this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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The US praised the Nazis for killing the communists. They supported their "cause" riiiiight up until they started attacking western Europe AKA the countries that actually matter.
The US also hired tons of Nazi "scientists," including granting them immunity for their roles in the Holocaust. They also granted the head of Unit 731 immunity (specifically from the USSR who rightly wanted him executed) in exchange for the human experimentation data. NATO coincidentally also has a ton of Nazis in its leadership.
The US went as far as installing prominent Nazi figures back into West Germany in the same way they let confederates go back to their lives after the civil war. Whereas the Soviets executed Nazi leaders in East Germany because that's what they fucking deserve. The US then claimed that the executed Nazis were victims of communism and included them in their "communism death toll" numbers.
This isn't an error. The US has always been sympathetic to Nazis, before, during, and after the war. They only begrudgingly pitched in against them because they viewed western Europe as slightly more important.
Finally, the US didn't even fucking do that much. Certainly nowhere near enough to justify their claim that they "saved the world" in WWII. The USSR and UK each did far more yet the US seems to think the USSR was fighting for the Nazis and the UK was a scared poodle hiding in their island until the heroic Americans came to save them, when in reality, the tide had already turned against the Nazis by the time the US joined. They also nuked Japan just because they could, it had nothing to do with the war because they already had intelligence that Japan was about to surrender.
The Nazi eugenics program was also strongly inspired by what the US was doing at the time.
It's just that the Nazi went a bit too far, too obvious (and mainly they lost the war). It was one of the arguments of the defense in the Nuremberg trial that the German eugenics differed little from what was practiced in the US.
"Experimentation" data that was entirely useless, if I remember correctly.
The only Nazi rally held outside of Nazi Germany (in the 20th century) was held in the US.
While technically true, there were plenty of affiliated fascist organisations around the world who openly paraded their nazi sympathies in public. Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists spring to mind.
Minor correction: the US nuked Japan so the Soviets couldn't be credited for Japan's surrender as well as Nazi Germany. It was a calculated move by the US to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians just so that Socialism wouldn't spread as much as it could have after the war due to the Soviets saving the world. The US paid the price of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives in order to benefit its own standing after the war.
Oh, it wasn't because of the fanatical dedication of the Japanese armed forces that were so dug in it would have taken years and cost thousands of American lives to defeat them, island by island? It was because they didn't want the Russians to hog all the glory? Never heard that one before
That justification was made after the fact. The truth is that Japan was already going to surrender. This isn't a conspiracy theory either, it's modern historical consensus, even the US Navy's museum admits so. The USSR had just taken Berlin and the Nazis surrendered on May 8, and declared war on Imperial Japan on August 8 after both Japan and the US had seen the Red Army pivoting to their East, towards Manchuria.
On August 9th, the Soviets invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and Japan announced surrender on August 15th. The nukes were launched on the 6th and 9th of August, because the US didn't want Japan to go Soviet, the US had plans of reforming Imperial Japan as a subsidiary Empire, maintaining Japan's colonization of Korea and other Asian countries while profiting off of Japan, in a form of double Imperialism, and a Soviet Japan wouldn't let that work. Their plan was thrown to dust with the Korean War that followed.
Right on Wikipedia.
Geoffrey Jukes review Racing the enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Thanks for this!
There were also 400,000 soldiers who died fighting fascists under the US flag, who were not responsible for their government's decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons, nor Operation Paperclip, nor any other major government decisions.
Appreciate your comments. My grandfather fought Nazis, but then he stayed in the Navy through the Korean war. Guess which one haunted him the most.
I'm aware, and am not trying to downplay that. My comment was about the US gov's decision to bomb Japan, not to downplay the lives given by US soldiers in the fight against the Nazis.
I hear you, I just feel like the meme was about the ordinary soldiers rather than the government. Fully respect wanting to correct the record regarding the government, just felt it was worth a reminder that there were people like the soldier in the meme who did sacrifice a lot fighting for a worthy cause and who do deserve respect, and our criticism of the government shouldn't overshadow that. Just a small pushback on that, but one I felt was important.
That's a fair point to push back on. It wasn't my intention to downplay the many brave US soldiers involved who were genuinely antifascist, but if my comments gave off that impression, then it's good that you spoke up. My main critique of this comic isn't even with the US, but with how (in my view) it treats liberalism and fascism as distinct, and not as the twins I understand them to be. The ending of the comic gives the impression that the former US was a bastion of antifascism and the modern US failed to get the memo, but the reality is that the fascists were always there, and the anti-fascists too. I wanted to add more materialism to the picture, and if in doing so I accidentally downplayed the role of the brave antifascists in the US Army that gave their lives fighting the Nazis, then I made my point poorly.
According to my lib colleague it's fine because apparently they said they were forced to become Nazis.
Which might be understandable if they were lowly conscripted soldiers, but the ones that got into NATO were high ranking officers and other leaders in the Nazi party, many of whom architected the Holocaust.
It takes years and a ton of personal effort and commitmemt to climb the ranks of any military or party. Even if you did get conscripted, why did you keep going?
"Help I'm being forced to use my own cruelty and demonic propensity for making people suffer to organize a genocide after I spent years proving that I was the right person for the job! My only hope is if a peaceful, civilized, Western military alliance hires me once this ordeal that I'm in no way enjoying or benefiting from is over!"
Honestly the thing that still gets me is does he actually think they'd admit to being willing Nazis, especially when Nazis were being executed?
I know, see Operation Paperclip and I also know that the end of the nazi Germany is mainly thanks to Rusia and allies, US entered when the main task was already done. Without the French and British resistance, USA couldn't even have managed to enter Germany.