On May 8, 1945, the German armed forces signed their unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. WWII, at least in Europe, was over. And now that the guns had fallen silent, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had to face a daunting conundrum: how to deal with the active members of the National Socialist Party, the SS, the Wehrmacht and other organisations who had committed some rather extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity? On top of that, how to rid the fabric of the fallen III Recih’s society from the pernicious influence of an extremist ideology so many had bought into? Afterall, in some respects with those who had bought into the ideology wholly, it would have been like going back to the 1700s American South and trying to convince a mass group of slave owners to completely, and almost immediately, rethink their ideas on slavery and those of African descent in the nation. A seemingly impossible task. And then beyond ideological shifts, Just from a practical standpoint, how to speed up economic recovery for the nation and ensure nothing like this would happen again in the country and provide a strong buffer between the Soviets and the rest of Europe.

So, how was all of this accomplished? And how did they do it so fast? And just how successful was all of this in reality?

To begin with, the very top ranking members of the Nazi Party, and nazi-adjacent organisations – 199 defendants in total – were tried at the famous Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946. Of course, hundreds, if not thousands, of other officials and officers wanted by Allied authorities were able to escape to Argentina via the numerous ‘rat lines’ through Scandinavia, Spain or even Vatican City. And countless more had no need to escape. Entities within the Allied and Soviet forces were more than happy to look the other way about anything they got up to during the war owing to the knowledge contained in their brains. More on this in a bit.

But when looking at the more wide-scale process of Denazification of the citizenry, most of these efforts consisted of special tribunals reviewing the alleged Nazi past of German and Austrian citizens. As well as just a general instillment in the mass populace that everything that had happened was their fault, and trying to get rid of various works that espoused Nazi ideology.

On that latter, over 30,000 different books were not only banned in the country after the war, but also systematically collected and destroyed. Anyone who tried to keep a copy could face legal consequences. The irony of this was not lost on anyone, given this was more or less a tactic taken out of the Nazi handbook when they came to power.

Beyond this, as alluded to, there was the general populace, who were to be made to feel responsible for what Germany had done under the Nazi regime, with the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force taking point on this. They began efforts here seeing to it that the media from radio to newspapers not only strongly emphasised the atrocities in their coverage, but also explicitly noting that it was every single German’s fault for allowing it to happen, not just the Nazis, in all heavily controlling the press to say what they wanted it to say… Another rather ironic page taken out of the Nazi handbook. Although, to be fair, in this case strongly emphasising educating the German public on all the atrocities that had actually been committed, unlike much of the things completely made up by the Nazis.

Beyond the various media outlets, posters were put up all around showing pictures from concentration camps with giant text overlaid saying things like “YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS.”

As noted by British author James Stern, in one German town a “crowd… gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage, instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading “WHO IS GUILTY?”. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming “THIS TOWN IS GUILTY! YOU ARE GUILTY!”

On top of that, in towns near concentration camps, the citizenry were often made to tour them, and even help bury the dead, help dig up mass graves, and things like this, with films also made of all this by the American War Information Unit to be shown to Germans who couldn’t see for themselves. As noted by the Chief of the film division of Psychological Warfare, Sidney Bernstein, the point of all this was “To shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that these German crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people – and not just the Nazis and SS – bore responsibility.”

This general shift in mindset to blame all Germans, and not just the Nazis began around 1944, with before this generally a distinction made by the U.S. brass and with the U.S. public, whereas after a strong push to solidify in everyone’s minds that there was little difference between a Nazi and a non-Nazi German citizen.

This also seems to have been a general mindset pushed by the military brass to their own troops, warning soldiers that “the majority of Germans supported the Nazis try to make friends with us – to get information, to get favors, to create sympathy for the ‘poor down-trodden’ German people, to make us disagree among ourselves, or just to get a good chance to slip a knife into Allied soldiers.”

Speaking of the soldiers and going back to taking pages out of the Nazi handbook, it is also noted that during the denazification process, not just on the Soviet side, but on the U.S. side as well, frequent random beatings and rape of German civilians out and about was a thing. As one German professor noted, “These assaults have become notorious among the civilian population of Marburg; nobody risks going out in the evenings, and people feel as if they were exposed to acts of indiscriminate brutality with no means of protection.”

But in all, to help change the mindset of the German populace who had bought into Nazi ideology, the general push was to show the atrocities that had been committed, and try to make every German citizen feel responsible.

Going back to the tribunals to try to punish those more directly involved and rid society of them in any prominent position, very briefly, the objectives of this process were codified as early as July of 1945, and while the tribunals’ sentences dragged into 1957, the vast majority of the millions of card-carrying Nazi Party members had already been reviewed and sanctioned by April 1948.

But that’s all at a high level. How was this actually accomplished, and so quickly?

To begin with, the process of removing National Socialism ideology from the social fabric of Germany was conceived long before the end of the war in Europe. In fact, the term “denazification” itself was coined in 1943 by the Pentagon as they began thinking about what post-war Germany legal system would look like. And as early as August 1944, this had all gotten expanded with US President Franklin Roosevelt writing in his memos that the Allies should ‘drive home’ to the Germans that they had participated in a ‘Lawless conspiracy’.

The same sentiment was expressed more formally when Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. On that occasion, the so-called ‘Three Greats’ clarified that denazification was to be considered a strategic war aim. More precisely, the removal of ‘All Nazi and militarist influences from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German people.’

The III Reich surrendered on May 8, 1945 and the drive for denazification was restated in the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. By that month, the western Allies had compiled a list of 178,000 nazis to be put under arrest, while the Soviets had already proceeded to the internment of 67,000 Reich officials.

Such a huge endeavour could not be conducted willy-nilly of course. Allied occupation forces had to clearly state the denazification objectives and parameters, as well as the categories and related sanctions for nazi offenders.

According to a US Department of State memo of July 1945, the objectives of the denazification program included:

1. The arrest of Nazi leaders, supporters and any other persons ‘dangerous to the Allied occupation or its objectives’
   
2. Exclusion of members of the Nazi Party, who had been more than nominal participants, from both public office and positions of responsibility in private enterprises
   
3. Eradication of Nazi laws and decrees

4. The dissolution of the Nazi Party and all its affiliated organisations, as well the prevention of their revival. This went hand in hand with:
   
5. Elimination of all paraphernalia, so central to Nazi propaganda: symbols, flags and anthems. And finally
   
6. Complete removal of nazi ideology from German information services, schooling system, and religion.

Having clarified what denazification was about, Allied forces had to define how it would be carried out. The Allied Control Council reached an agreement only in January 1946, issuing Directive 24 which contained guidelines for a coordinated approach – as we shall see later, this would be anything but coordinated!

In each of the four occupation zones of Germany, the Allies set up ad-hoc denazification commissions and tribunals, which involved the participation of local, vetted individuals, such as union leaders, judges and opponents to Nazism. The rulings of these bodies were made on the basis of an extensive, 131-point questionnaire drafted by the Public Safety Branch of the Allied Military Government.

This was known as the ‘Fragebogen’ which, translated from German, simply means ‘Questionnaire’

Respondents had to provide accurate and detailed answers about their education, their professional training, employment and military service. Going even deeper, those filling in ‘The Questionnaire’ had to provide details on the source of their income and assets since January 1931, as well as their writings and speeches published since 1923.

But most of all, they had to provide a full account of their membership and role within the National Socialist Party or any other affiliated organisation.

In the American occupation sector, filled in and signed questionnaires would be evaluated by a denazification tribunal in collaboration with the US Counter Intelligence Corps and a Special Branch Section of the Military Government’s Public Safety Division. These bodies would then cross-check all the answers against police files, civil service records and the very archives of the Nazi Party.

The purpose of this screening was not to identify all German citizens who had joined the Party or an adjacent organisation at any point, as there would have been very few exceptions. The Allied Military Government in fact agreed to safeguard from sanctions the ‘Purely nominal member of the Nazi Party who was forced to join in order to retain his position of livelihood or escape the concentration camp.’

The point was to ascertain if the individuals under scrutiny had been involved in more than just a nominal capacity in supporting the Nazi regime; if they had contributed to perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity; or if they posed a threat to the Allies and the restoration of democracy.

Based on these factors, respondents would be classified as follows:

‘Major offenders’ were to be sentenced to life imprisonment, or even to death.

Then you had the ‘offenders’: activists, militarists and those who had profited from Germany’s war of aggression, who could face up to ten years of prison.

Next, you had the somewhat murkier category of ‘lesser offenders’, subjected to a probationary period of up to three years.

The rank-and-file followers or supporters of Hitler’s regime, with no specific active responsibilities might encounter a fine, and be subjected to surveillance.

And finally ‘exonerated individuals’ would not receive any sanction.

Based on this categorisation, anybody from ‘lesser offender’ and up were deemed to have had more than a nominal participation in the Nazi Party’s activities. As such, in addition to the sanctions described, they would face mandatory removal from their post, be them military officers or public officials.

OK, so we have covered how the denazification of Germany should have worked. But how did it actually turn out?

Well, especially in the US-controlled occupation zone, military authorities started with a bang, preemptively detaining 400,000 Germans in internment camps, before they had even started filling in their 131-point questionnaires. But when the tribunals and commissions started applying due process, it became apparent that discerning rank-and-file party members from lesser or more serious offenders was no easy task …

The US military had access to excellent records – one thing the Nazis were unquestionably good at was record keeping. Occupation troops in Munich, in fact, discovered the party’s entire registry with the names of 12 million card-carrying members. But, according to Earl F. Ziemke, writing for the US Army Centre of Military History, ‘It was on the gray fringes of denazification that the question of who and what were Nazis vexed military government,’

The military occupation authorities still had to sift all those 12 million individuals, trying to identify the worst that humanity had to offer. And it turns out that many of those 12 million Nazis ‘had training, experience, energy, affability, and not a bad political record.’

As reported by Ziemke, American troops found those under scrutiny to be, on the whole, surprisingly pleasant chaps, which made their denazification efforts all the more difficult. A US high-ranking officer commented that if ‘All the Nazis had been exceedingly unpleasant and rude, denazification would have been easy.’

On the other hand, many among those Germans who were not formal members of the party could fall into two categories: those ballsy enough not to fall for Nazi ideology and propaganda; and those who had applied for membership but had been rejected! Interestingly, the former were equally not keen to cooperate with the Allies. And the latter likely did not make for ideal members of society.

And that was the problem: denazification was all well and good, but the Allies were also seeking to rebuild German society from its ruins, and as fast as possible. If they made a clean sweep of anybody even loosely associated with National Socialism, in Ziemke’s words: ‘They were going to have to run the country with old men until the next generation grew up. The number of political acceptables between the ages of twenty and fifty who were also trained and competent was exceedingly small.’

So, that was the first snag.

The second one was that the whole program required a huge bureaucratic apparatus which the Allies simply could not manage. In the US controlled zone alone, the commissions and tribunals had to review a whopping 10 million questionnaires. Sure, they had enrolled local personnel to run the tribunals, but even so trained man-power was scarce. And even those Germans who were willing to participate were reluctant to dish out harsh sanctions to their fellow citizens.

The third snag was that defendants in these tribunals had found a convenient way out: they could easily obtain signed, sworn affidavits from priests or even just friends and neighbours, attesting that the defendant was a mere rank-and-file follower, or that he or she could be altogether exonerated. Naturally, a cottage industry emerged, putting these affidavits on sale. They later became colloquially known as ‘Persilscheine’ after the popular Persil brand of detergent. In other words, they would leave a defendant’s reputation squeaky clean!

Eventually, US authorities could not cope with the red tape associated with denazification in their controlled areas, and with tensions between the Soviets and the U.S. rising, also somewhat shifted their focus. In particular, they were now much more concerned with Germany’s rapid economic recovery than trying to make sure everyone paid for their crimes and weren’t allowed in prominent positions. A similar thing happened over in Japan with the now termed “Reverse Course” policies. But back in Germany, with this shift, on March 5, 1946, they formally transferred all such duties to reconstituted German authorities, something that the British had done a few months earlier as well.

On that note, with the British and French occupation zones, local military governments took an even more pragmatic approach. Both prioritised the efficiency of local administration and economy, to quickly cope with housing and food shortages. Thus, they were even less scrupulous when it came to allowing former high-ranking officials to hold or resume important positions. French authorities were most lax of all, even allowing nazis residing in other zones to move and resume work in their occupied areas with no hinderance. As another example, given the Nazis had placed individuals whose beliefs aligned with their ideologies in prominent teaching positions, around 3/4 of teachers in the country were immediately fired after the war… only for the vast majority in the French zone to be quickly rehired and given their positions back. This was reflected in most industries in the French zone. In the end, in total, the French only labelled 13 total individuals in their region “major offenders”.

Finally, moving to the Soviet occupation zone, the removal of Nazi personnel and ideology appeared to be more resolute than in the zones governed by the Western Allies. In fact, denazification proceeded hand-in-hand with the ‘Sovietization’ of Eastern Germany, that is extensive land reforms and nationalisation of industry. Moreover, while Western Allies strove to replace Nazi officials with political representatives from a broad spectrum, Moscow had a preference for the KPD, or Communist Party of Germany, later the Socialist Unity Party or SED.

However, according to historian Timothy R. Vogt, the denazification in the Soviet-held area was not as thorough as it initially appeared. Thanks to the cooperation of the KPD, Soviet authorities were able to delegate most denazification processes to the Germans themselves, in the form of local anti-Nazi committees and newly formed provincial governments. These bodies enacted their measures inconsistently, and were prone to caving in when meeting local resistance and objections.

Moreover, they appeared to follow the general principle that if former Nazis were willing to rebrand themselves as Communists, they would not be removed from public life.

As you might have guessed from all this, as early as 1948, it had become apparent that the denazification of Germany had not resulted in the intended restructure of society. In December of that year, international relations scholar John H. Herz, a member of the US delegation at the Nuremberg trials, published an article with the self-explanatory title of ‘The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany’

Herz focused on the American occupation zone, reporting how trials conducted there were frequently hindered by intimidation on the part of nazi sympathisers. Even without intimidation, prosecutors based their indictments of the answers provided in the questionnaires, without verifying their veracity. Thus, most defendants were categorised as mere ‘followers’.

Moreover, after denazification efforts had been handed over to German authorities in March 1946, they had issued two amnesties, one in August, one in December, exonerating members of the Hitler Youth, persons of low income and disabled citizens. Herz pointed out how such amnesties allowed even war criminals to escape prosecution.

The scholar also unearthed a major procedural flaw.

Until October 1947, denazification processes had vetted some 50,000 individuals a month. Quite a good number! But the tribunals had given precedence to those who had been classified as ‘followers’ on the basis of their questionnaires. By the time tribunals finally worked their stash of paperwork to those classified as ‘offenders’, a legislative amendment allowed prosecutors to re-categorise them as ‘followers’, too – with the exception of members of the SS.

Such re-categorisation still required approval from the Allied Military Government. But in January 1948 this procedural step was removed by the enactment of an expediting procedure. Now all ‘offenders’ could be rubber stamped as ‘followers’ wholesale!

A further relaxation of standards took place in March 1948, with the almost total removal of the exception clause for members of the SS and other criminal organisations affiliated to the Nazi Party. Now, only those belonging to the category of the ‘Major offenders’ could expect major sanctions. Everybody else was deemed a ‘follower’ and was free to go after paying a fine.

As for the numbers on all this, some 12,753,000 Germans were expected to undergo the denazification procedures. More than 9 million were found ‘not chargeable’. The remaining 3,209,000 were processed by the end of April 1948. And of these, more than 2.3 million were amnestied without trial.

This left 836,000 to be tried – a mere 6.5%. More than one third of these were exonerated, and more than half classified as ‘followers’.

Of the remainder, 10.7% were categorised as ‘lesser offenders’; 2.1% were Class II ‘offenders’; and only 0.1% were found to be ‘major offenders’. That’s 836 individuals from the original nearly 13 million person pool.

And even those who were sentenced as ‘offenders’ in any degree of severity, most received lenient sanctions, such as community work, payment of fines, or shortened prison sentences.

Herz proceeded to compile several examples of such lenient treatments, of which we shall report only a few:

• An active propagandist and publisher of anti-Semitic writings was ranked as ‘follower’ and fined a mere 50 marks.
• A Dean at Bonn University, active member of the SS and their intelligence services, the SD, was fully exonerated.
• A high-ranking member of the Gestapo was found to be only a ‘follower’ and received a minor fine. Another Gestapo-man, head of station in the town of Fulda: also a ‘follower’.
• And the former deputy chief of police in Nuremberg, and one of the men responsible for the infamous Kristallnacht? Also a follower, fined a mere 800 marks!
• One physician, responsible for carrying out the sterilisation law against ‘undesirables’ … you guessed it: follower! Please pay your 500 marks and leave!
• Finally, an aeronautical engineer and industrialist who made a fortune of 36 million marks thanks to slave labour … Well, you get the gist by now. He was ultimately fined 2,000 marks.

Moving on toward the end of the 1940s, across all areas of occupation leniency gave way to amnesty and a strategy of integration. The chief proponent of this approach was the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, Konrad Adenauer. After his election in September 1949, Adenauer advocated for West Germany to forge strong bonds with Western Europe against the Communist Bloc. This strategy also included for old Nazi cadres to be integrated into the new republic, in order to move forward.

Towards that end in all this, in May 1951, Adenauer’s government passed the first amnesty law, which reintegrated into their position some 150,000 officials and civil servants, previously removed by the Allied denazification efforts. The following year, the Chancellor reported to the parliament that two thirds of German diplomats were, in fact, former Nazis. The armed forces, security services and even the private sector were similarly replete with former Reich personnel.

Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, British HIgh Commissioner in Germany, commented: ‘Whenever I travelled, I ran into ghosts of Hitler’s Reich, men who had occupied positions in administration, in industry, or the society of the day. They were either living in retirement or were taking jobs in banks, commerce or industry.’

Despite the amnesty, Adenauer’s regime also took steps the other way. For example, in August of 1952, his cabinet banned the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party. And in September he agreed to pay the state of Israel a reparation of 3 billion German marks, equivalent to $8.3 billion in today’s value.

But Adenauer’s intention was to leave the past behind nonetheless, and in 1954 his government issued the second amnesty law, which this time benefited around 400,000 German citizens.

A similar denazification process, culminating in widespread amnesty, was followed in Austria. This country is often excluded from English-speaking accounts of denazification, but we should not forget that Austria was annexed to the III Reich before the start of WWII. Nor that Austrian citizens actively joined the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Nazi Party, and therefore the country was occupied by the Allies at the end of the conflict.

The Austrian denazification process was led by the four occupying powers, UK, France, US and USSR in collaboration with three local parties: the Social Democratic Party, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Communist Party.

According to historian Dieter Stiefel, the Austrian denazification can be divided into five phases:

During the ‘Military Security Phase’, from April 1945 to June 1945, the four allied occupation powers worked in coordination to intern an initial batch of prominent SS and Nazi Party members. Such potentially dangerous individuals were hunted down and detained, on the basis of ‘black lists’ compiled by the allied high commissioners.

The next phase, from June 1945 to February 1946, is labelled as ‘Autonomous Denazification’: now the four Allies, plus the Austrian government, carried out denazification efforts independently from each other, which resulted in contradictory measures and decisions.

For example, the US occupation used a seven-page questionnaire similar to the fragebogen. The British and French used it, too, but only in part, while the Soviets ditched it completely! In Fact, the Soviets acted relatively chill in their zone of occupation, delegating the denazification process to local authorities. They intervened directly only when they identified someone guilty of war crimes committed on Soviet soil, or when they selected a promising scientist for, let’s say, relocation under pressure. More on this later!

In February 1946 the Allies devolved all denazification activities to the Austrian government, ushering in the third ‘Autochthonous’ phase. Local authorities followed three laws promulgated to this purpose, the Prohibition Act, Economic Cleansing Act, and War Crimes Act.

In order to enforce these laws, the government created ad hoc ‘People’s Courts’, consisting of two professional judges, and three lay judges nominated amongst the general public. These tribunals were set up to take very direct action, as no appeal was allowed against their verdicts. Nonetheless, allied authorities took note that the Austrian judiciary introduced at a very slow pace, and pressured for a quicker uptake.

In February 1947 the Government issued a new National Socialist law regulating the removal of the old Reich’s vestiges, thus kicking off a fourth phase …

… which lasted less than one year. The fifth and final phase, from 1948 to 1957, is known as the ‘time of amnesties’. The first of these involved the so-called ‘Minderbelastete’, which can be translated as ‘less incriminated’ or ‘lesser offenders’. This amnesty was applied to 90% of all registered members of the Austrian National Socialist Party.

The ‘Minderbelastete Amnesty’ effectively put an end to all major attempts at denazifying Austrian society. Which is not unsurprising: much like in a divided Germany, after the onset of the Cold War each allied power sought to consolidate local authorities under their sphere of influence.

The Austrian People’s Courts, however, continued to operate until December 1955. Up to that point, these tribunals had issued 13,607 guilty verdicts. But following the withdrawal of occupation forces from the country, a new constitutional law abolished the People’s Courts transferring their duties to standard jury trials.

Denazification trials continued for another couple of years, but to a much lesser degree of intensity: in the 1956-57 period, Austrian courts issued a total of 39 verdicts, of which only 18 were guilty sentences. As the denazification efforts and fervour whittled down, the Austrian parliament voted in favour of a final amnesty in 1957.

Besides widespread amnesties, it is no secret that hundreds of former Nazi officials entirely escaped any form of sanctions thanks to their military, scientific or technical expertise. They were simply deemed too useful to the Allies! In allied countries this seems to be something history paints as completely acceptable, though when other countries, like Argentina, essentially did the same, it’s more vilified for various reasons. See our video Why Did So Many Nazis Choose Argentina to Flee to After WWII?.

But as for the United States, according to the US Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, as early as May 10, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised the commander of US forces in Europe, General Eisenhower, to make some exceptions when it came to arresting war criminals:

‘In your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.’

Throughout the summer or 1945, the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC, and the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, did employ former German military and intelligence officers as informants – but this was a necessity to identify more dangerous Nazi criminals, or suppress anti-Allied resistance. But as friction mounted across the Iron Curtain, American and other Western allied services took to using German military personnel as a source of intelligence about Soviet military strategy, equipment and tactics.

Towards this end, the CIC collaborated closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the ‘Foreign Armies East’, founded in 1938 and responsible for collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union. But the Corps also recruited personnel whose resume erred on the criminal side, such as SS officer Klaus Barbie, charmingly known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’.

Barbie the Butcher and other war criminals were eventually protected from prosecution and smuggled out of Europe with the complicity of the CIC, OSS and other Allied services. Many, many more former Nazi and SS officials would escape via ‘rat lines’ set up by Argentinian intelligence and even the Vatican.

The US Joint Chief of Staffs, however, were not interested in simply knowing more about the Soviets. They were interested in gaining a technological edge over them. As early as July 1945, they explicitly authorised a program to exploit ‘Chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.’

Those rare minds were 350 German and Austrian scientists and technicians, to be brought immediately to America under Operation OVERCAST.

By 1946, the Department of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency sought to expand OVERCAST to recruit further 1,000 former enemy brains, and even grant them American citizenship. This was a complicated endeavour, as some of these chosen 1,000 were high ranking members of the Nazi Party. At least one of them, ‘rocket scientist’ Werner von Braun, had been an SS officer.

The plan required Presidential blessing, which President Truman granted in September 1946, insisting that only so-called ‘nominal’ Nazis be allowed in the program. The term indicated German and Austrian citizens who had joined the party out of convenience or coercion, but had not actively supported the Reich.

The new, expanded program took the name of Operation Paperclip. In early 1947 a panel constituted by the Departments of Justice and State began combing dossiers of prospective scientists for relocation to the US, which were based on CIC investigations. The panel initially rejected several applications, as the individuals in question had been identified as potential threats on the basis of their Nazi past.

This did not sit well with the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. According to the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, they ordered American intelligence in Europe to revise the scientists’ dossiers, so that they could make it through the Paperclip panel.

Thus, from 1945 to 1955, Operations Overcast and Paperclip helped relocate 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians to the States. The Interagency Working Group estimates that as many as 80% of them were former Nazi Party members.

Now, Operation Paperclip is a well-known episode of the Cold War. What is less well-known is that the Soviet Union had their own version of this project, known as Operation Osoaviakhim, or the forced relocation of more than 2,500 German scientists to the USSR.

However, an interesting thing about the name is it actually is something of a misnomer. The term ‘Osoaviakhim’ is an acronym which stands for ‘Union of Societies for Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR’. This was a paramilitary and sporting organisation founded in 1927. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet equivalent of Paperclip, but apparently a German radio incorrectly used this word to refer to the ‘brain drain’ in 1946, and US intelligence services adopted the term.

The plan was initiated in April 1946, when the Soviet Minister of Aeronautical Industry, Mikhail Khrunichev, Minister of Aeronautical Industry, issued an order for the relocation of the German aeronautical and engine industry. This was followed by a May 13, 1946 resolution, decreed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, which ordered the transfer of 2,000 ‘German specialists’ by the end of the year.

And not just specialists of any kind. The Soviet zone of occupation included facilities which were replete with scientists and technicians involved in aviation and rocket engineering projects. Initially, the Soviets founded institutions such as the Nordhausen Institute or the Berlin Institute, to resume work initiated by the Reich’s best and brightest. For example, the Nordhausen was put under the direction of Helmut Gröttrup, a former collaborator of Werner von Braun on the V-2 program.

But the agreements signed amongst the Allies at the Potsdam Conference prohibited the development of weapons on German soil, and so Moscow planned the relocation of these programs elsewhere.

Following the MVD’s resolution of May 1946, the Soviet forces started to gather hundreds of experts in atomic research, electronics, navigation equipment, rockets, jet engines and even colour video.

On October 22, 1946, Operation Osoaviakhim was effectively initiated, under the leadership of Ivan Serov, later a chairman of the KGB. By day, Serov had organised 92 freight trains, transporting the necessary equipment to the USSR. And by night, the Army and MVD police swooped in to arrest the German scientists and their families, for a total of 6,500 individuals.

After being made to see that their lives would be much better doing what the Soviet regime wanted… and it would be a shame if anything *happened* to themselves or their families, they were all offered a regular contract and paid salaries which were higher than that of their Soviet counterparts as extra incentive. As you might imagine, only a fraction of the German scientific contingent refused to cooperate with Moscow, and for that refusal these were thus interned at the Sharashka GuLag camp.

The Osoaviakhim scientists were gradually allowed to return to Germany after 1950, with the vast majority leaving after Stalin’s death in March of 1953.

But in the end, at the start of this video we asked the question: how did Germany and Austria denazify so quickly after WWII? Especially given the ideology behind their former regime was so embedded into every facet of society.

To sum up, on one hand, we can very simplistically state that both societies needed to move on quickly, to both rebuild their economies and to face the political challenges posed by the Cold War. And so everyone was incentivized to do so, and so did. And on top of this the extreme atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war helped convince those who had bought into what the Nazis were selling, that maybe they should rethink their decision making paradigm.

On the other hand, we can cynically acknowledge that the process was quick because it failed overall on a huge percentage of what it was meant to accomplish. Wiping the slate clean in such a pervasive regime was a logistically daunting task, one which the Allies and the local institutions were ill-prepared and little motivated to accomplish at a certain point. The Nazi party was finished. The Soviets were the new threat. West Germany, much like Japan, needed to be strong to help counter this. And to help facilitate this, former prominent Nazis and many prominent individuals in Japan would better serve these goals in their positions they were experts in, rather than sitting in prison or executed.

And for more on the Japanese side of this, do see our documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust.

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