Was Nazism Defeated or Absorbed?

Zionism, Gdadentod, and other Flourishing Nazi Ideology Within the Western Empire

Palestine awoke Western populaces with two questions: why aren’t we allowed to criticize a genocidal state that is killing so many innocents? And why are all of our governments supporting something that is so despicable?

These questions have shattered the Cold War consensus arrived upon at the closing of World War Two. We thought good conquered evil, and that the world was now in benevolent hands. Many of us were persuaded to believe that there must have been some benevolent justification behind all of the wars in the Middle East, because people we thought were credible told us it was for humanitarian reasons.

But the post-WWII destruction and death toll require us to re-examine exactly what happened in the postwar period, through lenses we may not have considered before. We must ask ourselves this scary, uncomfortable question: were the Nazis in fact defeated? Or when they were “conquered,” did they actually just strike a deal with the victorious West, and their ideas, practices, and ideologies became absorbed and repackaged into the West?

The more I learn, the more the evidence supports this. Here is the evidence that the Nazis never went away. This is a long essay, but I encourage you to read until the end so you can understand the full picture of why I’ve arrived at this conclusion.

1. Supporting Zionism & Israel in their Holocaust

Source: Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The West is supporting Israel’s ongoing Holocaust to maintain control in the Middle East, and Zionism is no different from Nazism. Zionism, like Nazism, is the belief that one race is superior to another, and thus the superior race is owed the right to exterminate the other and take their land. Zionists, after all, do not have to be Jewish, and frequently they aren’t. Netanyahu’s real surname is Mileikowsky.

Israel is also connected to Nazi Germany through the notorious Haavara/Transfer agreement of 1933. This indicates that Zionists and Nazis had a collaborative rather than antagonistic relationship, and their parallel ideologies are clear in witnessing the genocide of the Palestinians.

The West, of course, has been thoroughly supportive of this violence and destruction. And the Palestinians are not the only innocents that have been killed at the hands of our empire. Millions have been murdered by the US since WWII, and this article I’ve linked is a decade old, meaning the death toll far exceeds what is cited.

2. Supporting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Azov Battalion Nazi soldiers fighting for Ukraine. [Source: https://x.com/f_asselineau/status/1496528673515655170]

We can see from the example of Ukraine that Canada, one of the Empire’s “Five Eyes”, has not been interested in prosecuting Nazis since the end of WWII. While it is frequently argued that this was in order to defeat the Soviet Union, this indicates two things: 1) Western countries like the US, the UK, and Canada would rather fund and train neo-Nazis than engage in diplomacy with Russia, meaning unipolarity takes precedence over combatting Nazism, and 2) Western educational institutions have accepted funding from people that harbour Nazi ideologies, which could influence the lens through which we view history. Even Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister is literally the granddaughter of a Nazi.

3. Historic Ties Absorbing Nazis into Western institutions post-WWII

Following the 40s, Nazis were absorbed into prominent Western institutions. Operation Paperclip was a US intelligence program that took in more than 1600 Nazi and Nazi collaborator scientists, engineers, and technicians for government employment between 1945 and 1959. This was reportedly to “leverage German expertise” for other war efforts, as they claimed that if they didn’t do this, the Soviets would. But it meant that the most powerful country in the world had people like Nazi doctors working for their government, even though they had been accused of crimes like conducting human experimentation. People like this were acquitted by the U.S, and their crimes whitewashed. This kind of thing happened in other Western countries like Canada and West Germany too.

Former Nazis were also absorbed into prominent institutions like NATO and NASA. The NATO Commander in Chief for Allied Forces in Central Europe was a position filled solely by former Nazis for 16 years, and fear of communism was used as an excuse for them to engage in incredibly sketchy behaviour in Operation Gladio, which reinforced imperial interests. As for NASA, the most famous case was Wernher von Braun, who developed the Saturn V rocket and also developed rockets for Hitler. Kurt Debus was the first director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and Hubertus Strughold, the “Father of Space Medicine,” was likely involved in Nazi human experimentation.

The concern here is not necessarily about the specific Nazis and collaborators, but about how the West was learning from them and using them to destroy those with anti-imperial interests. Their techniques and influence were thus incorporated into prominent institutions and industries. Notably, the West also hired war criminals to benefit from their intelligence and propaganda knowledge. Ivan Hrinioch, a Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi collaborator, worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the CIA. Franz Alfred Six, a former Nazi SS officer and propaganda specialist, also worked for US intelligence, and then for corporate PR in West Germany. Reinhard Gehlen created the Gehlen/BND group which “boosted” anti-Soviet “propaganda efforts” throughout the Cold War, and figures like Emil Augsburg are worth looking into when it comes to Nazis employed for their “psychological warfare tactic” expertise. This history can be challenging to find, but you can still find the evidence:

Source: Blowback : America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War by Christopher Simpson

Source: Blowback : America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War by Christopher Simpson

The West has been manufacturing consent for bloodshed for decades. It is notable that they employed propagandists who did the same thing in Nazi Germany.

4. Realpolitik & “Switching Allegiances”

The West likes to frame Russia as an inherent enemy. However, the West was allied with the Soviet Union during WWII to defeat Nazi Germany. The typical argument of the West is that this was because both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were malicious players, so they had to ally with the latter to defeat the former, and afterwards the Soviets returned to “enemy status.”

However, what is happening now with Israel and Ukraine indicates that the West would not only ally with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazism, but also ally with Nazism to defeat Russia. This invites skepticism that the West allies with other nations based on benevolent “shared democratic values.” Their actions rather indicate realpolitik, in which nations ally with whatever nations or ideologies happen to provide them with the most power and global dominance.

5. ICE and the Gestapo

Source: Washington Post

This one is self-evident, but the ICE deportations and case of Mahmoud Khalil look no different from the modern-day Gestapo. Dissidents and “undesirables” are being attacked and expelled from America for no real reason other than because their pro-Palestinian ideas are threatening to the state, and the state is in the pocket of Miriam Adelson and Peter Thiel.

6. The Eugenics Theory—is MAID akin to Nazi “Gdadentod?”

Source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

This section is the whole reason I’m writing this essay, and also the one that will take me the longest to explain. It’s the reason I am suspicious of MAID and wrote this article about it in November 2024.

The Nazis engaged in eugenics in the 40s. However, they did not immediately jump into it. When states slide into authoritarianism and want to pass oppressive domestic policies, they must first convince their populaces that the ideas are benevolent. If they don’t, they risk their people revolting, which would throw a wrench into their plans. They thus have to frame proposed policies within propaganda as ones that cannot be seen as anything other than benevolent, and then increasingly push the boundaries of the policy. For the Germans, antisemitism was encouraged not by first saying: “we should kill all the undesirables” but by persuading them that something they treasured—their German culture and identities—was under attack.

Similarly, when the Nazis wanted to implement eugenics, they did not begin by saying “let’s euthanize the undesirables.” Instead they began public health programs that initially seemed benevolent, and promoted them through propaganda. Their campaign for promoting “racial hygiene” started with simply discouraging alcoholism and smoking. They also promoted exercise and healthy living, so rhetoric was focused on the benevolent notion of “health.” Eugenics was then framed as disease prevention, characterized as a fight to prevent hereditary and mental illness within the German population.

Then, the Nazis moved from general public health to coercive eugenics. They began with people with disabilities through their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. This mandated forced sterilizations for people with disabilities and mental health concerns. They then moved to the Nuremberg Laws and the T4 Euthanasia Program, which began in 1939 and was the more systematic murder of patients with disabilities. So the Nazis’ eugenics policies were a slide from harmless, benevolent-seeming public health programs to open, systematic murder.

You may say it’s paranoid to compare this to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, which is now gaining traction in the UK. But there are concerning parallels.

MAID was inspired by a program in Switzerland called Dignitas, which begun in the 90s and was cited as a model before the passing of Bill C-14, which legalized medical assistance in dying in Canada. Dignitas was founded by Ludwig Minelli, a controversial figure accused of profiting from assisted suicide. The Swiss magazine Beobachter reported that he’d had no assets when he founded the organization, and yet became a multimillionaire by the end of his life. In Switzerland, assisted dying is only permissible if one is not “selfishly benefitting” from the deaths, however Beobachter and others reported that Dignitas had a sketchy history with disclosing its financial statements. Minelli was also accused of other sketchy things like hiring a doctor with a previous conviction of pedophilia.

Then in 2010, six years before Bill C-14 was passed, Canada’s Vancouver Sun published this article about a Canadian woman who travelled to Switzerland to visit Dignitas before MAID was legalised. Note the rhetoric of the piece. It mostly romanticizes medically-assisted suicide, framing it as liberating and dignified though there are important legal and ethical complexities to consider to the topic. It almost reads like an advertisement for MAID:

“Kay’s family will forever associate their mother’s death with the taste of creamy Swiss Sprungli chocolate. Lying on her Dignitas death bed, with a painting of mountains and a lake above her, Kay swallowed the chocolate before taking the fatal dose of sodium pentobarbital supplied by Dignitas’s small staff.”

This article is an example of how MAID has been framed to the Canadian public, who received limited consultation prior to the bill being passed.

This Vancouver Sun article also cited Assisted Suicide Researcher Russel Ogden as a pro-MAID proponent, stating: Ogden said he finds it “odd” that a terminally ill woman who wants a carefully done assisted suicide would have to go to the trouble and expense of travelling to Switzerland. Why not, he asks, allow it here?

I include this because Ogden is also a controversial figure. He taught the “sociology of death” and “socio-legal aspects of assisted death” at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and was interviewed about the death of one of his “research participants” in 2012. Ogden argued he had the right to protect the confidentiality of the participant, and the drama ended in him leaving KPU but still drawing a salary anyway.

So both Ogden and Minelli were used as early support to the pro-MAID argument within media and legal cases prior to the law being passed, however both are controversial figures who may not be ideal ethical models.

I’ve already written about the slippery slope argument about MAID, but briefly, while the law initially started with deaths where one could only get MAID if one was “suffering” and their death “reasonably foreseeable,” those restrictions were removed, as they were at Dignitas. Proponents then pushed to extend eligibility for MAID to people with disabilities, people with mental health concerns, and children. Pro-MAID stances often employ and repeat benevolent rhetoric such as “choice,” “peace,” and “dignity,” but don’t acknowledge the darker side of the debate. If you argue against the policy, you are framed as “spreading misinformation” or as oppressive to a person’s autonomy and choice.

But if the state is essentially sponsoring the program and frequently frames it positively, including towards children, to what degree is the populace propagandized into a domestic policy that the state itself normalizes? How does that then affect your “choice?”

The United Nations recently condemned Trudeau for expanding MAID criteria. Rosemary Kayess, vice-chair of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, called Track-2 of MAID “state-sponsored euthanasia” aimed at people with mental health concerns and disabilities.

Who did the Nazis come for first when beginning their eugenics program? The “incurably sick” and people with mental health concerns and disabilities.

The Nazis similarly used manipulative language to portray the euthanasia of sick and disabled individuals as an act of “compassion” and “mercy.” They called it Gnadentod, which translates to “Merciful Death.” Per Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, the Fuhrer framed the program in “humanitarian” terms:

"Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with expanding the authority of physicians, so that patients who are incurably sick can be granted a mercy death after a critical assessment of their condition."

Lastly, the Nazis pushed eugenics because it saved the state on cost. Supporters of MAID often claim that cost savings are not the central motivator for this program, however they acknowledge that the program does come with healthcare savings. If someone is dead, after all, the state doesn’t have to pay for them anymore, and they then have more money for other priorities, like making weapons for Israel to behead babies.

When a state needs to pass an oppressive policy without a populace catching on, they must first frame the policy as moral necessity. They must have some negative idea they need to “fight” against. They must normalize through repetition and propaganda. They must co-opt trusted institutions, “charities,” and figures to endorse the policy. Supporters will be rewarded and glorified. Dissenters will be demonized.

So when MAID was passed, was the intention for mercy? Or was this gnadentod?

My government wouldn’t do that, you might say. But the similarities are remarkable, and this is what your government supports.

If I’m right about MAID, then it means that Canada was used a guinea pig for a eugenics program that was intended to be rolled out in other corners of the empire to help our governments cut costs.

It would also mean that the Nazis weren’t defeated, and would be another reason why you must care about Palestine. Even if you have a black heart, and do not think it concerns you that our empire has supported an indefensible genocide, Westerners are not immune to oppression by their own empire.

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