Postwar Western recruitment of former Nazis to oppose the Soviet Union

Postwar Western recruitment of former Nazis to oppose the Soviet Union is the novel’s sharpest illustration of how the defeat of Hitler did not end the political usefulness of his followers. As the Allies prosecuted war criminals in public, some of their commanders recruited former SS officers in secret, treating anti-communism as a reason to recast men implicated in Nazi crimes as instruments of Western security. That reversal made justice contingent on Cold War priorities and helped create an international climate in which Franco’s protection of fugitives could become politically tolerable.

From prosecution to recruitment

The shift appears against the background of the Nuremberg trials, whose highly public proceedings seemed to promise that Nazi crimes would be judged. But the novel places that spectacle beside a quieter development: former SS officers were disappearing from Allied prisoner lists because British and American authorities had recruited them to work against Soviet interests in Germany. The discrepancy is not incidental. The same powers that staged the trials were also making practical use of men whose experience and loyalties could be redirected toward a new enemy.

The recruitment belongs to a wider change in how the recent war was remembered. In a conversation with Pablo de Azcárate and Juan Negrín, Manuel Arroyo observes that the Soviet Union, treated as an ally the previous year, was now being pushed out of the public account of victory. The story of the war, he says, was being revised day by day to magnify the Normandy landings and diminish the Eastern campaign; soon, children might be taught that the Americans had taken Berlin. This changing memory mattered politically: as the Soviet contribution receded, Franco could present himself as the champion of anti-communism, the allegiance that seemed to count most in the new climate.

The logic of the new enemy

The novel portrays recruitment not as an isolated expedient but as one consequence of making the Soviet Union the paramount threat. Allied commanders in Germany increasingly accepted the argument that the Soviet Union posed the only genuine danger to world peace and Western civilization. Former Nazis could exploit that premise: they argued that the victors had chosen the wrong enemy, and, the narrator notes, they often succeeded in persuading their listeners. Their former position within the Nazi system did not vanish; it was made newly useful by a change in strategic emphasis.

Manuel voices the moral and political contradiction directly. The democratic powers, he tells his Republican interlocutors, are publicly prosecuting war criminals at Nuremberg while, according to persistent rumors, certain Allied commanders recruit Nazis as anti-Soviet agents in Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. If the recruits do not trouble those commanders, he reasons, Franco may not trouble them either. His skepticism is sharpened by the speed of the reversal: Stalin had been an ally in defeating Hitler, yet the public narrative now gave less space to the Soviet campaign and more to the Western landings. The issue is not simply hypocrisy between public condemnation and private conduct; it is the way strategic need changes which parts of the past are emphasized and which perpetrators can be treated as useful.

Political consequences for Spain

The shift in Allied priorities alters the setting for Spain’s postwar diplomacy. By late 1947, the logic of the Cold War had transformed the international landscape in a direction favorable to Franco’s interests. The novel presents anti-Soviet fear and the prospect of another conflict as the conditions that let Spanish diplomacy repeatedly engage the victorious powers without surrendering the protection it offered to fugitives. That protection was not merely a matter of ideological sympathy: it could be defended, delayed, and obscured while Western governments weighed their own strategic calculations.

The contrast with the transfer of Pierre Laval to France makes the limits of Spanish cooperation especially clear. In July 1945, under French pressure and wary of offending the victors, Franco handed Laval over; Laval was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and executed that October. The novel describes this as the beginning and end of Franco’s cooperation with Allied justice. Franco refused Belgium’s repeated demands for Léon Degrelle and, in 1954, definitively shielded him by making him, for official purposes, the Spanish citizen José León Ramírez Reina. The false identity allowed Degrelle to establish a construction company and profit from public contracts. The account says the same method—granting Spanish nationality retroactively while producing authentic documents for a false identity—would be used for decades to protect other Nazis seeking permanent refuge or a way onward to another country.

Accountability recast as a strategic choice

The recruitment of former Nazis gives this policy of shelter a broader international context. When the Allies delivered the so-called List of 104, or Black List, its members were described as Germans who had actively contributed to Hitler’s project and could not excuse their responsibility as mere obedience to superiors. They had outstanding claims before German courts. Yet the Spanish foreign minister treated them as essential to the regime’s good relations with the victors, and delayed meeting the Allied representatives until their patience was exhausted. The novel places that maneuver within a world where some Nazi fugitives were already being taken off prisoner lists for anti-Soviet service: accountability existed, but its force was increasingly qualified by political usefulness.

Sal Burnstein’s campaign against the networks protecting Nazi fugitives dramatizes what that qualification meant to those seeking consequences for the crimes. After learning that the Nazis had exterminated his family, Burnstein devoted himself to honoring and avenging his mother, siblings, and nephews. He organized Democratic politicians in contact with an influential group of Jewish businessmen and financiers. Their aim was to counter the argument that any means were justified to prevent another war with Stalin—not simply to remind American public opinion of crimes already being tried at Nuremberg. Yet sympathy did not readily become political risk: people offered kind words, understanding, and even sincere tears, while declining to jeopardize their careers. Burnstein therefore made the exposure of escape networks his principal objective, hoping that public knowledge would force Washington to help dismantle them.

The account’s later treatment of dictatorship in Argentina extends the same political pattern without making the historical settings interchangeable. It describes the National Security Doctrine as a Cold War policy adopted by American diplomacy in Latin America to fight left-wing movements at any cost, with military dictatorships favored and supported from Washington. In the novel’s account, anti-communism again supplies a warrant for exceptional violence and foreign backing. Read alongside the recruitment of former Nazis, the later discussion makes the stakes of the earlier reversal clearer: when opposition to communism becomes the overriding measure of political value, the people and regimes that serve that purpose may receive protection even as their crimes are known. The recruitment thus marks not an end to the Nazi past but its conversion into a usable resource, with consequences for justice, Francoist impunity, and the novel’s larger account of Cold War betrayal.