fighter to see combat, even though he was not directly involved in its airframe design.

After World II, Ohain emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming chief scientist at a U.S. Air Force research laboratory in 1963. His prolific publishing record earned him induction into both the International Aerospace Hall of Fame and the Sciences Hall of Fame.

4 Walter Thiel

In 1936, Walter Thiel became the third scientist recruited by Walter Dornberger, the head of Germany’s rocket research division. With a background in chemical engineering, Thiel quickly rose to become second‑in‑command of the program.

Thiel’s contributions were crucial to the V‑2 rocket’s ascent. He focused on engine design, engineering a lighter, more compact powerplant, and he selected the fuel mixture that made the V‑2 feasible for mass production.

By 1943, Thiel grew convinced that inherent design flaws made large‑scale V‑2 production impossible, prompting his resignation. Tragically, only days later, a British bombing raid on Peenemünde claimed the lives of Thiel and his family.

3 Herbert A. Wagner

During the 1920s, aerospace engineer Herbert A. Wagner probed the dynamics of various aircraft components, including the floats of seaplanes. By the 1930s, his work extended to high‑altitude military aircraft and nascent jet engine concepts.

In the 1940s, Wagner contributed to guided‑missile technology, most notably the Hs 293 – a rocket‑powered glide bomb that earned the distinction of being the first guided bomb ever deployed in combat.

The Hs 293 proved devastating, sinking approximately 400,000 tons of Allied shipping. However, the proliferation of multiple Hs 293 variants hampered further refinement of the weapon.

After the war, Wagner was among the first German scientists transferred to the United States, where he helped develop a radar‑guided aircraft system used by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He also refined American guided‑bomb designs and later contributed guidance systems for U.S. Army anti‑tank missiles.

2 Konrad Zuse

In 1935, Konrad Zuse worked as an engineer for the Henschel aircraft factory, but his true passion occupied weekend evenings in his parents’ living room, where he assembled the Z1 – the world’s first programmable computer.

Zuse’s motivation was practical: he wanted a machine capable of crunching engineering equations for his own designs. Completed in 1938, the Z1 was a groundbreaking achievement, though its simplicity limited complex calculations.

When World II erupted, Zuse narrowly avoided conscription by pitching his computer to the German army as a potential aid. Employed by the Third Reich’s Aerodynamics Research Institute, he continued developing computers, culminating in the Z4.

Zuse proposed advancing to vacuum‑tube‑based computers, but the German military abruptly canceled the project, convinced that victory was imminent and a computer unnecessary.

German aircraft manufacturers coveted Zuse’s machines for aerodynamic calculations. Their importance was such that Werner von Braun personally intervened to relocate Zuse and his computers to a safer site.

After the war, Zuse smuggled the Z4 into Switzerland, founding a computer manufacturing enterprise in 1950. Two decades later, Siemens acquired his company, and Zuse retired from active engineering.

1 Fritz Todt

Following service in the German army during World I, Fritz Todt pursued engineering studies and eventually secured a position at a modest construction firm. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922, a full decade before the party seized power, and later became a member of the SS.

In 1930, Todt authored a paper on employment that caught Adolf Hitler’s attention. When the Nazis assumed control, Todt was appointed head of the new Autobahn project, later overseeing the entire German economy as Reich Minister of Munitions and leader of the Head Office of Technology.

He also founded Organization Todt, a quasi‑governmental engineering body responsible for constructing the Atlantic Wall and massive U‑boat shelters along the French coastline. The organization is infamous for its reliance on millions of forced laborers.

Although Todt enjoyed Hitler’s favor, he frequently clashed with other high‑ranking Nazis such as Hermann Göring and Martin Bormann. In 1942, he perished in an aircraft explosion; suspicions of sabotage or assassination lingered, but no definitive proof emerged.

Sam writes, writes, and writes some more!

Here are 10 historical facts that shed light on how the Nazi movement managed to plant roots on American soil. From organized Bund gatherings to the lingering echo of neo‑Nazi groups, each fact reveals a startling chapter of U.S. history that many tend to overlook.

10 Historical Facts Overview

10 The 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.

9 Nazi 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 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.

8 The 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 residents are white and of German ancestry.

7 The 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.

6 The 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.

5 Nazi 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.”

4 American 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.”

3 Failure 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. Others reported that Hitler’s rhetoric was a threat to democracy.

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 a clash of ideologies rather than a murderous campaign against a people.

2 Celebrity 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.

1 Continued 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,” might sound like a flimsy excuse for the 10 famous people we’re about to meet, yet many of them truly believed that profiting from the Nazi regime was just another business decision. Some merely tried to survive the terror, while others actively chased wealth by aligning themselves with National Socialism. Below is a countdown of the most notorious examples.

10 The Vuitton Family

The Louis Vuitton boutique was the lone shop allowed to stay open on the ground floor of the Hotel du Parc in Vichy‑occupied France throughout the war. That building served as the headquarters of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s puppet government, and Henry Gaston Vuitton, the designer’s grandson, was nudged to cultivate ties with the Vichy regime to safeguard the business.

Gaston quickly became a regular at the Gestapo’s favorite café nearby and even earned one of the first French decorations from Pétain’s administration. Though the Vuitton archives never mention it, the family has been accused of establishing a factory that churned out 2,500 busts glorifying Pétain’s campaign – perhaps even emblazoned with the iconic LV monogram.

Why These 10 Famous People Matter

9 Hardy Kruger

Most people remember Hardy Kruger for his Hollywood collaborations with John Wayne and Richard Burton, yet his early career was steeped in Nazi‑run cinema.

Like many German boys of his generation, Kruger joined the Hitler Youth at 13. By 15, he had landed a role in the 1944 German film “Young Eagles.” While on set, he grew close to veteran actor Hans Sohnker, who is believed to have shared harrowing details of the Holocaust with the teenager.

At 16, Kruger was drafted into the SS Division Nibelungen. When ordered to execute a group of American soldiers, he froze, prompting an almost‑firing‑squad execution for cowardice. The order was halted, and Kruger escaped his squad, hiding in the mountains until the war’s end.

8 Ferdinand Porsche

When Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, Ferdinand Porsche unveiled a concept for a compact, affordable vehicle at the Berlin auto show. Hitler, eager to motorise Germany much like Henry Ford had transformed America, seized the idea and announced plans for a “people’s car,” later known as the Volkswagen Beetle.

Under Porsche’s direction, the Wolfsburg plant was flooded with forced labourers – prisoners of war and concentration‑camp inmates – who assembled the Beetle in massive numbers. Porsche’s technical expertise and close ties to the regime allowed him to reap enormous financial rewards while the car became one of the best‑selling models in history.

7 Cristobal Balenciaga

Balenciaga began stitching garments at age three, and the 1940 Nazi invasion of France did little to stall his ambition.

When the occupiers demanded that France’s haute‑couture relocate to Germany, designer Lucien Lelong brokered a compromise: hand over all Jewish designers in exchange for the industry’s continued operation in Lyon and Paris. Balenciaga, though not directly involved in the deal, was among the sixty firms permitted to keep working.

He reopened his Paris house in 1940, thriving thanks to his connections with General Franco, Hitler’s Spanish ally. Balenciaga even crafted the wedding dress for Franco’s granddaughter, cementing his profitable ties to the fascist regime.

6 F. Scott Fitzgerald

By the mid‑1930s, the author of “The Great Gatsby” was drowning in debt, battling alcoholism, and covering his daughter’s upbringing and his wife Zelda’s institutionalisation costs.

In 1936, Hollywood studios were struggling under Nazi censorship, with only MGM, Paramount, and Fox still operating in Germany. When Erich Maria Remarque’s final “Three Comrades” volume hit the U.S. in April 1937, MGM producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz hired Fitzgerald to adapt it for the screen.

Fitzgerald earned $1,000 a week for six months – a hefty sum when the average annual wage was $1,780 – and produced a script that fiercely condemned the rise of National Socialism. Yet the studio sanitized the film, turning it into a glossy anti‑Nazi melodrama that still padded Fitzgerald’s bank account while muting his political message.

5 Hugo Boss

Hugo Ferdinand Boss, founder of the eponymous fashion label, was an outspoken National Socialist who embraced both the party’s ideology and its profit‑making opportunities.

Recent acknowledgments reveal the company’s wartime reliance on forced labour – 140 Poles and 40 French workers – to churn out uniforms. Early contracts supplied the brown shirts for the Nazi stormtroopers, later followed by black and brown garments for the Hitler Youth, and eventually the infamous black SS uniforms.

Those contracts flooded the fledgling firm with riches, and while Boss never personally designed the SS attire, his company’s production became synonymous with the regime’s terror, later inspiring the sleek uniforms of Imperial Officers in “Star Wars.”

4 Henry Ford

It seems odd to pair the emblem of the American Dream, Henry Ford, with the backward dogma of National Socialism.

In 1938, on his 75th birthday, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle – the highest honour a foreigner could receive from the Nazis. Adolf Hitler praised Ford as a personal inspiration, even keeping a life‑size portrait of him on his desk, and cited him admiringly in “Mein Kampf.” German engineers also borrowed Fordist production techniques while building the Volkswagen.

Although Ford harboured anti‑Semitic views, he publicly opposed war and despised the militaristic side of Nazism. Nonetheless, before the United States entered the conflict, he supplied Germany with military equipment while refusing to build engines for Britain’s Royal Air Force.

3 The Rockefellers

Hitler’s obsession with eugenics was not a novel idea; by 1909, California alone had performed nearly half of the world’s coerced sterilizations in the name of “racial hygiene.”

The Rockefeller Foundation, a major patron of eugenic research, funneled $410,000 (about $4 million today) by 1926 to dozens of German scientists. $250,000 of that sum supported the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Ernst Rudin later directed Hitler’s systematic medical atrocities.

In 1929, a $317,000 Rockefeller grant expanded the Institute for Brain Research, which became the epicentre of Rudin’s murderous experiments. Another beneficiary, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, received Rockefeller money that later enabled Joseph Mengele’s grotesque twin studies.

2 Prescott Bush

Prescott Bush, grandfather of future President George W. Bush, sat on the board of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by the German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen family.

Thyssen, enthralled by Hitler after hearing him speak, joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and repeatedly bailed out the fledgling movement. In 1928, he bought Munich’s Barlow Palace, later the Nazi Party headquarters, and his enterprises relied heavily on forced labour from camps like Auschwitz until 1941.

Until the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Union Banking Corp. continued financing Thyssen’s steel empire, which produced the planes and tanks that battered the Allies. The firm’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, yet Bush and fellow director Herbert Walker allegedly helped Thyssen transfer ownership documents to New York, shielding him from post‑war prosecution.

1 Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel, famed for her quilted bags, timeless dresses, and the iconic scent Chanel No 5, also dabbled in espionage on behalf of the Nazis.

Although she never embraced Nazi ideology, Chanel gravitated toward power in occupied France, entering a liaison with 44‑year‑old German officer Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a professional Abwehr spy who had been operating in France since the late 1920s.

The relationship was mutually exploitative: Dincklage arranged for Chanel to reside in the luxurious Hotel Ritz, while the designer received the codename “Westminster” and the agent number F‑7124 from the German intelligence service.

Using her new connections, Chanel secured the release of her nephew André Palasse from a German prison camp. She later travelled to Madrid in August 1941 with special German permission to gather political intelligence, though the mission yielded only trivial diplomatic chatter. The next time you picture Chanel measuring a dress in a Parisian atelier, remember she also measured out a brief, opportunistic partnership with the Nazi regime.

When most people think about racial persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, the Holocaust instantly dominates the conversation. Yet the Nazis’ twisted vision of racial purity also targeted Africans living in Germany, and their suffering is rarely spotlighted. Below are 10 facts about the African experience in Nazi Germany, each shedding light on a hidden chapter of history.

10 Facts About the African Experience in Nazi Germany

10 The Death Camps

Long before Adolf Hitler seized power, the German Imperial army embarked on a ruthless campaign against African peoples in its overseas colonies. In the early 1900s, when Germany ruled present‑day Namibia, it established a system of extermination that pre‑figured later Nazi atrocities.

In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha issued a chilling directive demanding the total eradication of the Herero tribe to clear land for German settlers. He explicitly ordered that women and children receive no mercy. Within three years, roughly 80 percent of the Herero and half of the Nama were wiped out.

German forces set up five concentration camps on Namibia’s infamous Shark Island, a stretch of coastline later nicknamed the “Skeleton Coast” because of the countless mass graves. One missionary recounted a harrowing scene: an emaciated African woman asked a fellow inmate for water, only to be shot five times by a soldier outraged by her audacity.

The perpetrators even staged photographs of themselves surrounded by starving African prisoners, turning the grotesque scenes into postcards sent home. Some of these cards featured explicit, pornographic depictions of German soldiers assaulting African women.

Dr. Bofinger, a German physician stationed in Namibia, conducted macabre experiments on the corpses of these victims. He decapitated prisoners, preserved their heads, and shipped them back to scientific labs in Germany. These crimes occurred before the Nazis rose to power, yet they set a grim precedent for later racial science.

9 Propaganda

Propaganda was the Nazi regime’s most potent weapon for shaping public opinion about Africans. Most ordinary Germans knew little about the realities of German colonies, and the state flooded them with messages of a harmonious German‑African friendship.

One widely circulated poster depicted a German woman arm‑in‑arm with an African woman, proclaiming that Germany no longer harbored any “racial pride.” The government hoped to lure citizens to settle in imagined all‑German African colonies, but such fantasies required persuasive visual propaganda.

After the First World War, Germany lost its African territories to the victorious Allies. Simultaneously, thousands of Germans emigrated to the United States, fleeing dire unemployment and poverty at home.

When the Third Reich rose in the 1930s, German filmmakers produced movies glorifying the nation’s former colonial exploits in Southwest Africa. The long‑term Nazi goal was to reclaim those colonies and spread the Aryan race worldwide, and cinema served as a rallying cry for that ambition.

8 The Rhineland Bastards

Following the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Allied forces—including troops from French African colonies—occupied Germany’s western Rhineland. Black soldiers stationed there fathered children with German women, creating the first sizable multiracial cohort in German history.

These children earned the derogatory nickname “Rhineland bastards.” The German press and right‑wing agitators seized upon their existence, unleashing a wave of sensationalist propaganda that painted African soldiers as predatory and German women as victims.

One infamous illustration, titled “Jumbo,” portrayed a colossal, naked black soldier clutching a horde of distressed German women. A minted coin even displayed a white woman shackled to a massive phallus opposite the image of a black soldier, underscoring the vilification.

Although most of the German mothers reported consensual relationships—only a single woman claimed rape—the campaign framed the encounters as violent assaults, demonizing the black men and demeaning the women.

Hitler’s *Mein Kampf* echoed this rhetoric, blaming Jewish influence for bringing black soldiers into Germany and alleging a plot to contaminate the Aryan bloodline.

7 Rassenschande

The Nazi regime aggressively promoted the doctrine of Rassenschande, literally “racial defilement.” Enacted through the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the policy forbade Aryans from marrying or engaging in sexual relations with anyone deemed non‑Aryan.

While the public most readily associates these laws with the persecution of Jews, they equally targeted Afro‑German individuals. Citizens seeking the coveted Aryan certificate underwent invasive medical examinations to prove their “pure‑blooded” status.

Contemporary publications warned that the presence of African soldiers in Germany represented an external assault on German racial purity. Nazis portrayed themselves as victims forced to defend the nation against an imposed multiculturalism.

Ironically, despite Germany’s earlier diplomatic outreach to African nations and its lingering colonial aspirations, the regime insisted that Black people belonged exclusively in Africa, never within the German Reich.

6 Murder And Sterilization

Anthropologist Dr. Wolfgang Abel conducted pseudo‑scientific studies on Afro‑German and Asian‑German children, labeling them “aggressive,” “psychotic,” and genetically inferior to their Aryan counterparts. He also suggested that the mothers of such children were somehow corrupted, likening them to alien vessels.

In 1937, the Gestapo received orders to locate and apprehend any Black individuals within Germany. Those captured faced execution, forced sterilization, or were subjected to inhumane medical experiments. Even Black foreigners caught in Germany were imprisoned or killed rather than being repatriated.

Under Nazi racial policy, anyone deemed to possess “undesirable DNA” underwent compulsory sterilization, preventing them from reproducing. The Rhineland bastards were specifically targeted, with over 400 recorded sterilization procedures.

5 The Extraordinary Life Of Hans Massaquoi

Hans Massaquoi stands out as one of the few Black children who survived Nazi Germany. Born to Liberian king Momolu Massaquoi—serving as Liberia’s consul general in Germany—and a German nurse, Bertha Baetz, Hans was technically a prince of the Vai tribe.

His father, Al‑Haj, a university student in Dublin, never returned to Germany. The king initially raised Hans within the consular mansion before returning to Liberia, leaving Bertha to raise her son alone in Hamburg.

As a youngster, Hans endured relentless bullying because of his skin color, yet his intelligence and friendly demeanor helped him forge local friendships. He yearned to join the Hitler Youth, captivated by the allure of the “cool uniforms” his peers wore.

Desperate to fit in, Hans even persuaded his babysitter to stitch a swastika patch onto his sweater for school. Although his mother tried to intervene, Hans continued to emulate Nazi‑aligned behavior, not fully grasping the regime’s true nature.

War‑time scarcity left Hans unable to secure employment, and despite his desire to serve, the German army denied his enlistment because of his race.

In 1948, his father finally brought him back to Liberia, where he was welcomed as the prince he truly was. Later, Hans built a successful journalism career with publications such as *Jet* and *Ebony*.

Crucially, Hans escaped the sterilization campaigns that targeted many Rhineland children, likely because German officials believed he could be useful if the Nazis ever reclaimed African colonies. He eventually emigrated to the United States, married, and raised a family.

His memoir, *Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany*, was adapted into a German film now freely available on YouTube.

4 Human Zoos

Theodor Wonja Michael’s parents hailed from Cameroon, a former German colony. They migrated to Germany believing the “motherland” promised better prospects, only to discover that employment opportunities for Africans were virtually nonexistent.

Stranded without sufficient funds to return home, the family was forced into a grotesque form of entertainment: acting in “people’s shows,” a type of human zoo where Black performers donned grass skirts and mimicked stereotypical African village life before German audiences.

These exhibitions frequently traveled with circuses and were sometimes staged inside actual German zoos, positioned beside animal enclosures. Promoters claimed the performers were freshly captured “savages” placed in habitats mirroring their supposed native environments.

German spectators laughed and mocked the displays, unaware that many of the performers were fluent German speakers.

By the 1930s, roughly 400 such human zoos operated across Germany. After the Nazi era ended, the practice faded—until a 2005 controversy when the Augsburg Zoo installed an exhibit featuring African mud‑huts, grass skirts, and tribal dances next to a baboon habitat.

The exhibit sparked outrage, as it echoed the historic dehumanization of Black people as beasts. Protesters sent threatening letters, picketed the zoo, and eventually forced the removal of the display. The Augsburg Zoo maintains that it never intended to revive “human zoos,” denying any racist motive.

3 The African Campaigns

World War II histories often spotlight the Blitz, the Holocaust, and European battlefields, while the brutal fighting that unfolded across North Africa receives far less attention. The desert wars pitted Axis forces against Allied troops from various colonial powers, leading to massive civilian casualties.

Much like contemporary conflicts, the North African theater centered on control of oil and strategic supply routes. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, roughly one million European soldiers were killed or wounded during these campaigns, with Germany briefly occupying Tunisia in 1942 and allegedly targeting civilian populations.

The National WWII Museum maintains comprehensive charts of global civilian losses, yet the figures for North African countries are conspicuously absent, suggesting a historical blind spot.

While some argue that the sparsely populated desert terrain limited civilian impact, personal testimonies and biographies attest to significant non‑combatant suffering throughout the region.

2 Prisoners Of War

International law traditionally mandates that prisoners of war be treated humanely and exchanged for one’s own captured soldiers. In practice, both Axis and Allied powers committed grave violations.

The Nazis showed no hesitation in killing African soldiers serving under French colonial forces, viewing their deaths as retribution for the so‑called “crimes” against German women in the Rhineland.

African POWs were barred from setting foot on German soil to avoid “contaminating” the Aryan race. Instead, they were detained in Frontstalag camps located in France, drawing prisoners from Algeria, Tunisia, Southeast Asia, the West Indies, Madagascar, Morocco, and beyond.

These camps housed detainees in flimsy, hand‑sewn tents offering little protection from the elements. In 1941, over 100,000 prisoners were recorded; by 1942, that number had fallen to 44,000 due to harsh labor, disease, and mortality.

In 1943, Germany ordered the French government to assume guard duties. French volunteers provided “godmother” services—cooking, reading, knitting, and religious instruction—while some forged romantic relationships with the prisoners, resulting in mixed‑race offspring.

Even after the war, these men remained barred from returning home or marrying the women who bore their children. They continued to be classified as French military personnel and were corralled into barracks.

1 After The War

When Allied forces occupied Germany after 1945, a wave of children born to African‑American soldiers and German mothers—known as Mischlingskinder or “brown babies”—entered the public consciousness. German media portrayed these children as symbols of a newly inclusive society, claiming that within a generation the nation would fully embrace racial diversity.

In reality, widespread racist attitudes persisted. The majority of these mixed‑race infants were abandoned to orphanages. An *Ebony* magazine cover displayed a black child with blue eyes, accompanied by the caption “Homes Needed For 10,000 Brown Orphans.”

During the 1950s, thousands of African‑American families in the United States adopted many of these children, yet countless others endured neglect, abuse, and institutional mistreatment. Documentary filmmaker Regina Griffin captured these harrowing stories in *Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story*, including a chilling account of a caregiver attempting to drown a boy.

Today, the Afro‑German population remains small. In 2017, the United Nations issued a warning advising Black tourists to avoid certain German neighborhoods due to safety concerns. Ongoing investigations allege systemic discrimination, such as teachers deliberately grading Afro‑German students poorly and employers exhibiting bias in hiring.

Shannon Quinn, a writer and entrepreneur, continues to shed light on these overlooked histories. Follow her insights on Twitter.

When you hear the phrase 10 nazi scientists, you probably picture shadowy figures tinkering in secret labs, only to resurface after the war as heroes of American progress. The truth is far more tangled: a dozen German experts who helped fuel the Third Reich’s terrifying arsenal slipped into U.S. hands, where they became linchpins of Cold‑War technology, space exploration, and even covert chemical programs. Below is a countdown of the most notorious of those men, each of whom managed to dodge justice and embed themselves in the United States’ scientific elite.

10 Nazi Scientists: Their Postwar Careers

10 Walter Schieber

Walter Schieber played a pivotal role in the Reich’s wartime manufacturing machine. Before the war, he cut his teeth in the textile sector, a background that proved invaluable to the Nazis’ massive production drives, earning him the War Merit Cross from Hitler in 1943.

After the guns fell silent, Schieber caught the eye of Brigadier General Charles Loucks of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. Loucks, stationed in Heidelberg, was hunting experts to advance America’s own nerve‑agent research. Rather than shunning the former Nazi, Loucks was drawn to Schieber’s direct links to Heinrich Himmler and his intimate knowledge of the deadly gases the Nazis had engineered.

Schieber spent a decade with the Chemical Corps, later becoming a CIA asset. Because his expertise was deemed indispensable, he never faced prosecution for his wartime crimes. In fact, his work helped shape the United States’ own sarin‑gas program, a legacy that still echoes in modern military chemistry.

9 Hubertus Strughold

Often hailed as the “Father of Space Medicine,” Hubertus Strughold guided the U.S. Air Force and NASA in developing medical protocols that keep astronauts alive beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The Aerospace Medical Association even named its annual award after him—until his murky Nazi connections surfaced and the honor was stripped away.

Throughout his American tenure, Strughold staunchly denied any awareness of Nazi atrocities. Yet evidence from the Nuremberg trials ties him to the horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, and he presented on the infamous “cold” studies at a 1942 Nazi conference.

His colleagues found it hard to reconcile the compassionate image of a space‑medicine pioneer with the reality that his research may have drawn on the extreme limits of human endurance observed in those war crimes. The truth suggests his breakthroughs in keeping bodies alive in space were at least partially built on knowledge gained from those dark experiments.

8 Dr. Kurt Blome

On paper, Dr. Kurt Blome was Hitler’s chief of cancer research, but behind the scenes he headed the Nazi biological‑warfare division. He oversaw projects aimed at turning disease into a weapon, a chilling endeavor that placed him at the very heart of the regime’s sinister science.

Blome faced trial at Nuremberg for participating in euthanasia programs and conducting human experiments. However, the American military intervened, securing his acquittal. The United States saw value in his intimate grasp of human biological vulnerabilities and wanted to harness it for its own nerve‑agent development.

Official U.S. Army Chemical Corps files never mention Blome’s wartime human‑experiment work. After the trial, he settled in West Germany, continuing secret collaborations with the American government and staying active in the right‑wing Germany Party until his death in 1969.

7 Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph arrived in America in 1947 via Operation Paperclip, flagged as a fervent Nazi, yet his criminal past was deliberately erased from official reports. Two years later, Allied documents confirmed his designation as a war criminal.

In 1961, Rudolph joined Wernher von Braun at NASA, applying his rocketry brilliance to the Saturn V program. Without his engineering mastery, the Apollo moon‑landing might never have taken off.

Despite his indispensable contributions, the Justice Department charged him in 1984 with overseeing the death of thousands of forced laborers during V‑2 production. To avoid prosecution, Rudolph renounced his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany, where he lived out his remaining years.

6 Magnus von Braun

Magnus von Braun, the lesser‑known brother of Wernher, earned a reputation among U.S. military officials as a “dangerous German Nazi”—a label suggesting he posed a greater threat than half a dozen disgraced SS generals. Serving as Wernher’s personal aide, Magnus helped negotiate the surrender of Germany’s rocket team in 1945.

When the American Army welcomed him to Fort Bliss, Texas, his technical skill was praised, but skepticism lingered. That doubt proved justified when Magnus attempted to smuggle a stolen brick of platinum out of the base, trying to sell it to a jeweler in El Paso.

The incident was quietly buried to protect Operation Paperclip’s image. Wernher personally meted out a brutal beating to his brother, after which Magnus secured a prosperous career with Chrysler before retiring to the Arizona desert.

5 Dieter Grau

Dieter Grau was a core member of von Braun’s rocket team, contributing to the V‑2’s development during the war. After the conflict, he crossed the Atlantic under Operation Paperclip, becoming the quality‑control director on several U.S. rocket projects, including the Saturn V.

Before his American tenure, Grau served at the Mittelwerk plant, the underground factory where slave labor built V‑2 rockets. There, he specialized in “debugging”—identifying sabotage among the forced workforce. Those he exposed faced a grim fate: public hanging by a crane in the factory’s main hall, a slow, agonizing execution.

Living to the age of 101, Grau was remembered by his U.S. colleagues for his meticulous attention to detail, a trait that helped shape America’s early rocketry successes.

4 Walter Dornberger

Walter Dornberger, unlike many of his Paperclip peers, did serve a brief prison term for exploiting slave labor in V‑2 production. Yet the American military cut his sentence short after just two years, ushering him back to the United States to rejoin his fellow rocket scientists.

He quickly rose to become vice‑president of Bell Aircraft Corporation. During his Nazi service, Dornberger ordered more than a thousand V‑2 rockets to fall on London’s residential districts. He also witnessed the inaugural V‑2 launch in 1937, prompting a famous exchange with von Braun: “Yes, today the spaceship was born.”

Dornberger believed that the Third Reich’s obsession with space travel contributed to Hitler’s defeat. When America needed expertise for its own space program, he gladly obliged, spending his later years in Germany and passing away at 84.

3 Hermann Oberth

Hermann Oberth’s pioneering rocket theories inspired von Braun to pursue spaceflight. Initially mocked for suggesting rockets could operate in a vacuum, Oberth eventually helped develop the German V‑2 and later joined the American effort to build the Saturn V.

Beyond his technical achievements, Oberth’s legacy is tinged with mystery. Supposedly, he once claimed humanity’s ability to reach the stars was aided by beings from other worlds—a quote that fuels speculation about his belief in UFOs as extraterrestrial craft.

Whether his remarks were earnest or a whimsical aside, they add an enigmatic layer to a scientist whose work propelled humanity beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

2 Kurt Debus

Kurt Debus, second only to von Braun in fame among former Nazis, served as director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center from 1962 to 1974. In his earlier life, he was Hitler’s flight‑test chief for the V‑2 program.

Debus helped negotiate the surrender of the German rocket team, then was swiftly relocated to Fort Bliss and later to Huntsville, Alabama, where he oversaw the construction of NASA’s launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.

Under his leadership, NASA launched 13 Saturn V rockets, including the historic Apollo 11 mission that landed on the Moon. Yet none of these triumphs would have been possible without his earlier role in forcing slave labor to build the Nazis’ rockets.

1 Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun quickly rose to prominence in Nazi Germany as a physics and engineering prodigy, steering the massive V‑2 rocket effort. By age 25, he commanded a team of 400; by 30, his workforce swelled to 5,000.

During the war, von Braun toured the Mittelwerk slave factory multiple times, even inspecting the cramped sleeping quarters where forced laborers lived. Later, in the United States, he attempted to distance himself from those atrocities, insisting he could not have altered the system.

Nevertheless, his relentless drive powered the V‑2’s development and later the Saturn V, which carried Apollo 11 to the Moon. While America reaped the benefits of his genius, the price paid was the suffering and death of countless enslaved workers under his watch.

Among roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent who fought in Hitler’s army, the stories of 10 Jews who served on the front lines reveal a paradox: while their families were being forced into ghettos and sent to death camps, these soldiers were stationed in Poland, France, or Russia, helping spread the very system that was slaughtering their own people across Europe.

Why 10 Jews Who Joined the Nazi Ranks?

10 Werner Goldberg

A familiar poster plastered throughout Nazi Germany showed a soldier with a swastika emblazoned on his chest, hailed as “The Ideal German Soldier.” Ironically, the model soldier was not a pure‑blood Aryan at all – he was half‑Jewish.

Werner Goldberg grew up unaware of his Jewish roots; his father never mentioned it. The truth hit him at fourteen when his school principal announced a “Jew‑free” policy and singled Werner out as the problem, publicly exposing his heritage.

Shunned overnight, Werner became desperate to belong again. He enlisted at the earliest opportunity, managing to join before the invasion of Poland, hoping military service would restore his place in society.

Back home, his father endured the horrors of the Holocaust. Werner leveraged his position to intervene repeatedly, even breaking into the prison holding his father when he learned of an imminent transfer to Auschwitz, rescuing him from certain death.

In the war’s aftermath, the Goldberg family suffered devastating losses—only his father survived. The reunion between Werner and his rescued father stands as a stark reminder of the personal stakes hidden behind the propaganda.

9 Nachemia Wurman

Debates have long swirled about how much ordinary Nazi soldiers knew about the atrocities in the camps. In the 72nd Infantry, one man certainly had a front‑row seat: Nachemia Wurman.

A Polish Jew, Wurman survived a 1944 labor camp where he witnessed his father’s execution and was forced to bathe in soap crafted from the bodies of fellow inmates.

After escaping and heading west in hopes of meeting Soviet troops, he instead ran straight into a German battalion. Knowing he couldn’t slip past them unnoticed, he boldly approached, shook hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” a German‑born chef.

He was promptly accepted into the unit, spending the remainder of the war with a swastika on his arm, cooking for the soldiers while keeping his true identity a secret. “The best hiding place was in the mouth of the wolf,” he later reflected.

8 Arno Spitz

Arno Spitz earned three Iron Crosses, the highest German decoration for bravery, making him one of the most decorated men in the Wehrmacht.

His father, a Jew, fled to the United States as persecution intensified. Arno, however, stayed in Germany and proved so valuable that when Himmler ordered half‑Jewish soldiers expelled in 1940, he was allowed to remain.

Spitz later insisted that fighting for Germany was not the same as supporting Hitler, telling Dateline NBC in 2002, “There is a difference.” His daughter later accused him of betraying his own people, but he refused to apologize, saying, “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans‑Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans‑Geert Falkenberg recalled. “I had to join the army.” He enlisted as soon as war was declared, hoping to prove his worth to a society that was already targeting Jews.

His teachers had been preaching Jewish inferiority, and he spent his teenage years excelling at everything the Nazis prized, seeing military service as the next logical step.

While fighting in France, he received letters from his grandmother describing the unfolding Holocaust. When the letters ceased, he learned she had been sent to a concentration camp, a blow that shocked him and his acquaintances alike.

His family had already fled to England, but trapped in occupied Europe, Falkenberg concluded that staying in the army was the safest way to survive, stating, “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp, the son of a German father and a Jewish mother, felt most alienated by his maternal side. His grandfather openly dismissed him, referring to him as a “goy” rather than a grandson.

When war erupted, Kopp filled out his enlistment papers as “full Aryan” and served in an artillery unit. He claimed to have been aware of the camps but chose to focus solely on his own survival, saying, “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation; I thought only about myself.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Lichtwitz recalled. He felt accepted among his comrades, unaware of the growing persecution of Jews at home.

When the 1940 purge expelled half‑Jewish soldiers, he was sent to a forced‑labor camp and later, after a failed escape, to Dachau. Asked by an NBC reporter how it felt to transition from soldier to prisoner, he could only reply, “I can’t say; I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik served as a doctor with Finland’s 53rd Infantry. Though Jewish by birth, his Finnish nationality placed him alongside German SS troops against the Soviet Union.

He tended to every wounded combatant, regardless of uniform, and even helped clear paths for German assaults. When a German soldier needed aid, Skurnik braved no‑man’s land to rescue him.

He organized the evacuation of a field hospital under Russian bombardment, carrying over 600 wounded—including SS men—across 8.9 km of bogland. Though offered an Iron Cross, he famously rejected it, telling his commander, “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

Harry Matso, a Finnish Jew, fought for Finland’s army, an ally of Nazi Germany. He asserted, “We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ which is a lie,” emphasizing his opposition to Nazi ideology.

He explained that Finnish Jews fought for their nation’s independence, not for Germany’s war aims. Conscription forced him into service, even as rumors of the Holocaust filtered through.

Fearing Soviet domination as much as Nazi oppression, Matso chose to defend his homeland, refusing to salute German soldiers whenever he encountered them.

2 Emil Maurice

Emil Maurice, listed as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler—was, by Himmler’s own standards, a Jew.

He joined the National Socialist Party in 1919, rose to lead the Sturmabteilung, participated in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and even helped Hitler draft Mein Kampf while imprisoned.

Despite his Jewish ancestry being exposed, Hitler declared Maurice an “honorary Aryan,” shielding him from expulsion after Himmler demanded his removal.

1 Erhard Milch

Erhard Milch rose to the upper echelons of the Nazi war machine, serving on the German War Cabinet and as chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, despite the public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

His friendship with Hermann Göring secured his “full Aryan” status after Göring arranged for Milch’s mother to sign a statement denying his Jewish lineage.

During the Nuremberg trials, Milch faced accusations of conducting lethal experiments on Jewish prisoners in Dachau, including high‑altitude and hypothermia tests. He never expressed remorse, defending Göring and refusing to apologize for his role.

Before the world erupted into the chaos of World War II in 1939, the Nazi Party’s ascent in Germany sent shockwaves through Western societies. While the regime’s anti‑Jewish and expansionist agenda alarmed many, a surprising handful of well‑known figures across the Atlantic and beyond harbored a degree of admiration or sympathy for Adolf Hitler and his movement. In this roundup we examine 10 famous people who, in various ways, showed Nazi sympathies during the turbulent 1930s.

10 famous people and Their Nazi sympathies

10 Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound, a towering modernist poet who rubbed shoulders with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, took a dramatic turn after World I. He settled in Italy, openly defying his native United Kingdom, and threw his support behind Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. By 1933 he was meeting the Italian dictator, and during the years leading up to and throughout World II he broadcast from Rome Radio, cheering Mussolini and Hitler while lambasting Jews.

When the Allies liberated Italy, Pound was seized, faced treason charges in the United States, and endured a three‑week stint in an outdoor cage before suffering a mental collapse. He famously called Hitler “a saint” to reporters and pleaded for a final broadcast asking for leniency toward Germany. After a 13‑year stay in a U.S. psychiatric hospital, he returned to Italy, still espousing anti‑Jewish views, and died in 1972, leaving a literary heritage that remains celebrated alongside a deeply controversial personal record.

9 Walt Disney

The notion that the mastermind behind the world‑renowned Disney empire might have entertained pro‑Nazi sentiments is both startling and hotly debated. Reports indicate that Disney attended a handful of gatherings in the 1930s that functioned essentially as U.S. Nazi Party meetings. In the era before the full horror of Hitler’s regime became widely known, elite circles in both America and Britain occasionally echoed fascist ideas, and Disney appears to have been among those linked to such events. A book titled Hitler’s Doubles even claims Disney participated in pro‑Nazi meetings prior to the war.

Adding to the controversy, Disney once hosted Leni Riefenstahl—renowned for directing the Nazi propaganda films Olympia and Triumph des Willens—and gave her a studio tour, drawing criticism. Yet Disney also produced anti‑Nazi shorts such as Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, which muddies the historical picture. The true extent of his Nazi connections may never be definitively resolved.

8 Edward VIII

Edward VIII, perhaps the most recognizable name on this list, combined personal scandal with political intrigue. His 1936 abdication to marry American Wallis Simpson sparked a constitutional crisis, but it also coincided with a close rapport with Adolf Hitler. Hitler reportedly admired Edward, and the king’s abdication was perceived as a blow to the German leader’s hopes of cultivating a friendly British monarch. In 1937 the couple visited Nazi Germany, posing for photographs alongside Hitler.

During World II British officials regarded Edward as a potential threat to democracy, fearing that Hitler might reinstall him if Britain fell. To keep him away from the political arena, he was appointed governor of the Bahamas. Numerous accounts document Edward’s vocal support for Hitler and fascist policies, leading many historians to label both him and his wife as sympathetic to fascism—a contentious legacy for the British monarchy.

7 Henry Ford

Industrial titan Henry Ford revolutionized automobile production with the moving assembly line, but his writings reveal a darker side. In a 1920 interview with the New York World, he denounced what he called the “International Jew,” alleging Jewish conspiracies behind World I. The New York Times later reported that Hitler kept a large portrait of Ford on his office wall, admiring the American magnate. Hitler even mentioned Ford in Mein Kampf, praising him as a “single great man” who remained independent of Jewish influence.

In 1938, a year before the invasion of Poland, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—the highest honor a non‑German could attain—making him the sole American recipient. His anti‑Semitic newspaper series, The International Jew, was cited during the Nuremberg Trials as influential Nazi propaganda. Ford passed away in 1947, leaving a legacy of both automotive innovation and controversial political sympathies.

6 Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh vaulted to fame in 1927 when he solo‑flied from New York to Paris, winning the Orteig Prize and becoming an American hero. Tragedy struck in 1932 when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered, a crime that seized the nation’s attention. Yet Lindbergh’s later years are marked by his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement against Nazi Germany and a series of actions that suggested a pro‑German stance.

In June 1936, Lindbergh toured Germany on a U.S. government mission to assess German aviation, sitting near Hitler during the opening of the Berlin Olympics—though he never directly conversed with the Führer. His calls for U.S. neutrality attracted members of the German‑American Bund, a pro‑Nazi organization, to his speeches. While Lindbergh never openly declared Nazi allegiance, his ambiguous position and public statements caused a significant backlash in America.

5 Charles Coughlin

Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman‑Catholic priest, wielded the power of radio in the pre‑war era to reach millions with his fiery sermons. He championed fascist regimes, including the Third Reich, positioning himself as a bulwark against both communism and what he claimed was Jewish control of banking. In November 1938, Coughlin controversially framed the Kristallnacht pogrom as a persecution of Christians, prompting widespread outrage.

After the United States entered the war, Coughlin was silenced by the government, his radio program cancelled and his newspaper Social Justice shut down. Though he denied anti‑Semitic leanings, evidence—including alleged financial support from Nazi Germany—suggests he was sympathetic to Hitler’s cause, and he spent the remainder of his life confined to parish duties.

4 Cliveden Set

The “Cliveden set” referred to a circle of affluent Britons who convened at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire estate of Nancy and Waldorf Astor, during the inter‑war years. Dubbed in 1937, the group was accused of harboring anti‑Semitic sentiments and wielding significant influence over senior British officials. Their connections allegedly extended to high‑ranking Nazi officials, and they were thought to have swayed Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

More recent scholarship suggests the Cliveden set may have been mischaracterized, noting that members were reportedly slated for immediate arrest had Germany successfully invaded Britain. Critics like Claud Cockburn of The Week labeled the group as “fake news” in hindsight. Nonetheless, the set remains forever linked in popular memory to pro‑German sympathies.

3 Sir Oswald Mosley

Sir Oswald Mosley stands out as perhaps the most overt Nazi sympathizer on this list. After a failed parliamentary bid in 1931, he traveled to Mussolini’s Italy in 1936, emerging convinced that fascism offered the best antidote to communism. He founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, whose “blackshirts” terrorized Jewish neighborhoods and performed the Nazi salute in unison with Mosley.

In 1936 Mosley married Diana Guinness at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler himself in attendance. During World II, Mosley attempted to persuade the British government to accept Hitler’s peace overtures, leading to his arrest and house‑arrest for the war’s duration. While his influence waned after the Blitz, he continued to advocate for a united Europe after the conflict.

2 Philip Johnson

Architect Philip Johnson, celebrated for his glass‑house masterpiece in Connecticut, was an ardent admirer of Hitler’s Third Reich before the war erupted. He contributed articles to Father Coughlin’s anti‑Semitic newspaper Social Justice and traveled to Nazi Germany to cover the massive Nuremberg rallies, reportedly enthralled by their spectacle and forging contacts with senior Nazi officials.

In 1940 the FBI uncovered Johnson’s role in funneling German propaganda to the United States on the Nazis’ behalf, and he described the destruction of Warsaw as a “stirring spectacle.” Though he later tried to distance himself after the war, a 2018 New Yorker profile noted that Johnson still praised Hitler, calling him “better than Roosevelt” in a 1964 interview.

1 Viscount Rothermere

Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, may not be a household name today, but he helped forge two of Britain’s most influential tabloids—the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. Between the wars, Rothermere corresponded directly with Hitler, publishing articles that effectively championed fascist ideas. He also backed Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, using his media empire to promote their agenda.

Rothermere even paid an annual retainer to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a notorious German spy monitored by British and American authorities, with the aim of advancing Nazi interests and gaining closer access to Hitler. In 1939 he authored My Fight to Rearm Britain, urging greater defense spending. Despite his deep ties to the Nazi regime, his influence ultimately failed to sway British public opinion.

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