The Unburied Corpses: How American Empire Recycles Fascism

From European Nazis to Japanese war criminals; from Latin American death squads to Salafist Jihadists, the names of the actors and enemies may change, but the script remains the same.

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire

We are living through a global conflict of connected crises. Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, the South China Sea and in Ukraine, where battalions adorned with neo-Nazi insignia fight with Western arms. Meanwhile, in the halls of European power the ancestry of leaders echoes with fascist collaboration. These are not historical accidents but the symptomatic convulsions of an Empire in continuity, repurposing its oldest tools to preserve a core of power that is fundamentally unchanged. Behind the headlines of military alliances and ideological battles lies a deeper, more disturbing truth—a war waged not against fascism, but with it.

This series, The Anatomy of Empire, has traced the obscured path that brought us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of cold calculation; not of isolated compromises, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. We have seen how the engines of capital accumulation require global expansion and how raw military power was institutionalized to secure it. Now, we turn to the system’s most cynical and durable adaptation: the wholesale absorption of its defeated enemy into the very infrastructure designed to fight the next enemy.

Parts of this story are familiar, often presented as isolated incidents and justified as moral compromises in the name of realpolitik. But this is not true. Taken together they represent a cold, clear, calculated strategy, executed with the presence of foresight, to wholesale incorporate the infrastructure of fascism into the architecture of the Empire’s next war of choice: The Cold War.

This was not merely the recruitment of a few useful individuals, but the systematic integration of personnel, tactics, and ideologies into intelligence agencies, scientific programs, and military commands. A clandestine architecture whose logical endpoint is not peace, but a state of perpetual, undeclared war waged with democratic façades and fascist instruments.

It was a corporate takeover that transformed a group of disparate regional start-ups into a global franchise.

An Unfortunate Oversight?

BBC article.

In June 2025, as the British government announced the appointment of Blaise Metreweli as the first female head of its Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a discovery in a German archive sent ripples through the diplomatic world. The new spymaster’s grandfather, Konstantin Dobrovolsky, was not just a soldier but a dedicated Nazi collaborator in German-occupied Ukraine.

Archival evidence, some of which was still being hunted by Soviet authorities as late as 1969, labels him “The Butcher” or “Agent 30”. In his own letters to Nazi superiors, he wrote “Heil Hitler,” boasted of his personal involvement in “the extermination of the Jews,” and was implicated in the looting of victims and the mocking of sexual violence against female prisoners. For her part, Metreweli has never met her grandfather, and the British Foreign Office, downplaying the connection, stated her ancestors “had features of conflict and division, just like many people of Eastern European origin”.

This is more than a personal family secret; it is a profound institutional irony. The newly appointed leader of one of the West’s most powerful intelligence agencies is the descendant of a man who served the very ideology the Allies vowed to destroy. Her career represents a pinnacle of Western state power, yet her family’s history is rooted in the fascist forces that power was mobilized to defeat. This contradiction is not an anomaly but a pattern—one that began even before the ashes of World War II had settled.

The case of Blaise Metreweli’s family shows how the legacy of those choices, and the shadows of those recycled fascists, are woven into the very fabric of the modern security state.

This 2025 scandal finds its roots in the immediate post-war decisions, beginning with figures like SS General Karl Wolff. This is the story of how and why those choices were made.

The Die is Cast: A Deal with the Devil

On a cold March morning in 1945, as the Third Reich crumbled, SS General Karl Wolff, a man intimately acquainted with the mechanics of genocide, slipped across the Swiss border. His destination was a quiet villa above Lake Lugano. As the former commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp’s deportation process, Wolff was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. He was precisely the kind of architect of terror the world expected to see in the dock at Nuremberg, condemned to hang for his crimes against humanity.

Instead, he was bargaining with Allen Dulles, America’s top spymaster in Europe. The deal they struck was starkly pragmatic: in exchange for arranging the surrender of all German forces in Northern Italy, Wolff’s past would be quietly forgotten. He would walk free. Dulles, who would soon become the first civilian Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had set a chilling precedent. For the ascendant American empire, the existential enemy was no longer fascism—it was socialism. And the fascists, far from being buried in the rubble of Berlin, were about to be recycled into Washington’s new, global project.

This was not an isolated act of realpolitik, but a foundational pattern. From the ashes of World War II, the United States did not destroy fascism; it selectively salvaged it. The very forces the world had united to militarily defeat were systematically integrated into the West’s emerging Cold War architecture. This is the story of that great recycling project—a project that reveals fascism not as an alien intruder into the Western order, but as its dark twin, an emergency option that capitalism has never been afraid to deploy.

From European Nazis to Japanese war criminals; from South American death squads to salafist Jihadists, the names of the actors and enemies may change, but the script remains the same.

East German school textbook map of former Nazi-era oficials serving West Germany after the War.

Fascism: Capitalism Unmasked

To understand how American Empire is capable of absorbing the most retrograde reactionary elements with such moral effortlessness, it is critical to understand the nature of fascism and its relationship to capitalism.

Mainstream history often treats fascism as an aberration—a psychotic break in the progress of liberal democracy, born from national humiliation and demagogic frenzy. This comforting narrative is a profound misconception. Fascism is not an alien intrusion into capitalism. It is capitalism itself, stripped of its democratic façade, mobilized with open violence when the system feels its rule is under existential threat.

At its core, capitalism is a system of class domination. In ordinary times, liberal democracy serves as its most effective political shell. Elections, parliaments, and constitutions provide the illusion of popular sovereignty, while the underlying reality of economic power - corporate monopolies, banking elites, imperialist alliances—remains untouched. But when crises deepen - when workers’ movements rise, when colonized peoples demand liberation, when economic collapse threatens - the ruling class reaches for sharper tools. Fascism becomes capitalism’s emergency option: a way to defend property and empire through terror, nationalism, and war.

In interwar Europe, Italian and German fascism did not emerge from a vacuum. They were bankrolled by industrialists and landowners terrified of socialist revolution. Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts were recruited as shock troops against unions, communists, and striking workers. The corporate elite calculated that it was better to risk a dictatorship than to lose private property and imperial markets. Fascism is, in essence, the militant wing of capitalism, smashing democracy in order to preserve capitalist power.

Imperialism gave this dynamic a global stage. Expansionist war was not merely ideological; it was economic. Hitler’s drive for lebensraum in the East was about conquering resources and enslaving labor for German industry. Japan’s empire in China and Southeast Asia, justified with talk of racial destiny, served industrial monopolies hungry for oil, rubber, and metals. Fascism’s unparalleled brutality was capitalism’s hunger unrestrained, cloaked in the language of nation and race.

After World War II, the Western powers claimed to have buried this monster for good. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were presented as a moral reckoning. Yet, even as the trials proceeded, a parallel process was underway. Fascist forces were being quietly disinterred and recycled into the Cold War order. Nazis were absorbed into U.S. intelligence; Japanese war criminals were spared to build America’s Asian alliance system; reactionary militias and émigré networks were repurposed as weapons against socialism across Europe and beyond. When liberal democracy was not enough to secure empire, fascists were once again called upon as shock troops.

The Gehlen Organization: Hitler’s Spymaster Reborn

Just months after the war’s end, in a U.S. POW camp in Bavaria, General Reinhard Gehlen—Hitler’s chief of intelligence on the Eastern Front—made a calculated pitch to his American captors. He had meticulously preserved his files on the Soviets. He had networks of agents still active across Eastern Europe. All he needed was U.S. support to reactivate them. The fledgling CIA, recognizing an unparalleled intelligence windfall, obliged.

Thus, the Gehlen Organization was born, becoming the backbone of American espionage in Europe. Staffed with thousands of Wehrmacht and SS veterans, it supplied Washington with Cold War data while quietly protecting its own from prosecution. This was not a mere alliance of convenience; it was a wholesale adoption of the Nazi intelligence apparatus. By 1956, Gehlen’s network was formally institutionalized as West Germany’s official intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In a stunning reality, NATO’s spy system was, quite literally, a Nazi enterprise under new management.

This clandestine collaboration provided cover for even darker endeavors. Under the umbrella of the MKUltra project, the CIA conducted secret mind control and interrogation experiments on West German soil. High doses of LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture were administered to unwitting subjects in safe houses and medical facilities. In one grotesque episode, the agency funded experiments on 311 Danish orphans in the 1960s, subjecting them to LSD and electroshock to study schizophrenia. To aid these efforts, the CIA actively recruited former Nazi scientists, leveraging their expertise in human experimentation gleaned from wartime atrocities. The ethical abyss of the camps had not been closed; it had been repurposed, with most records deliberately destroyed in the 1970s to conceal its existence.

Operation Paperclip: The Scientists of the Shoah

Parallel to the intelligence coup was a scientific one. Operation Paperclip was a secret program to bring more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians—including many former Nazi Party members and accused war criminals—to work in the United States. Justified as a necessity to deny this expertise to the Soviets, it represented a conscious moral compromise on a staggering scale.

The recruits were not minor figures. Among them was Wernher von Braun, the pioneering rocket scientist who would later become a beloved American icon as the head of NASA’s Apollo program. His V-2 rockets, built with the slave labor of concentration camp prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora, had rained down on London and Antwerp. His program manager, Arthur Rudolph, was also brought over, despite his direct involvement in the brutal exploitation of these slaves. Similarly, Hubertus Strughold, the so-called “father of space medicine,” had participated in grotesque human experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Their pasts were whitewashed, their expertise valued above the lives they had destroyed.

The logic was cold and clear: the technological imperative of the Cold War trumped the moral imperative of justice. The rockets that had terrorized Allied cities would now propel America to the moon, their origins in unimaginable human suffering conveniently forgotten.

Wernher von Braun at his desk at Marshall Space Flight Center.

From Nazi to NATO

Recycling continued at the military operational level too. Former Wehrmacht and SS officers were systematically integrated into NATO military structures and Western intelligence services. Western planners argued that experienced German military personnel were essential for building an effective force against the Soviet Union. By 1955, approximately 300 former Wehrmacht officers had been integrated into senior positions within the West German military (Bundeswehr).

Notable examples included Adolf Heusinger (former Wehrmacht lieutenant general who became NATO chairman) and Hans Speidel (Rommel’s former chief of staff who became NATO commander). Both had been implicated in illegal wartime activities but were rehabilitated due to their strategic expertise and anti-communist credentials.

Operation Gladio: NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Networks and the Strategy of Tension

Operation Gladio represented one of the most extensive postwar continuations of fascist-era personnel and methodologies, incorporating former fascist sympathizers and operatives into NATO-backed structures. While “Gladio” specifically referred to NATO’s Italian branch, the term is commonly applied to similar operations throughout Western Europe.

Established in 1956, ostensibly as a covert stay-behind network to organize resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact conquest of Europe, it created paramilitary structures that engaged in psychological operations and false-flag terror attacks.

Evidence links these networks to several terrorist incidents during Italy’s “Years of Lead” in the 1970s-1980s, including the Piazza Fontana bombing (1969) and Bologna massacre (1980). Such atrocities were intended to discredit leftist political movements and maintain anti-communist political dominance in Western Europe. The networks were ultimately disbanded in 1990 after their existence was publicly revealed.

Bandera’s Ghosts: From Operation Aerodynamic to the Azov Brigade

As World War II ended and the Cold War dawned, yesterday’s fascists quickly became tomorrow’s freedom fighters. Nowhere is this clearer than in the story of Operation Aerodynamic, a covert CIA program launched in the late 1940s to rehabilitate and weaponize Ukrainian ultra-nationalists – an episode with repercussions into the immediate present.

The program targeted remnants of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Units that had actively collaborated with Nazi Germany, participated in pogroms against Jews and Poles, and carried out campaigns of mass ethnic cleansing. Yet to Washington, their fanatical anti-Soviet credentials outweighed their fascist crimes.

Aerodynamic funneled money, propaganda, and arms into Bandera’s networks, recruiting former members of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division and smuggling them across the Iron Curtain to establish anti-Soviet resistance. While largely ineffective due to Soviet counterintelligence, the program had a profound long-term impact. By funneling resources to Ukrainian émigré groups in the West, it helped sustain a far-right ideology that would otherwise have faded. Over decades, émigré publications, funded and supported by Western intelligence, glorified Bandera’s legacy as a nationalist hero rather than a fascist collaborator.

This nurtured mythology returned to Ukraine with a vengeance after the Soviet collapse. As the country fractured in the 1990s, these ultra-nationalist movements, preserved under Western patronage, found fertile ground. By the 2014 Maidan coup, they had crystallized into paramilitary formations like the Azov Battalion. Azov’s iconography - Wolfsangel symbols, SS-style insignia, and open veneration of Bandera - is no historical accident. It is the living continuation of fascist ideology.

Today, Azov is formally integrated into Ukraine’s military and receives NATO training and Western weapons. The genealogy is clear: from CIA-sponsored émigrés to front-line fascist regiments, the continuity is unbroken.

Declassified CIA files on Operation AERODYNAMIC

The Dismemberment of Yugoslavia: A Cynical Masterpiece

Networks like those used against the Soviet Union were used to dismantle another multi-ethnic socialist state: Yugoslavia. Tolerated by the West as a thorn in Moscow’s side, Yugoslavia lost its utility after the Soviet collapse. For a newly unified Germany and its NATO allies, the Balkan republics represented golden opportunities for asset stripping, captive markets, and pools of cheap, skilled labor.

The assault was multi-pronged. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund extended loans to Belgrade, only to later turn the screws, prescribing a brutal regime of austerity, privatization, and the dismantling of the workers’ self-management system. The result was economic despair, hyperinflation, and the deliberate fracturing of the social contract that had bound the republics together.

Into this volatile mix, Western intelligence agencies poured fuel. The BND—the very same Gehlen Organization born from the SS—leveraged its Cold War-era networks of former Nazi collaborators, including the notoriously brutal Croatian Ustaše and Serbian Chetnik elements. These fascist assets, valued for their fervent anti-communism and penchant for violence, were used to funnel weapons, training, and resources to ultra-nationalist factions, exacerbating ethnic divisions and ensuring the conflict would be bloody and decisive. The Western media either whitewashed these actors or turned a blind eye, presenting a simplistic narrative of ancient ethnic hatreds to obscure a calculated campaign of economic and covert political sabotage.

The Pacific Theater: From Monsters to Allies

This pattern of rehabilitation was global. In Japan, few men seemed more irredeemable in 1945 than Nobusuke Kishi - the grandfather of Shinzo Abe. As a key planner of Japan’s wartime empire, he had overseen forced labor programs and economic exploitation in the puppet state of Manchukuo, earning the moniker “the Showa-era monster.” Arrested as a Class-A war criminal suspect, he was expected to face the gallows.

Nobusuke Kishi with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office.

Instead, with the Cold War intensifying after Mao’s victory in China, American priorities shifted. Japan was now needed as an industrial bulwark against communism. Kishi, released from prison in 1948 without trial, reemerged as a central figure in Japanese conservative politics. With CIA backing funneled into the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party, his wartime technocratic skills were now celebrated. By 1957, the former “monster” was Prime Minister, negotiating the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and crushing domestic left-wing protests. For Washington, he was perfect proof that yesterday’s enemy could become today’s indispensable ally.

This moral abdication reached its nadir with Unit 731. This Japanese biological warfare unit in Manchuria had conducted lethal experiments on hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Korean prisoners, testing plague, anthrax, and frostbite. After the war, General Douglas MacArthur secretly negotiated a deal: full immunity from prosecution for all Unit 731 personnel in exchange for their extensive research data. The goal was to acquire Japan’s advanced biological weapons knowledge before the Soviets could. The architects of some of the war’s most horrific crimes were never brought to justice, their data deemed a strategic asset in the new conflict.

Unit 731 in Manchuria.

From Fascists to Jihadists: The Template Lives On

The cynical recycling of reactionary forces, perfected in the ashes of WWII, did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This pattern of creating and empowering monsters has continued to define 21st-century imperialism. The template simply found new enemies and new assets. In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan administrations, viewing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through a Cold War lens, launched Operation Cyclone, a massive CIA program to arm and fund Islamist fighters.

The mujahideen were glorified in Western media as “freedom fighters,” their medieval ideology and brutal tactics ignored in service of a larger geopolitical goal. Just as with Bandera’s nationalists, their fervent anti-communism laundered their extremism. From this very CIA-funded crucible, hardened and globally networked, emerged Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

In the Balkans, compelling evidence indicates that Western intelligence agencies, in their drive to dismantle Yugoslavia, leveraged not only revived fascist networks but also deployed jihadist elements - veterans of the very Afghan war the U.S. had sponsored - to fight against Serbian forces. This cynical fusion of old and new reactionary forces highlights a brutal pragmatism: any weapon, any ally, will do.

The template was exported globally. In Latin America, the U.S. doctrine of backing anti-communist terror manifested in the training and support of death squads to crush leftist movements. The most infamous instructor was Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.” After being shielded and employed by U.S. intelligence in Europe, this wanted Gestapo chief was eventually exfiltrated to South America. There, he lent his expertise in torture and counter-insurgency to the brutal regimes of Bolivia and others, even allegedly helping the CIA hunt down and capture Che Guevara in 1967. The circle was viciously complete: a Nazi, saved by America, used to destroy a socialist icon.

Decades later, the playbook remained unchanged. The 2003 invasion of Iraq deliberately dismantled the secular state, creating a power vacuum that empowered sectarian militias and, ultimately, gave birth to the Islamic State. In Syria and Libya, U.S. and allied interventions again funneled arms to a mosaic of rebel groups, directly strengthening Salafi-jihadist elements in the name of toppling undesirable governments.

The result has been the same: regional devastation, unimaginable human suffering, and the strengthening of the very extremist forces that threaten global stability. The names and ideologies of the assets change, but the imperial logic remains constant: when faced with a challenge to its dominance, capitalism will always seek out the most ruthless shock troops available, no matter the long-term cost.

Conclusion: To Truly Defeat Fascism, We Must Defeat Capitalism

The stories of Karl Wolff’s freedom, Reinhard Gehlen’s organization, Wernher von Braun’s career, and Stepan Bandera’s resurrected legacy are not merely tales of moral compromise. They are the blueprint of empire. The United States did not destroy fascism in 1945; it saved it, integrating its personnel, its methodologies, and its ideological fervor into its own security architecture. The “ratlines” that helped Nazis escape to South America, the Operation Gladio stay-behind armies that used fascist to terrorize left-wing movements in Europe, the support for Franco in Spain—all were part of the same coherent strategy.

This history strips away the comforting myth that fascism stands diametrically opposed to Western democracy. The truth is harsher and more chilling: liberal democracy and fascism are two faces of the same capitalist coin. One face wears the mask of rights, freedoms, and procedural norms; the other bares its teeth in open repression and racialized violence. When workers and oppressed peoples rise, when challenges to capital and empire become too potent, the system does not hesitate to switch masks.

The lesson is stark. Fascism cannot be permanently defeated by defending liberal democracy alone, because it is from the crises of that very system that fascism draws its strength. It grows from the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the relentless violence of imperialism. To end its perpetual cycle of recycling—to finally bury the corpse that the United States and its allies have kept walking for eighty years—we must confront and dismantle the system that summons it back to life: the global rule of capital itself.

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