Gabriel Rockhill | Critical Theory Workshop

The birth of NATO is often described, by bourgeois historians, as the result of the recognition that a north Atlantic defense organization was necessary in order to contain the so-called Soviet threat. What the bourgeois historians fail to mention is that the idea that an anticommunist military alliance between Western Europe and the US was so strongly supported by a major figure in German politics that NATO has sometimes been described as his brainchild. This man was Heinrich Himmler, renowned for his role as the leader of the SS and one of the main architects of the Nazi Holocaust.

The heart of the Second World War was in the East, where Hitler, with the financial backing of major Western capitalists, vowed to destroy what fourteen capitalist states had failed to eradicate in the wake of 1917: actually existing socialism. Once it became clear to Himmler that this war had failed, beginning around the time of the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, he started making secret overtures to the West in order to form an alliance that would allow them, collectively, to do what the Nazis—as well as the Japanese fascists—were incapable of doing on their own. This was appealing to sectors of the Western elite, and powerful figures in the leading imperialist countries shared Himmler’s opinion. Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, complained that his country was fighting the wrong enemy because the Nazis were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the real opponent was godless communism.

Dulles, working at the time for the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was one of Himmler’s interlocutors for the planned anticommunist north Atlantic alliance. General Karl Wolff, formerly Himmler’s right-hand man, offered Dulles, in return for postwar amnesty, to develop, with his Nazi allies, an intelligence network against Stalin. This is exactly what happened, and Dulles integrated many other Nazis and fascists into the ranks of an anticommunist international. This included the head of the Nazi intelligence service focused on the USSR, Reinhard Gehlen, who was appointed by the CIA to head West German intelligence after the war, where he proceeded to hire many of his Nazi collaborators. It also comprised, as part of Operation Sunrise in Italy, Valerio Borghese, the man known as the Black Prince and one of the major leaders of postwar fascism, who was saved from the communists by the OSS and then worked for the CIA. The Japanese official who signed the declaration of war against the US, Nobusuke Kishi, who was known as the “Devil of Shōwa” for his brutal rule of a Japanese colony in Northeast China, was also rehabilitated by the infamous Agency, which financed his rise to become the Prime Minister of Japan. These examples are only the tip of the iceberg, however, since an incalculable number of fascists were rehabilitated after the Second World War, at least 10,000 of which were brought directly to the US.

When NATO was officially established in 1949, Portugal was one of its founding members. It was a fascist dictatorship at the time, which demonstrates that NATO was, from its very founding, a military alliance of the imperialist powers—be they bourgeois democracies or fascist states—against communism, which is precisely what Himmler had had in mind. Greece joined NATO in 1953, after the communists, who had played a leading role in liberating the country from the Nazis, had lost a brutal war against their new anticommunist occupiers: the UK and the US. Having first reinstated the profascist King and then established a rightwing puppet government, the Western imperialist powers welcomed Greece into NATO once it had been remade into a reliable anticommunist client state. These patterns are visible throughout NATO’s long history, and the Ukraine is but one of the latest versions of a fascistic anticommunist client state.

West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the same year that the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany was authorized through the Paris Accords. The West German government screened volunteers and admitted 61 generals and admirals from the Nazi Wehrmacht into its new military, as well as many more at lower ranks. Among the most senior Nazi officers integrated into the West German military were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who were sworn in as its first two lieutenant generals. Speidel became “chief of the Combined Forces Department at the Ministry of Defense” and served as one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s key military advisers (a position later occupied by Heusinger). Heusinger, whom Hitler had referred to as “my true and loyal collaborator,” became West Germany’s senior serving military officer, the equivalent of the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also served as chief of evaluation for the CIA’s Gehlen Organization, performing his task so well that the Agency “seriously considered” him for Gehlen’s position, according to internal documents. He served as a CIA agent, who “continued to consult with and confide in CIA representatives,” who reported that they “found Heusinger’s political views clearly in the interest of the U.S.” These two Nazi leaders were both promoted and became West Germany’s first four-star generals.

Both of these major Nazi officers played key roles in NATO. In 1954, Speidel was appointed as the principal “negotiator on the question of German entry into NATO.” He oversaw the integration of West Germany’s armed forces into NATO and was appointed chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe. This meant that Speidel was “the senior operational commander of all German, American, French and British divisions assigned to NATO’s Central Region.” A high-ranking Nazi official, directly involved in the genocidal war of elimination against the USSR, would thus have been the senior NATO ground commander if war broke out with the Warsaw Pact countries. Heusinger became NATO’s “senior military officer and chief military adviser to the secretary general,” serving as the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, “the highest rank in the organization’s non-civilian branch.”
Speidel and Heusinger, like many others who were integrated into NATO, had not been low-ranking Nazis. Speidel was promoted to Lieutenant general in January 1944, and he received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his service in the anti-Soviet war of elimination. Heusinger, according to US Senator Wayne Morse’s 1961 fact sheet, had become the “chief of operations on Hitler’s general staff” in 1941 and was “responsible for the military planning of all Nazi invasions from then on.” He commanded the special extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) that were tasked with liquidating “all Jews and other groups.” Heusinger explained his view on these matters with remarkable candor: “It had always been my personal opinion that the treatment of the civilian population and the methods of anti-partisan warfare (extermination) presented the highest political and military leaders with a welcomed opportunity for carrying out their plans, namely, the systematic extermination of Slavism and Jewry.”

Speidel and Heusinger were far from the only Germans to follow the Nazi to NATO pipeline, but their leadership positions reveal how brazen NATO has been regarding its fascist ties. They were also both involved in setting up stay behind armies, which were secret fascist militias whose purported objective was originally to serve as military forces that would stay behind enemy lines to carry out acts of sabotage, espionage, exfiltration, etc. in the case of a Soviet invasion. In Germany, the Nazi colonel Albert Schnez set up a network of some 2,000 Nazi officers and 10,000 soldiers, claiming to be able to mobilize 40,000 fighters in the event of a war. They had financial backing from the business world and regularly shared intelligence with the Gehlen Organization. Gehlen himself was “the spiritual father of Stay Behind in Germany.” Schnez’s organization also had contacts with two other stay-behind Nazi networks, both of which were secretly funded by the U.S.: the Technischer Dienst (Technical Service) and the League of German Youth.

The stay behind armies that these Nazi leaders established across West Germany were part of a Western European network of sub rosa fascist militias set up by the CIA, MI6, and NATO. These organizations recruited Nazis, fascists, and other extreme rightwing anticommunists, provided them with weapons and ammunition, and fully equipped them for waging war. They were activated to commit false flag terrorist attacks, targeting the civilian population, which were blamed on communists in order to justify crackdowns and drum up support for so-called law and order governments. This anticommunist strategy of tension was extremely deadly, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands. NATO was behind these false flag terrorist attacks, and NATO’s Nazis were—at a minimum—involved in setting up the organizations that committed them.
The well-known joke that NATO is really NAFO, the North Atlantic Fascist Organization, is no joke at all. It is a deadly serious reality, and it needs to be changed. The fight against NAFO is an essential part of the broader struggle against fascism and imperialism.