From Nuremberg to Kiev: Washington's Whitewashing of Nazism

On the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials in November 1945, the world's attention has been distracted from the atrocities in Ukraine by the ones in Paris, Syria, and Egypt.

by Professor Arthur Noble

"The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being tolerated."

These were the solemn warning words of Robert H Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor, at the Nuremberg (German: Nürnberg) Trials of German Nazis on 21 November 1945. By the end of World War II the Nazis' regime of terror had led to the collapse of civilisation and to human suffering on a scale previously unimaginable. For the first time in world history, the perpetrators of Nazi Germany's horrendous crimes against humanity were called to answer for their evil deeds in Court Room 600 of Nuremberg Palace of Justice. The proceedings against Hitler's evil men - Göring, Hess, Speer, Bormann and many others - were instrumental in the subsequent development of international criminal law.

They were led by the country which the free world at that time still admired as the champion of justice, freedom and democracy - the United States of America - and supported by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France. After considering the evidence against the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the SS and the other criminal organisations, the Nuremberg Tribunal pronounced judgement: twelve deaths by hanging, three life sentences, four long-term prison sentences, and only three acquittals. Today Washington refuses to support the 2014 UN resolution against Nazism Seven decades later the US has abandoned - and actually reversed - those high ideals which it preached and practised at Nuremberg and which throughout its previous history had gained it the respect and admiration of the free and democratic world. Today Washington both ignores and tolerates the wrongs of which Nuremberg's Chief Prosecutor spoke. The US now supports Nazism, as is confirmed by the fact that Ukraine (whose illegal Nazi-led coup Washington plotted and financed), together with the US itself, and now the latter's latest puppet Canada, were the only three countries to vote against the UN resolution of 17 November 2014 to combat the "glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance".

The refusal of the US to support the resolution has been justly denounced as Washington's "new low in mindless, destructive Russophobia" which is leading the world to the brink of disaster. What one does not condemn, one supports. Shamefully, the UK and Germany abstained from the vote. Eric Lichtblau's new book The Nazis next door: How America became a safe haven for Hitler's men exposes in detail the secret history of how America, immediately after World War II, already became home to thousands of Nazi war criminals, many of whom were brought there by the OSS and the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. They included senior officers in the Nazi party under Hitler as well as Nazi collaborators, whose records were cleansed by the removal of much of the Nazi material.

Today the White House actively promotes, finances and supports the modern successors of the same Nazi criminals. Washington-sponsored subversion The notorious Victoria Nuland speech, which openly admitted that the White House had already spent $5 billion deliberately to "subvert Ukraine" through its direct involvement in the 2014 illegal coup in Kiev, provided ample proof of a complete volte face in Washington's attitude towards Nazism since Nuremberg. It was indisputable evidence that the 'neocons' - Obama, Biden, McCain, Cheney, Kerry and the rest of their subordinates - had sided, for their own geopolitical ends, with the contemporary Ukrainian successors of the Nazis of the Third Reich. In January 2014 about 15,000 supporters marched on Kiev's Independence Square to honour Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, who had aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. Some demonstrators actually wore the uniform of a Ukrainian division of the German army during World War II, while others chanted the slogan 'Ukraine above all' - an echo of 'Deutschland über alles'.

Today the White House shenanigans have had no qualms about being photographed with the members of this movement, among them the Arch-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok who is the current leader of Svoboda ('Freedom'), the Neo-Nazi party supported and financed by Washington which led the armed 'protest movement' in Kiev and glorified World War II Ukrainian Nazi fighters. Tyahnybok's factually twisted pronouncement that his hero Bandera had fought against "Russians, Jewry and other crap" evoked memories of Hitler's goal of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, and revealed that Germany is once again at the helm of the action to turn Ukraine into a stepping-stone in the US global game against Russia. If the naïve dupes of the Goebbels-style propaganda still being spewed out by the contemporary Western corporate media are unable or unwilling to recognise these facts, then the deliberate distortion, lies and censorship have been very successful indeed. Dangers of Nazi glorification Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote: "The hardening anti-Russian rhetoric issuing from Washington and its punk EU puppet states places the world on the road to extinction. [...] The entire cadre of neocon warmongers should be arrested and indefinitely detained before they destroy humanity."

Following their chaotic failure to incorporate Ukraine and the Crimea into their geopolitical orbit, they are now - largely obscured by the horrendous events in Paris and Syria - rearming Kiev in a new attempt to drive Russia towards "vassalage or war". Rodney Atkinson, who was foremost in analysing the Nazi origins and aims of the EU - notably in his book And into the Fire: Fascist Elements in Post War Europe and the Development of the European Union - posted an article on his Freenations website aptly entitled "US, Canada, Ukraine vote for Nazi Glorification".

Like his book, the article is essential reading. He notes "the imperialist corporatist expansion of the European Union with the financial help and military power of Washington", and exposes "the celebration of Nazi collaborators [...] as fighters in nationalist resistance movements", mentioning such glorifications in Ukraine, Croatia and Bosnia "where German Europe has been pleased to stir up old fascist traditions in order to break up nation states and extend the borders of German Europe - or 'The European Union' as we call it". Atkinson condemns the enthusiastic support for this policy by Cameron and Hague, "who daily sound more like cheerleaders for German expansionism". He finds similarities with the situation in the First World War and also mentions the "grim" and "repulsive" history of Ukraine in the Second World War "with some of the worst of the Nazi criminals and concentration camp commissars either being condemned after the war, or allowed to escape through Rome and the Vatican's 'ratlines' to South America". He concludes that with the vote on the resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism, since then formally adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2014, "yet another chapter in the moral, financial and political descent of western Europe will be written". Forgetful of history, the post-Christian, "godless" West - to use a recent famous description by Russian President Vladimir Putin - is now disastrously siding with fascism and already supplying Kiev with military hardware while the world's attention is distracted towards the current events in Paris and Syria.

German troops are already on the ground in Ukraine in breach of international law, and thus a renewed attempt to undo the failures of the West's anti-Russian manoeuvring is being made. It is doomed to be a new disastrous failure and will achieve nothing but more chaos, devastation and human suffering, and the blame will again wrongly be put on Russia. The lessons of history are never learned.