History likes tidy endings. The Second World War ends with Allied victory, Nuremberg, and the defeat of Nazism. Peter Dale Scott’s 1986 essay “How Allen Dulles and the SS Preserved Each Other” refuses that comfort.
What he describes is not the clean burial of a criminal regime but the selective recycling of its personnel and networks into the early architecture of the Cold War.
I keep returning to one figure at the center of that recycling: Josef Mengele.
The Auschwitz physician who decided who lived and who died, who performed experiments that treated human beings as raw material, did not simply disappear into the chaos of 1945. He was identified in Allied custody.
American counterintelligence records later indicated knowledge of his survival and approximate whereabouts.
Yet he walked free, moved through the ratlines, and lived for decades in Latin America under successive false names.
His escape was not a bureaucratic glitch.
It was a symptom.
Scott’s argument is that the secret negotiations known as Operation Sunrise—conducted in the spring of 1945 by Allen Dulles, then OSS station chief in Bern, with SS General Karl Wolff—helped create the conditions in which parts of the SS apparatus survived the collapse of the Third Reich.
The official purpose was an early German surrender in northern Italy.
The longer consequence was the preservation of men and networks judged useful against communism.
Utility became the new moral criterion.
A man who had helped run the machinery of genocide could be reclassified as an anti-communist asset.
Reinhard Gehlen’s Eastern Front intelligence organization was absorbed into American structures and later formed the core of West Germany’s BND. Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” worked for U.S. Army Counterintelligence before being moved to Bolivia.
Walter Rauff, linked to the development of mobile gas chambers, found refuge in South America. Mengele’s quieter flight belongs to the same pattern.
Out of these preserved fragments something larger took shape.
I have come to think of it as a CIA-centered international or supranational “fourth estate”—not the press in the classical sense, but a parallel structure of intelligence, influence, operational capacity, and deniability that operated across borders and outside ordinary democratic accountability. It drew personnel, methods, and anti-communist intensity from the ruins of the SS and related networks.
It was never a formal government. It was a hybrid: American strategic priorities fused with German wartime expertise, escape routes that ran through Italy and the Vatican’s orbit, commercial and arms-trading channels, and the willingness of certain Latin American regimes to absorb the arrivals.
Mengele’s presence in that afterlife is especially clarifying. The man who embodied the medicalized extreme of racial ideology became a protected figure in the same hemispheric environment where other former Nazis advised security services, trafficked weapons, or simply lived under official tolerance.
Scott links these individual cases to a broader postwar environment in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru.
Former Nazi personnel and their associates established themselves within political, commercial, and security networks that supported repression against left-wing movements.
The story is not only about 1945.
It is about the decades that followed: the consolidation of military regimes, the circulation of counterinsurgency doctrines, the use of torture and clandestine detention, arms trafficking, and the elevation of “anti-communism” into a near-absolute justification for almost any alliance.
This does not mean every Latin American dictatorship was a Nazi transplant. Local class conflicts, military institutions, colonial legacies, and U.S. Cold War policy mattered at least as much.
But the migration of people, methods, connections, and ideological habits was real.
Networks that should have been broken were adapted.
Techniques refined in occupied Europe reappeared in new settings.
The language of democratic victory coexisted with the practical sheltering of men formed by fascist institutions.
The deeper point is institutional.
Secret services prioritize information, contacts, and deniability.
When those priorities meet the exigencies of a new global rivalry, accountability becomes selective.
Official investigations into cases like Barbie’s later acknowledged specific failures while framing them as lower-level excesses rather than reflections of strategic choice.
Scott’s critique is that such framing is too narrow.
The protection of useful former enemies helped constitute an informal transnational apparatus whose continuity outlasted the immediate postwar years.
None of this requires equating the United States with Nazi Germany. The systems remained distinct in purpose, scale, and political structure.
What it does require is recognizing that democracies are capable of subordinating justice to perceived necessity without abandoning the vocabulary of freedom.
They can celebrate the defeat of fascism while incorporating some of its human and operational residue into the architecture of the next struggle.
Mengele’s long, unpunished life is the most visceral illustration of that bargain.
The larger structure that made such lives possible—the intelligence networks, the ratlines, the geopolitical calculations that treated certain war criminals as assets—represents the quieter, more enduring formation: a CIA-based international capacity assembled, in part, from the ashes of the Holocaust.
That capacity did not announce itself as a fourth estate.
It operated through compartments, cutouts, and the mutual preservation of secrets.
Its existence forces an uncomfortable question that official histories prefer to close: When a state decides that some crimes are strategically inconvenient, what kind of power is being built, and on whose bodies?
Scott’s essay refuses the clean ending. It insists that the postwar order was shaped not only by the public triumph over Nazism but by the private arrangements that allowed parts of its machinery to survive under new management.
Mengele remains the figure who makes that claim hardest to ignore.
Source
Peter Dale Scott, “How Allen Dulles and the SS Preserved Each Other,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 25 (Winter 1986): 4–14. Available at: https://dn721907.ca.archive.org/0/items/CovertActionBulltetin/covert%20action%20bulltetin_text.pdf
