De-nazification was a sham exercise as the cold war started.
All fake while the US and Britain protected, used and supported not so ex nazis to facilitate the new conflict, while creating right wing networks for stay behind operations in case of Soviet invasion of western Europe.
![The Paladin Group was created in 1970 in the Albufereta neighborhood of Alacant, Spain, by former SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and former US Colonel James Sanders. A former special operations officer, Skorzeny had become a member of the ODESSA network after the war, helping to smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Allied Europe to Spain, South America and other friendly destinations so they could avoid prosecution for war crimes. Skorzeny himself resided after the war in Spain, protected by the Spanish government.
Skorzeny envisioned the Paladin Group as "an international directorship of strategic assault personnel [that would] straddle the watershed between paramilitary operations carried out by troops in uniforms and the political warfare which is conducted by civilian agents".[1]
In addition to recruiting many former SS members, the Group also recruited from the ranks of various right-wing and nationalist organizations, including the French Nationalist OAS, the SAC, and from military units such as the French Foreign Legion. The hands-on manager of the Group was Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, formerly of Dr. Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yt7jzvrdkkf3gw5qlg3lfmzp/bafkreiaxeifkwx33spsgyy6h625yeuwapa3pulau72vljh44qy7525jd6u)
