Hi,
Another interesting item is that most think of the WWII Japanese were the barbaric member of the Axis. Unlike the Japanese, the Nazis threw even their own citizens into concentration camps and the ovens.
In a text I read about 15-odd years ago, There is some reasonably strong evidence that Hitler (a failed artist) could sway people but might have just faded away if not for another person (I do not recall his name) that had much of the national socialist doctrine and starting feeding it to Hitler. With the heavy burden placed on the WWI losers, the economic boom of the 1920's did not occur in Germany (paying all the victorious Allies for the expense of WWI). The hope Hitler and the Nazis (SS) gave to the people of Germany who would not normally have been swayed by the rhetoric, caused lead to the eventual election of Hitler. Hitler's Mein Kampf was a more formal version of the ghost behind Hitler.
Interestingly enough (going back to another comment about the Japanese not being tried), Argentina was used as a path for Nazis to escape. Many like Werner von Braun were brought directly to the US and though his factories used concentration camp slaves, certain arguments could be made that he was not a rabid Nazi. van Braun got the US to the moon. Apparently in 1943 (post Stalingrad) the SS-SD (I think this was the intelligence arm of the SS) East, started covertly contacting Allen(?) Dulles (OSS) in Switzerland. They recognized that WWII was lost and had heavily infiltrated the Russians. Ost East (I think that is correct) found that the Russians had infiltrated the Manhattan Project enough that an agreement was made. In exchange for getting Ost East And their families out of German occupied territory, the would be willing to work for the OSS.
The result was that most all of Ost East was slowly exfiltrated to Argentine and became part of the CIA. Some were under the OSS and special arrangements were made to span the time between the disestablishment of the OSS (under Truman) and the CIA. The Manhattan Project was compromised by the USSR in the lower levels (an FBI failure) and the "German arm" of the OSS/CIA contained both Germans and Nazis that had fought the Allies. The "German" arm lived in South America (not just Argentina).
All these minute details are amazing. As with knowing the full details about the D&RG/D&RGW, I doubt anyone will ever know all the details of WWII.
Doug vV
