The Nazi Underground

He was right that the Nazis went underground

“We don’t understand German thoroughness. From the very start of World War ii, they have considered the possibility of losing this second round, as they did the first—and they have carefully, methodically planned, in such eventuality, the third round—World War iii! Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over. And the Nazis have now gone underground. In France and Norway they learned how effectively an organized underground can hamper occupation and control of a country. Paris was liberated by the French underground—and Allied armies. Now a Nazi underground is methodically planned. They plan to come back and to win on the third try.”

This is what Herbert W. Armstrong declared on May 9, 1945, during the founding conference of the United Nations, just hours after World War ii ended. Europe was in ruins. Nazis going into hiding, with secret plans to evade detection, could not possibly be real, could it?

All these years later, the truth is clear. A series of reports have detailed secret Nazi plans to infiltrate German business, politics and military, and return to power. This is no conspiracy theory: It has been the subject of government investigations and reported by mainstream media. Yet no one has asked what these discoveries mean for modern Germany and its future.

The Nazi war machine went underground in two main ways. First, Nazi leaders—the brain trust of Nazism—plotted to survive. Second, Nazi leaders found ways to infiltrate the new government and administration. After the war, almost every German insisted that he had not supported the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi members without high profiles and famous names claimed to renounce their ideology and stayed in their jobs, blending into the background. Hiding in plain sight, these ex-Nazis ran the postwar government—and helped their higher-profile colleagues escape.

Planning to Go Underground

Evidence of senior Nazis planning to go underground is clear.

On August 10, 1944, government and SS representatives met with leading industrialists. Representatives from Volkswagen, steel manufacturer Krupp and armaments company Rheinmetall were there, with several others. A United States intelligence document describing the meeting was declassified in 1996. It reported that the group was told, “… German industry must realize that the war cannot be won and that it must take steps in preparation for a postwar commercial campaign. Each industrialist must make contacts and alliances with foreign firms, but this must be done individually and without attracting any suspicion. Moreover, the ground would have to be laid on the financial level for borrowing considerable sums from foreign countries after the war.”

After this meeting, a smaller group assembled. Here, a handful of industrialists were told that the Nazi Party “would be forced to go underground,” the U.S. intel document reveals.

At the same time, others were preparing for the end.

From 1942 to 1945, Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen commanded the Wehrmacht’s Foreign Armies East military intelligence unit, a highly capable intelligence network in Eastern Europe and Russia. With his detailed knowledge of Russia’s advance, he clearly saw that the war would be lost. So he too prepared. He had his intelligence files printed on microfilm and stored in watertight containers, and he hid them in the Alps.

Within the Catholic Church, planning to shelter key Nazis also began before the war ended. In 1942, Monsignor Luigi Maglione contacted the ambassador of Argentina, asking about the nation’s willingness “to apply its immigration law generously, in order to encourage at the opportune moment European Catholic immigrants to seek the necessary land and capital in your country.” Clearly, he anticipated Germany’s defeat and an exodus of Nazis seeking refuge.

As the war wound down, many were preparing to hole up. “One day we shall come back. Until then, à bientôt.” Those were the words of a military spokesman on Nazi radio, September 1, 1944, offering only a “goodbye for now.”

Nazi Bureaucrats

While the high-profile Nazis fled, most bureaucrats were allowed to remain. For years, functionaries in Germany’s postwar government claimed their innocence. They were no Nazis, they insisted. Some may have served the Nazis but did not support them and merely did the minimum required.

The truth is very different, as has been revealed by a series of shocking studies by the German government in recent years.

• The German Foreign Ministry, “[f]rom day one, … functioned as an institution of the Nazi regime and backed its politics of violence at all times. … In this sense, one can say that the Foreign Ministry was a criminal organization,” said Prof. Eckart Conze, who chaired an 880-page study into the department.
• Three quarters of justice officials in postwar West Germany were former Nazis. Thirty-four of the ministry’s leading judges and lawyers were Stormtroopers for Hitler, according to a 2016 Justice Department investigation. The Local wrote, “The fascist old-boys network closed ranks, enabling its members to shield each other from justice, the study found—helping explain why so few Nazi war criminals ever went to prison” (Oct. 10, 2016).
• “The Reich’s Finance Ministry literally plundered the assets of the Jews,” said former Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück. “It was systematic. … The Jews were stripped of savings, assets, anything with a financial or material value.”
• Ex-Nazis assembled an underground army in 1949, which could have fielded 40,000 soldiers with 2,000 officers, according to a 2014 government report. It wound down once the official army began in 1955.
• Other documents show that SS war hero Otto Skorzeny also set up a secret army—but little is known about its size.
• Once the official German Army was established, it quickly filled with personnel from the Nazi-era military. In 1976, for example, of the 217 Bundeswehr generals, only three had not served in Hitler’s military.
• Seventy percent of Nazi government officials were allowed to stay in the government after the war, according to a 2011 German government report.
• Twenty-five cabinet members, one president and one chancellor of postwar Germany were former card-carrying Nazi Party members. A postwar minister of justice and a finance minister were members of Hitler’s Stormtroopers.

The Secret Service

This profusion of Nazis in German politics allowed them to continue in other key positions. One of the most influential was Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, whom we left back in 1944 hiding intel in the Swiss Alps. Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and offered them a deal: I control the leading German intelligence unit focused on the Soviets, and all my intelligence is stashed away. Set me free, and I can hand you a ready-made anti-Soviet espionage unit.

Incredibly, America accepted. Gehlen was freed. He was paid to rebuild his organization, using many of his old staff. He also recruited other ex-Nazis. He wasn’t picky: ex-Gestapo, ex-SS, war criminals, Nazis who had participated directly in the Holocaust—all were welcome. According to one estimate, 10 percent of his staff had worked for SS head Heinrich Himmler. Yet the Americans let Gehlen’s network flourish—to counter the Soviets.

In 1956, Gehlen’s spy agency was formally transferred to West German control and became the Federal Intelligence Service (bnd). Gehlen remained the spymaster.

Unsurprisingly for an organization full of Nazis, the bnd helped Nazis on the run. In 2011, documents leaked to Bild found that the organization had helped cover for Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. It also recruited Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” as an agent in 1965, despite his war crimes being so extensive and well documented that he had been sentenced to death. The bnd employed the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the “Princess of Nazism,” who remained an ardent Nazi and supporter of ex-SS members until her death.

But the full extent of the bnd’s Nazi history is lost forever. The bnd destroyed the files on approximately 250 of its early officials.

When did this cover-up take place? The late 1940s? The ’50s perhaps?

It happened in 2007.

Vanishing Commanders

It is beyond dispute that Nazis went underground after the war ended. They conspired to keep each other hidden and avoid punishment for their crimes. Secret reports published decades later confirm exactly what Herbert Armstrong forecast in 1945. How could he have known?

He based his forecast on Bible prophecy. He long taught that Germany was the modern descendant of biblical Assyria. The Bible has very specific prophecies about Assyria.

Nahum 3:17 states: “Your commanders are like swarming locusts, And your generals like great grasshoppers, Which camp in the hedges on a cold day; When the sun rises they flee away, And the place where they are is not known” (New King James Version). Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary explains, “Cold deprives the locust of the power of flight; so they alight in cold weather and at night, but when warmed by the sun soon ‘flee away.’ So shall the Assyrian multitudes suddenly disappear, not leaving a trace behind ….” On a cold morning, a hedgerow may be covered in grasshoppers. But just a few hours later, they will have all vanished.

But this scripture is not simply describing “the Assyrian multitudes.” It is more specific: It describes the “commanders” and “generals.” During the war, these “commanders” dominated the headlines. Afterward, they vanished.

Lower-level personnel insisted they had nothing to do with the Nazis. The Nazis had almost conquered the globe—yet somehow, once Germany was conquered, it became difficult to find any Nazis.

Another key prophecy forecasts this dramatic vanishing act. Revelation 17:8 describes a beast, symbolic of a major world power, that “was, and is not, and yet is.” This beast exists, then vanishes—only to then “ascend out of the bottomless pit.” You could say it comes out of nowhere—from “underground.”

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains this prophecy in his booklet Prophesy Again: “During World War ii, we saw the Hitler-Mussolini axis, but then it disappeared from the scene. It ‘was not’! And yet, God says, ‘it is’! The Axis powers lost the war, but as Mr. Armstrong preached time and again, they just went underground—into ‘the bottomless pit’ (verse 8). They’re still there—they’re just underground.”

This passage adds a vital truth: What goes underground will come back up again.

There are signs that beneath the surface, the Nazi spirit still lives in Germany.

The signs of this beast are there, but few recognize them. Revelation 17 says that when this power fully ascends, “the people who belong to this world … will be amazed at the reappearance of this beast” (verse 8; New Living Translation).

But you need not be “amazed.” In fact, knowing what Herbert W. Armstrong taught from the prophecies of the Bible, and linking it with history and current events, you can know exactly what is going to happen. Because, once again, Mr. Armstrong was right!